Bungie directs an an hour marathon “playma” with zero gameplay game while rubbing art for plagiarism while the artistic director of the game offers “personal excuses” to the artist whose work has been lifted
Bungie launched a series of “playma” developers flows for marathon last month, answering questions from the community while playing the game. The tone of the second entry of this series of flows was a little different following the revelation that the alpha conceptions of the game were removed from the independent anti-reprelation artist.
“Our program is a little different today,” said game director Joe Ziegler at the start of the flow. “We had planned to show much more, but for many reasons why we are about to get started, we decided not to show a bunch of these things.”
In this spirit, the developers have chosen to show no game sequence during the flow. “We had a lot of things that we wanted to show today, but we decided not to show it because we still rub all our assets to make sure that we are respectful of the situation,” said Ziegler.
While a large part of the flow was dedicated to discussing the game itself, the artistic director of the franchise Joe Cross opened things with a prepared declaration on art.
“It came to our attention that an artist who worked on the marathon in the first stages of pre-production took a certain number of graphic elements of a graphic designer, without authorization or recognition, and placed them on a decal of decal which was then recorded in 2020,” said Cross.
“The decal leaf included icons and elements of text. These elements found themselves in our alpha construction. There is absolutely no excuse for this surveillance and we work 100% in our examination process to guarantee that instances like this do not happen again on marathon or in Bungie.”
Cross said Bungie had “contacted Antireal, the artist in question, and followed to make sure that we do this artist’s good”. No exact details on what Bungie intends to do has been provided.
“I want to send my personal apology to Antireal, whose work has been used in this case,” concluded Cross. “I know how unfair it feels, and we do everything we can to do it properly with her. Her work is fantastic and we clearly share the mutual appreciation for a specific genre of graphic design. It is very exciting and I am delighted to have folded this in our style in general. So thank you for listening and thank you for your patience.”
5 months after the launch, marathon developers continue to avoid price issues, but Bungie promises that “it will certainly be a conversation”.
