Bungie morale reportedly in "free fall" as it grapples with stolen Marathon assets fallout

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.