Bungie blames “former artist” for latest plagiarism issue

Bungie has been accused of using an artist’s work to create assets for its upcoming shooter Marathon without their permission. Antireal, the artist claiming credit for the original designs, posted a convincing collection of evidence to support her accusations. Bungie investigated these claims quickly and confirmed the “unauthorized use of artist decals in Marathon.”

It was done quite lazily, too: Antireal had hidden a reference to the loss meme comics in some designs, which appeared in Marathon unaltered, as spotted by a beta tester. Another image is showing that someone used Antireal’s art and simply made a half-hearted attempt to erase her name from the piece.

Bungie blamed a former employee for including the designs in a texture sheet and claims that the “issue was unknown by our existing art team, and we are still reviewing how this oversight occurred.” It said that it reached out to Antireal to discuss the matter.

“As a matter of policy,” Bungie stated further, “we do not use the work of artists without their permission.” The company vowed to review all of its in-game assets and implement stricter plagiarism checks.

However, this isn’t the first time Bungie has been in the crossfire for art plagiarism. In September 2021, the trailer for Destiny 2’s The Witch Queen expansion contained unauthorized art, in June 2023 someone’s art appeared in a cutscene included in Destiny 2’s Lightfall, in September 2024 the company released a physical toy gun based on fan art, and that case led another artist to claim that their work had been used without permission in Destiny concept art as early as 2012.

All of these cases point towards a more structural issue in Bungie’s art department that can’t be explained away by blaming former employees.

Perhaps even more damning in the current case is the fact that Marathon art director Joseph Cross has been following Antireal’s social media accounts, so there is a good chance that he himself is familiar with her work. Other current Bungie employees are among her followers as well.

Marathon is set to be released on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S later in 2025.

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