"Nobody's reinventing the wheel" with Marathon's mechanics, says former art boss, so the visual design needed to take risks

Many would agree that nu-Marathon’s art is its strongest suite, accusations of plagiarism notwithstanding. It’s certainly the thing I like best about the game. Or at least, find the most intriguing. For want of a better analogy at this dismally late stage in the UK working day, everything in Marathon’s world looks like it’s made of very expensive cybernetic ice cream, sold in a branch of IKEA that appears on no Earthly map. As one might expect from his previous job description, Cross has nothing but good things to say about Marathon’s art. Indeed, he thinks the art direction has “more of a responsibility for creating interest” than is usual, because the game beneath is more about “compelling spins on established mechanics”.

“I believed immediately in the simplified style — but the simplified style was the risk,” Cross explains in a generous chat with Mikhail Klimentov for the latest ReaderGrev newsletter. “This look that we went for and that you see an evolution of today in the game, it clicked for me right away. I was like: This is the horse I’m betting on. And I know it’s challenging. That’s a big part of the point. I knew very early on, it should make people nervous. Anything new like this, at this scale, by definition almost, should be a little bit nerve-racking to fund.

“My instinctive way of approaching that challenge was to really approach the art side of it like production art — like we were doing product design, whether it was a weapon or a loot box or a character’s helmet,” he goes on. “Product design, by nature, lends itself to production, regardless of the industry, where you’re thinking about how stuff works and fits together, and shape language and color and all this stuff. We didn’t spend a lot of time trying to sell the fantasy, if that makes sense, and at least early on, we didn’t invest a lot of time in creating illustrations, for example. In hindsight, I would have commissioned more illustration work. Famously, that’s what George Lucas did to get Star Wars sold, is these Ralph McQuarrie illustrations.”

There’s a lot more in the full chat, including debts to graffiti, comparisons with the visual language of Roblox, and an ode to one particular character’s sneakers. There’s also some cagey talk about Marathon’s choppy pre-release fortunes, and the rigours of making the game run in Bungie’s Tiger engine without looking like a “first cousin of Destiny”. And then there is the below section on why Cross feels the art direction needs to go particularly hard for Marathon.

“There’s also something about the design of the game, where at a certain point I really did believe that art had potentially more of a responsibility for creating interest than it would if we were working on a different kind of game,” he says. “The game design, nobody’s reinventing the wheel here. We’re putting compelling spins on established mechanics. The narrative is also not reinventing the wheel. It’s an abandoned space colony where something mysterious happened. We’ve seen this a lot. It’s about how you spin it, and at some point, for better or for worse, I told myself that this is an opportunity for art to sort of step up and provide a level of newness to this world.”

To intercept the obvious criticism here, I don’t think this is Cross throwing his old colleagues in Marathon’s game design team under a bus. I don’t think anybody at Bungie can reasonably deny that nu-Marathon is a familiar species of shooter. Still, I imagine Bungie would prefer that it both look astonishing and blow your puny human brain at the level of the gunshoots and loot-getting. We’ll be able to decide for ourselves in not too long – as of yesterday, the game is due to launch on 5th March.