Ex-Bungie Dev On Marathon‘s Summer Of Hate: ‘You Can’t Take The Thing I Care About The Most Away’

The buzz around Marathon was strong coming out of its initial 2023 PlayStation Showcase reveal. It was a familiar multiplayer formula inside a wrapper that looked unlike anything else out there. But things started going downhill after fans went hands on with an alpha test build in May 2025. Coupled with an art plagiarism incident and annual mass layoffs at Bungie, the vibes had turned rancid. Fans were skeptical and haters were gleefully calling Marathon the next Concord. What does that do to the headspace of someone working on the game 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 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 worked outside games on film projects like 2021’s Dune, said he ultimately can’t control how players feel about the game design or how Marathon plays. “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 said. “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 can’t take that away from me, as much as the haters try online or wherever, 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. There’s a part of me definitely that feels bummed, but sort of in the same way you feel bummed like you got unlucky. 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?

As a manager, Cross added that it can be hard to know how everyone else on the team is processing the noise, especially when people are working remote through Zoom and Slack. “In my position, it’s not enough to just process it internally,” he said. “You have to advocate for and be there for the team and for the project and that’s a whole other can of soup.”

Something that did weigh on the veteran Bungie artist is what a big risk and investment Marathon is if it ends up not paying off. The people comparing it to Concord, which took many years to develop and cost over $200 million to make, are not entirely wrong in that regard. Cross pointed to that risk taking as one of the project’s vritues, but worries it could be party of a dying breed of AAA project that studios like Bungie made their bread and butter.

“Marathon is such a massive project,” he said. “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.”