For most of 2025, Marathon’s gameplay and extraction-shooter plans took a back seat as the plagiarism scandal dominated the conversation.
Months after the accusations first spread online, Fern “Antireal” Hook has now confirmed that her dispute with Bungie and Sony has been resolved in a way she’s satisfied with.
That brief update finally wraps up a controversy that shaped how people saw Marathon long before it even had a launch date.
Why Did Marathon Get Hit With a Plagiarism Scandal?
It all started in May, when early Marathon alpha footage began spreading and Hook realized that several visual assets matched the posters she had published back in 2017.
The overlap was too exact to ignore, and once she uploaded the before-and-after images, they spread everywhere and pulled Bungie and Sony into the mess.
Within hours, Bungie admitted that a former studio artist had taken her work and slipped it into a texture sheet that made its way into the playable build.
That admission did little to ease the situation, with Marathon already juggling skeptical fans, early-test complaints, and questions about where the game was heading.
As soon as the plagiarism was exposed, it became the headline everywhere, and Marathon’s coverage always circled back to the copied designs before anything related to the game.
Fans pointed out that several senior Bungie figures had kept up with Hook’s art for a long time, which made the repeated patterns feel impossible to miss.
Some said the blame didn’t disappear just because it started with one person. Bungie and its parent company were still expected to catch it.
What Happened During the Months of Silence?
After Bungie’s early apology, the silence that followed lasted for months and looked to the community like a classic legal freeze.
As time passed, fans debated what the eventual resolution might look like.
Some hoped Hook would receive royalties or permanent credit; others believed it was more likely that she would be compensated privately and required to sign a confidentiality agreement, something standard for settlements like this.
On December 2, 2025, Hook finally spoke up, saying in a brief update that her Marathon art dispute with Bungie and Sony was resolved in a way she was satisfied with.
She didn’t offer details, which likely means the agreement included a limited NDA restricting what she can say going forward.
But the important part (the only piece she was free to share) is that she’s satisfied.
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