The thrill round Marathon was strong coming out of its initial 2023 PlayStation Showcase reveal. It was a well-known multiplayer formulation inside a wrapper that seemed not like anything on the market. However issues began going downhill after followers went arms on with an alpha take a look at construct in Could 2025. Coupled with an artwork plagiarism incident and annual mass layoffs at Bungie, the vibes had turned rancid. Followers had been skeptical and haters had been gleefully calling Marathon the following Harmony. What does that do to the headspace of somebody engaged on the sport internally?
“That kind of stuff hits everyone differently,” Marathon‘s former franchise art director, Joseph Cross, said in a new interview with Mikhail Klimentov’s ReaderGrev e-newsletter. “We had both spells, where there was a lot of positivity and then there was lot of negativity. Personally, I’m able to compartmentalize a lot of that. And a big part of the reason I’m able to do that is just because, getting back to my own identity as an artist, the art is really the most important thing to me here.”
Cross, who’s labored exterior video games on movie tasks like 2021’s Dune, mentioned he finally can’t management how gamers really feel concerning the sport design or how Marathon performs. “It’s difficult for me to take any of that stuff personally because I believe in the art, because I believe in what we’ve done,” he mentioned. “I think we did something really cool, and I think it will pan out. I can’t control the way the game plays. I’m not a designer. I’m not the game director. I can only control what I can control, and what I could control, I feel really good about.”
He continued:
And you’ll’t take that away from me, as a lot because the haters strive on-line or wherever, and whether or not somebody doesn’t occur to love the artwork course personally, whether or not they don’t agree with some political factor Bungie did, or regardless of the animosity du jour is, you’ll be able to’t take the factor I care about essentially the most away. There’s part of me undoubtedly that feels bummed, however kind of in the identical approach you’re feeling bummed such as you bought unfortunate. It’s like while you drop the toast and it goes face down. It’s like: Rattling, I want it might have gone face up once I dropped the toast. It appears like dropping a lottery ticket or being within the flawed place on the flawed time. And that stuff by no means feels private, you already know?
As a supervisor, Cross added that it may be exhausting to understand how everybody else on the group is processing the noise, particularly when individuals are working distant by way of Zoom and Slack. “In my position, it’s not enough to just process it internally,” he mentioned. “You have to advocate for and be there for the team and for the project and that’s a whole other can of soup.”
One thing that did weigh on the veteran Bungie artist is what an enormous threat and funding Marathon is that if it finally ends up not paying off. The individuals evaluating it to Harmony, which took many years to develop and cost over $200 million to make, usually are not completely flawed in that regard. Cross pointed to that threat taking as one of many challenge’s vritues, however worries it may very well be get together of a dying breed of AAA challenge that studios like Bungie made their bread and butter.
“Marathon is such a massive project,” he mentioned. “The studio took such a risk on this. You know, often times we felt like we were sort of getting away with something. And I think about that in the big picture, the idea of studios funding unproven, unknown projects for six or eight years, for hundreds of millions of dollars, sort of on spec. How much longer are things like this going to exist? I’ve been part of a couple of them now.”
