Artist Fern Hook, or Antireal, who showed that her assets and designs had been copied wholesale by Bungie's upcoming extraction shooter Marathon, says she and the companies involved have reached a resolution on the plagiarism problem.
"The Marathon art issue has been resolved with Bungie and Sony Interactive Entertainment to my satisfaction," Hook said on Twitter earlier today, December 2.
Marathon's plagiarism surfaced in May on the heels of an alpha play test. At the time, Hook said "the Marathon alpha released recently and its environments are covered with assets lifted from poster designs I made in 2017."
The evidence was plentiful and undeniable, and it was the last thing Marathon needed as Bungie and its new owner Sony worked to get the game out the door. Last month, Sony said it is "fully dedicated" to avoiding another delay.
Shortly after this news broke, Bungie held a painful Q&A stream with no gameplay footage because, as game director Joe Ziegler explained at the time, "we 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 plagiarism occurred as a result of a decal sheet created by an artist "who worked on Marathon in the early stages of pre-production" and lifted Hook's designs "without permission or acknowledgement." This sheet was later used for the final – rather, then-final, or final enough – build of the game, which wasn't the first or even second time this sort of art slipup has slid under Bungie's guardrails.
Bungie only said it had "reached out to Antireal, the artist in question, and followed up to ensure we do right by this artist" at the time. The nature of this apparently recent resolution is unknown, but precedent suggests some legal folks got together and hashed out how many digits should go on the settlement check.
"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 said on Twitter in May.
