Bungie admits its Marathon alpha included stolen artwork

The bright, glitched-out, typography-forward look of Bungie's upcoming extraction shooter Marathon is 1 of its defining features. As it turns out, it's besides partially plagiarized, according to posts shared connected the authoritative Marathon X account. The announcement comes aft creator Fern Hook, who goes by @4nt1r34l connected X, initially accused Bungie of utilizing in-game textures that looked akin to her archetypal artwork connected May 15.

"Bungie is of people not obligated to prosecute maine erstwhile making a crippled that draws overwhelmingly from the aforesaid plan connection I person refined for the past decade," Hook wrote connected X, "but intelligibly my enactment was bully capable to pillage for ideas and plaster each implicit their crippled without wage oregon attribution."

Hook's posts are reasonably damning, identifying evident areas successful Marathon's alpha representation that diagnostic lone lightly altered versions of her archetypal work. She became alert of the contented erstwhile the alpha primitively launched successful April 2025, according to The Washington Post, but kept quiescent until present due to the fact that she was advised to question ineligible action. Hook yet decided to station astir the contented due to the fact that she doesn't "have capable clip oregon wealth to alert retired to the US to prosecute an unwinnable tribunal lawsuit against Sony."

Bungie's connection claims that "a erstwhile Bungie artist" included Hook's creation successful a texture expanse without the remainder of the creation team's knowledge. The institution is "conducting a thorough reappraisal of [its] in-game assets" and has besides reached retired to Hook to "discuss the issue" further.

As Eurogamer notes, this isn't the archetypal clip Bungie has been accused of lifting the enactment of different artists. The developer was accused of doing the aforesaid happening multiple times during the improvement of Destiny 2 and its assorted expansions.

Since the crippled is inactive successful development, it's not wide however oregon if Bungie volition alteration Marathon to code Hook's complaint, but the developer has until September 23 to bash it. That's erstwhile Marathon is expected to motorboat connected PlayStation 5, PC and Xbox Series X/S.