Last week Bungie blew the doors clean off its convoluted and mysterious lore by releasing a cutscene that spelled out exactly what The Traveler—that big white moon central to the series’ storyline—was, and where it had come from.
For Destiny fans that must have been extremely satisfying, but it was something else for artist Julian Faylona, aka ELEMENTJ21, who noticed that part of the official video sure looked like a piece of their own Destiny fan art that they first published online in 2020.
“I just realized Bungie took inspiration from my piece for this week’s cutscene”, they tweeted last week. “Certainly took me by surprise when I watched the cutscene”. As you can see below, the similarities between Faylona’s piece (green, on the right) and the art in Bungie’s trailer (black, left) show that the word “inspiration” is being used very generously:
In response, Bungie told 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” stories can often be acrimonious—and rightly so, given they are often outright theft—in this particular case Faylona has been surprisingly chill about the whole 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 said to PC Gamer in a statement. “It was totally unexpected and completely caught me by surprise. So much so that I wanted to make a shoutout about it.”