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Comparisons to Sony's live service failure Concord could weigh on former Marathon franchise art director Joseph Cross, who left developer Bungie shortly before the release date reveal for the incoming extraction shooter. Facing unflattering discussion, Cross says he focused on the art itself and examined the opportunity to take a rare "risk" on a game like this.
Cross discusses his exit from Bungie and his work on Marathon in an interview with ReaderGrev. Asked about the period where Marathon's challenges and stumbles inspired parallels to Concord – another risky, expensively produced, and premium-price competitive shooter, and another part of publisher Sony's ambitious plans to build a lineup of live service games – Cross reflects on a mix of positivity and negativity surrounding the game, as well as the light that guided him through it.
"It's difficult for me to take any of that stuff personally because I believe in the art, because I believe in what we've done," Cross says. "I think we did something really cool, and I think it will pan out. I can't control the way the game plays. I'm not a designer. I'm not the game director. I can only control what I can control, and what I could control, I feel really good about.
"And you can't take that away from me, as much as the haters try online or wherever, and whether someone doesn't happen to like the art direction personally, whether they don't agree with some political thing Bungie did, or whatever the animosity du jour is, you can't take the thing I care about the most away."
Marathon's art was famously saddled with a now-resolved plagiarism fiasco, with designs from an external artist found to have been lifted wholesale by some of the game's corporate logos. Brutal riffs on the game's rallying cry, such as "Plagiarism will make me god," defined an especially ugly stretch in the game's road to release.
But it wasn't all bad news. Criticism of Concord often targeted its art, specifically its forgettable environments and character designs. Marathon's reveal was not without some similar criticisms of its own – some of which have been addressed in a visual update that's only made me like its style more – but it also immediately clicked for some people, the conveyance of its style and iconography aided by compelling pieces like a cinematic short written and directed by Alberto Mielgo. Its art could be divisive, but it was capable of grabbing attention and making an impact, which at least beats the indifference Concord widely inspired.
Cross likens Bungie's position – ending up in the shadow of an unrelated but somewhat similar and unfortunate project – to bad luck. "It feels like losing a lottery ticket or being in the wrong place at the wrong time," he says. "And that stuff never feels personal, you know?"
"Something that sort of weighed on me, not super heavily, but something I've been aware of," would be the stakes of Marathon, Cross says. He rightly calls the game "such a risk" for Bungie, a studio which turned the also-risky Destiny into a decade-strong franchise (which Cross was also part of).
"You know, oftentimes we felt like we were sort of getting away with something. And I think about that in the big picture, the idea of studios funding unproven, unknown projects for six or eight years, for hundreds of millions of dollars, sort of on spec. How much longer are things like this going to exist?" he wonders.
Cross says he was on Marathon for about six years as part of a team that began with 12 people but ended up with hundreds of developers. Most of a game's development budget is labor over time, so while we don't have exact figures, we can very conservatively estimate that Bungie has sunk nine digits into Marathon's production.
"It's not always intuitive to remember that above all of this is this product that's being funded and every day that goes by is a day you're going further into the red," Cross observes "You're not making money. The studio is not making any money. And so anyway, that's a big one, especially when you're really trying to channel creativity and get to the point where you feel like you can't impose anything that feels like a risk."
