Last week Bungie blew the doorways clear off its convoluted and mysterious lore by releasing a cutscene that spelled out precisely what The Traveler—that huge white moon central to the collection’ storyline—was, and the place it had come from.
For Destiny followers that will need to have been extraordinarily satisfying, but it surely was one thing else for artist Julian Faylona, aka ELEMENTJ21, who observed that a part of the official video positive appeared like a bit of their very own Destiny fan artwork that they first printed on-line in 2020.
“I just realized Bungie took inspiration from my piece for this week’s cutscene”, they tweeted final week. “Certainly took me by surprise when I watched the cutscene”. As you possibly can see beneath, the similarities between Faylona’s piece (inexperienced, on the best) and the artwork in Bungie’s trailer (black, left) present that the phrase “inspiration” is getting used very generously:
In response, Bungie informed PC Gamer over the weekend that they “are planning to compensate and credit them for their work.”
“We discovered that an external vendor that helped to create this cutscene mistakenly used this art as a reference, assuming it was official Bungie artwork. We are currently waiting to hear back from the artist to take the necessary steps to remedy this situation.”
While these “company lifts fan art” tales can typically be acrimonious—and rightly so, given they’re typically outright theft—on this explicit case Faylona has been surprisingly chill about the entire thing.
“To be honest, I’m genuinely excited and happy that the piece I made 2 years ago—which, even back then, I fully acknowledged is based on the Destiny franchise—made it into the cutscene,” they mentioned to PC Gamer in a press release. “It was totally unexpected and completely caught me by surprise. So much so that I wanted to make a shoutout about it.”
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