Bungie's Marathon is in deep trouble

The closed alpha for Bungie's upcoming extraction shooter Marathon launched alongside Embark Studios' Arc Raiders, and the contrast could not have been starker. As Asmongold describes it, Arc Raiders commanded attention from the first moment — beautiful lighting, tense sound design, proximity chat that generates emergent player stories. Marathon, by contrast, felt like "plain yogurt." One player was reportedly spotted in Marathon's alpha. The other player, Asmongold jokes, was likely a Bungie lawyer searching for stolen art assets.

The plagiarism pattern

The immediate trigger for the episode is a new allegation: artist Anti-reel and Lead Speak publicly accused Bungie of lifting their poster designs and using them without permission or payment in Marathon's alpha environments. The accusation came with direct visual comparisons. When asked whether Bungie's art director Joseph Cross — who follows the artist on Twitter — might have known, the artist responded that Cross has followed him for years but never communicated. "A major company has deemed it easier to pay a designer to imitate or trace than license or commission my work," the artist wrote.