Former Marathon art director says 'what I could control, I feel really good about' in the face of pre-release animosity: 'You can't take that away from me'

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.

Cross told Klimentov the team felt distinct "spells" where talk around the game was positive at first, and then became negative. "Personally, I'm able to compartmentalize a lot of that," he said in the interview.

"The art is really the most important thing to me here. 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. I think we did something really cool, and I think it will pan out." He added that he had no say over design or "the way the game plays," but "what I could control, I feel really good about."

"You can't take that away from me, as much as the haters try online or wherever," said Cross. "And whether someone doesn't happen to like the art direction personally, whether they don't agree with some political thing Bungie did, or whatever the animosity du jour is, you can't take the thing I care about the most away.

"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?"

That said, Cross also felt "a responsibility to the team to weather that stuff," which he described as "a whole other can of soup." The legendarily quick failure of Concord, another game under the Sony umbrella that was shut down mere weeks after it released, drew attention to something that Cross admitted "sort of weighed" on him.

"We felt like we were sort of getting away with something," he said. "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?"

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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