Former Marathon art director stands by his work amid pre-release backlash

Pcgamer reports that former Marathon art director Joseph Cross, who left Bungie in Dec. 2025 after six years, said last Tuesday in an interview with Mikhail Klimentov of ReaderGrev that "what I could control, I feel really good about" amid pre-release animosity around Bungie's upcoming extraction shooter, Marathon.

Cross described a period of turbulence for the project: the game only just got a release date after a lengthy delay following rough playtest feedback, and a fiasco involving stolen art assets caused studio morale to take a nose dive. He likened the feeling to dropping toast and losing a lottery ticket, and warned the pressure of "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," adding that at times "you feel like you can't impose anything that feels like a risk."

While Cross said "it's impossible to know for sure that Marathon will fare any better than Concord," he expressed confidence in the team's work: "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."

Key Topics

Culture, Joseph Cross, Bungie, Marathon, Art Assets, Extraction Shooter