ANTIREAL, a designer known for his graphic designs, has accused Bungie of stealing some of his work for the game Marathon, without giving him any credit. He claims that after Marathon was released in its alpha stage, the game’s environments contained design elements taken from posters he created in 2017. ANTIREAL posted examples of the stolen graphics on Blusky, showing clear evidence of the theft.
Suspicious Similarities
Upon examining the case, many similarities between the designs in Marathon and ANTIREAL’s original works are hard to ignore. The most noticeable case is a row of icons in the game, which is almost identical to a design ANTIREAL made. Additionally, Bungie appears to have copied entire text phrases from his posters, which appear in the game with the same letters, style, and font.
ANTIREAL has pointed out that Bungie wasn’t required to hire him to work on the game, but he feels his work was valuable enough to be stolen and used in the game without any compensation or recognition. He expressed frustration with how big companies have often chosen to take his work instead of properly crediting or paying him.
Bungie’s Response
Bungie has acknowledged the theft in a post on X (formerly Twitter), where they explained that they had conducted an immediate investigation and discovered that an ex-employee was responsible for using ANTIREAL’s work without permission. They also clarified that the current graphic design team working on Marathon was unaware of this issue and that they are conducting further investigations to understand what happened. Bungie emphasized that they take matters like this seriously and are in touch with ANTIREAL to resolve the issue and give him the proper recognition.
The company also confirmed that their guidelines do not allow unauthorized use of external artists’ work, and a full review of Marathon’s resources is underway to check if there are any other similar instances.
