Bungie «got caught stealing again — the artist claimed that her works appeared in Marathon without permission.
Such scandals are not new for Bungie, but this time the developers have «pissed off» Antireal. The artist claimed that the upcoming shooter Marathon uses visual elements from her 2017 posters — without a license, without mentioning the authorship and, of course, without payment.
«Bungie is of course not obligated to hire me when making a game that draws overwhelmingly from the same design language I have refined for the last decade. But clearly my work was good enough to pillage for ideas and plaster all over their game without pay or attribution», — writes she is on X (Twitter).
Antireal posted the posters that caused the scandal on X (Twitter) back in 2017. To prove her point, she showed screenshots from the alpha version of Marathon, which she compared to her work. One of the posters has the inscription «Aleph» and the phrase «Dark-space haulage logistic» — in the game, the same elements appear on buildings without changes. Another example — box- or sticker-style logos on film that have migrated to Marathon directly from its illustrations.
Confirmation can be seen in the gameplay from YouTubewhich features the same double-arrow logo from one of Antireal’s posters.
«In 10 years, I have never made a consistent income from this work and I am tired of designers from huge companies moodboarding and parasitising my designs while I struggle to make a living», — the artist explains why she did not file a lawsuit.
Amidst the outrage, Bungie said that «would conduct a thorough review of all visuals used in Marathon. But it is already clear how similar the works are to each other. So far, this is all that is known officially. Against this background, Marathon has not yet been released, and it already has a background with the — scandal, and not necessarily the last one.
170715 pic.twitter.com/E2g0kggQcv
— N² (@4nt1r34l) July 16, 2017
170927 pic.twitter.com/JlCAgSFe1z
— N² (@4nt1r34l) September 28, 2017
And this is not the first such case. In 2023, the company admitted that it had used fan art without permission when developing the Nerf toy gun for Destiny 2. Then they promised to compensate for the damage and add a copyright notice. In the same year, another artist found his work in a Destiny 2 video. And in 2021, Xiu Arat’s fan art appeared in the trailer for the Witch Queen expansion pack — Bungie said it was «accidental».
Source: PC Gamer
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