Bungie Blames Stolen 'Marathon' Art On Former Developer (kotaku.com) 26
An anonymous reader shared this report from Kotaku:
One of the most striking things about Bungie's Marathon is its presentation. The sci-fi extraction shooter combines bleak settings with bright colors in a way that makes it feel a bit like a sneaker promo meets Ghost in the Shell, or as designer Jeremy Skoog put it, "Y2K Cyberpunk mixed with Acid Graphic Design Posters." But it now looks like at least a few of the visual design elements that appeared in the recent alpha test were lifted from eight-year old work by an outside artist.
"The Marathon alpha released recently and its environments are covered with assets lifted from poster designs I made in 2017," Bluesky user antire.alâ posted on Thursday. She shared two images showing elements of her work and where they appeared in Marathon's gameplay, including a rotated version of her own logo. A poster full of small repeating icon patterns also seems to be all but recreated in Marathon's press kit ARG and website...
Bungie has responded and blamed the incident on a former employee. The studio says it's reaching out to the artist in question and conducting a full review of its in-game assets for Marathon ["and implementing stricter checks to document all artist contributions."] "We immediately investigated a concern regarding unauthorized use of artist decals in Marathon and confirmed that a former Bungie artist included these in a texture sheet that was ultimately used in-game," the studio posted on X.
"As a matter of policy, we do not use the work of artists without their permission..." their X post emphasizes.
"We value the creativity and dedication of all artists who contribute to our games, and we are committed to doing right by them. Thank you for bringing this to our attention."
"The Marathon alpha released recently and its environments are covered with assets lifted from poster designs I made in 2017," Bluesky user antire.alâ posted on Thursday. She shared two images showing elements of her work and where they appeared in Marathon's gameplay, including a rotated version of her own logo. A poster full of small repeating icon patterns also seems to be all but recreated in Marathon's press kit ARG and website...
Bungie has responded and blamed the incident on a former employee. The studio says it's reaching out to the artist in question and conducting a full review of its in-game assets for Marathon ["and implementing stricter checks to document all artist contributions."] "We immediately investigated a concern regarding unauthorized use of artist decals in Marathon and confirmed that a former Bungie artist included these in a texture sheet that was ultimately used in-game," the studio posted on X.
"As a matter of policy, we do not use the work of artists without their permission..." their X post emphasizes.
"We value the creativity and dedication of all artists who contribute to our games, and we are committed to doing right by them. Thank you for bringing this to our attention."
Marathon is ancient. (Score:1)
Like mid-'90s. WTF?
Re: Marathon is ancient. (Score:3)
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The hype is so dead that they'd be better off cancelling it now.
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Re: Marathon is ancient. (Score:4, Funny)
I had beaten all of those games before most of you were born.
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I had beaten all of those games before most of you were born.
Doubtful. The last one was released in 1996. Judging by the comments here it's still mostly crotchety old coots.
Could have waited a year or two then licensing.... (Score:2)
The artist could have waited a year or two then approached Bungie about back licensing fees for the game Marathon which inappropriately used the artist's work without remuneration or credit.
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Not unless they could come up with a good excuse for why they didn't know about the violation and attempt to stop it. Deliberately allowing damages to pile up violates the "duty to mitigate damages" and the court would likely not allow further damages after the point at which the copyright holder could have objected.
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Not unless they could come up with a good excuse for why they didn't know about the violation and attempt to stop it. Deliberately allowing damages to pile up violates the "duty to mitigate damages" and the court would likely not allow further damages after the point at which the copyright holder could have objected.
This is more formally known as the doctrine of Laches.
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This is more formally known as the doctrine of Laches.
The language in that doctrine is "unreasonable delay". A delay of a year may not be unreasonable to a court. Part 4 of the elements is "lack of excuse". If the plaintiff has a reason like "I could not afford money for a lawyer" which a struggling artist may not have the money. There might be a lot of lawyers that would have taken this case without money but realize the lawyers are going up against Bungie which is owned by Sony. There are not of small law firms that could do that.
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It's refreshing to hear someone blamed other than Trump. Mod me down..
I thought your plight was all caused by Biden?
You had one job (Score:3)
All you had to do was say "AI" instead of you-know-who and you'd have had a 5+ insightful comment.
Must be Infinity + 1 (Score:1)
Before people question how much was copied . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Read the article. There are numerous other articles [forbes.com] and YouTube videos [youtube.com] on the copying allegation. The artist's work has seemingly been used as textures in the game so it appears in many places in the game. And the copying is not subtle or up to possible "interpretation". For example in one poster, the artist used 7 logos in boxes lined up horizontally. The game has the exact same logos but rotated at a different angle, reversed, and in a different color, but it is the same logos. Incidentally, one of the logos is the artist's logo that she uses as a stamp on her work. Another example is the block "Antireal Daily Series 28". In Marathon, again, it has been reversed and rotated and in a different color. Bungie also faded the text "Antireal Daily Series" but it is still visible. However the font is exactly the same. To remind everyone "Antireal" is name of the artist.
Re:Before people question how much was copied . . (Score:4, Interesting)
It's weird. Why would you copy something so simple so blatantly? It's just simple icons and plain text. Whoever did it could have just "been inspired" and put different icons in a row of boxes and changed the text to something similar but different. Instead they copied verbatim. Whoever it was was super lazy and very confident they wouldn't get caught. Or maybe the wanted to get caught.
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I almost never read AC replies, but occasionally someone legitimately posts some insider information or something anonymously.
You are certainly one of the majority who knows their post is so utterly without value that they won't even put a pseudonym to it.
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Either he wanted to rework it and forgot it, or he wanted to put some shit on his employer, now former employer.
Some revenge shit.
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As a charitable guess, they intended to use it only as a placeholder, and replace it with something else later. That something else either never got put on the list of things to do, or got cut, or just hasn't happened yet. Because you wouldn't intentionally ship a game with blatantly copied assets, you would at bare minimum try to disguise them better.
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Because it's an alpha? Placeholders are going to be everywhere
Re: Before people question how much was copied . . (Score:1)
It looks from the op text that Bungie is basically admitting it's copied.
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More then just the Art Director (Score:2)
Thor from Pirate Games commented on this: https://youtube.com/shorts/TM5... [youtube.com]
It shows examples of stolen art, but instead of just blaming the Art Director, various members of the team were following the art of the guy they stole from.