Original Marathon artist says Bungie and Sony have “resolved” stolen-art dispute “to my satisfaction”

There was substantial, hard-to-dismiss evidence, and the timing was especially unwelcome as Bungie and its owner Sony pushed to keep the game on schedule. Last month, Sony insisted it remained “fully dedicated” to avoiding another delay.

Soon after the allegations emerged, Bungie ran a candid Q&A stream that included no gameplay footage because, as game director Joe Ziegler explained, the team “decided not to show it because we’re still scrubbing all of our assets to make sure that we are being respectful of the situation.”

Franchise art director Joe Cross said the issue stemmed from a decal sheet produced by an artist “who worked on Marathon in the early stages of pre-production” and that this sheet reproduced Hook’s designs “without permission or acknowledgement.” That decal was incorporated into what was, at the time, the final—or at least a final-enough—build of the game, a type of mistake that Bungie has handled before.

At the time, Bungie said it had “reached out to Antireal, the artist in question, and followed up to ensure we do right by this artist.” The exact terms of the recent settlement haven’t been disclosed, but similar cases typically involve legal discussions and financial compensation.

“I don’t have the resources nor the energy to spare to pursue this legally but I have lost count of the number of times a major company has deemed it easier to pay a designer to imitate or steal my work than to write me an email,” Hook wrote on Twitter in May.

Over 2 hours of new Marathon footage leaks as Bungie’s answer to the likes of Arc Raiders shows how far it’s come since Sony indefinitely delayed the troubled extraction shooter earlier this year.

 

Source: gamesradar.com