A new report alleges that Marathon developer Bungie is in “chaos” after the studio was forced to admit that an external artist’s work has been used within upcoming game Marathon without consent.
Forbes claims morale at the studio is in “free fall” right across the organisation, with one source telling the outlet “the vibes have never been worse”.
The issue came to light earlier this week following recent playable alpha tests of Marathon, from which artist Fern Hook recognised their designs had been used. Responding via its less-visible Marathon Dev Team social media account, Bungie wrote that it had “immediately investigated” Hook’s claim and found that, yes, a former artist at the company had swiped the designs.
Then, in an ill-timed and palpably awkward livestream last night, the developer revealed it would not be sharing any Marathon gameplay due to the ongoing investigation.
“Our show is a little bit different today,” explained game director, Joe Ziegler, at the beginning of the stream. “We had planned to show a lot more stuff, but for a lot of reasons we’re about to get into, we decided not to show a bunch of this stuff. But we are going to be discussing a lot about what we learned through Alpha, some of the plans that we’re going forward with.”
Ziegler later said part of the reason Bungie wasn’t showing any gameplay was because the team was “still scrubbing all of our assets to make sure that we are being respectful of the situation”.
“It came to our attention that an artist who worked on Marathon in the early stages of pre-production took a number of graphic elements from a graphic designer, without permission or acknowledgement, and placed them on a decal sheet that was then checked in, in 2020,” added art director Joe Cross, reading from a statement.
“The decal sheet included icons and text elements. These elements ended up in our alpha build and there is absolutely no excuse for this oversight, and we are working on, and 100% committed to, our review process to ensure instances like this don’t happen again on Marathon or at Bungie.”
Forbes now reports sources at Bungie say the explanation given publicly about the incident – which is that a former employee is responsible – is the same reason given internally, but “morale was in free fall” as the team scrambled to recover from the latest in a line of plagiarism accusations. With changes to its marketing plan – which pre-dates this week’s incident – and possible amendments to its playtesting plans, as well as now an audit into what should be every single graphic element used on Marathon, some fear the shooter will struggle to hit its 23rd September release date.
Forbes also intimates staff have been uneasy with the direction of development, saying, “as far back as five years ago, devs were telling [management] what would and wouldn’t work and were often ignored. Many have said previously that it needed to have some sort of PvE component”.
“Sony and Bungie legal” are reportedly looking into what happened with the stolen assets, but Bungie’s decision not to share any footage in yesterday’s livestream is perhaps telling enough.
Marathon is set to launch for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 23rd September.