Art Director for Bungie’s ‘Marathon’ Leaves Studio ahead of Launch

With Marathon finally given a release windows for early next year, Bungie’s Art Director for the project, Joseph Cross has left the studio, and will be ‘enjoying playing the game as a fan’.

First spotted by The Game Post and later confirmed by Kotaku, who reached out to Cross directly. The developer shared a further sentiment on his time at Bungie on social media (seen above), saying “I’m incredibly proud of the visual world we built for Marathon. Getting support at this scale for something a bit different is rare, and the art team at Bungie is the best in the biz. I’ll be enjoying playing the game as a fan with all of you. Massive thank you to everyone who has supported through all of it.“

Earlier this week, Bungie shared a new develop ‘ViDoc’, where they shared what’s next for their survival-extraction first person shooter Marathon, which had had a fairly rough journey.  Originally scheduled to launch in September of this year, it had a beta go live at the same time as the incredibly successful ARC Raiders. Alas, in that fight, Marathon came off worse, with many players criticising the game. Then, a plagiarism accusation caused even more negativity, and while Bungie swore to investigate the matter, a month later the game was delayed.

Marathon is releasing on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S with full cross play and cross save, and will retail for $39.99/€39.99/£34.99. Players that pick the game up will get access to all gameplay updates as the year progresses. Bungie have stressed there are no pay-to-win mechanics, and winning or losing is never determined by spending money. Reward Passes (Marathon’s Battlepass mechanic) never expire, and players can earn any rewards from previously purchased passes at any time.

For now, Bungie are promising more detail on seasonal content and a future roadmap for the game will come closer to launch – and the next time we’ll hear more from them is in January 2026.

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