Bungie's Marathon is marred by controversy once again. A designer exposed the studio after she discovered that, basically, the entire visual style for the upcoming extraction shooter used ripped-off images and artwork created by her.
The first images popped up early on May 15, with user Antireal, a graphic designer based in the UK, pointing out the glaring similarities that she was able to spot in Marathon. Glaring similarities is putting it lightly, as the game directly uses assets she created back in 2017.
After sharing very damning evidence against Bungie, she stated that in over a decade of working as a designer, she's never been able to generate constant income due to plagiarism being, sadly, a common occurrence.
Bungie responded and, amid the clear evidence of plagiarism, confirmed the disastrous situation to be true: entire environment assets in Marathon are stolen from.
Via the MarathonDevTeam X account (formerly known as Twitter), the developers confirmed that an immediate thorough investigation was launched as soon as the plagiarism allegations came to light. The result was that a former Bungie artist included the designs in a texture sheet that made it into the game.
Bungie has reached out to the artist and will be working to amend this catastrophic error. The studio stated that none of the current artists working on Marathon were aware of the situation, confirming that the employee who stole the assets had been out of the company for some time.
Oddly enough, this is far from the first plagiarism accusation against Bungie that's turned out to be true. In 2023, an artist exposed Bungie for using, without permission, fan art in an official cutscene featured in Destiny 2.
Later, in 2024, another artist noticed that the official NERF gun design for the Ace of Spades hand cannon directly stole elements from a commission they had created back in 2015.
Marathon was already having a hard time selling players on the premise of a non-free-to-play extraction shooter going mainstream. This situation is just another PR nightmare that might just tip the balance against Bungie even more ahead of its release.