Bungie’s upcoming extraction shooter, Marathon, has experienced a good deal of pre-release turbulence. It only just got a release date after a lengthy delay following rough playtest feedback, and after a fiasco involving some stolen art assets, studio morale took a nose dive.
Former art director Joseph Cross left the studio in Dec. 2025 after six years, and last Tuesday, he unpacked his thoughts on the online discourse around Marathon in an interview with Mikhail Klimentov of ReaderGrev.
“It’s like when you drop the toast and it goes face down. It’s like: Damn, I wish it would have gone face up when I dropped the toast. It feels like losing a lottery ticket or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that stuff never feels personal, you know?”
Cross said it was easy to forget that the team was “making a product with a ticking clock that needs to launch into the world and make profound amounts of money … the profundity of releasing this stuff into the wild really can be kind of a mind fuck.” That pressure occasionally hampered creativity: “you feel like you can’t impose anything that feels like a risk.”
While it’s impossible to know for sure that Marathon will fare any better than Concord, Cross told Klimentov he’s confident the team’s work will pay off. “That’s where you have to sort of put on the armor of art and have faith in your perspective and experience as an artist. All great art—commercial art anyways—it’s doubted and there’s a level of skepticism. Until there’s not.”
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