Bungie’s off to court, but it might not have much to worry about. The studio is being sued (via The Game Post) in a copyright infringement lawsuit for—so alleges plaintiff Kelsey Martineau—copying parts of Destiny 2’s storyline from Martineau’s work. He’s after damages and injunctive relief—which, given you can’t actually play the offending campaign anymore, might be a moot point.
Martineau, a writer, reckons that Bungie purloined elements of a story he wrote for Destiny 2’s Red War storyline (since archived forever, sealed away in the game’s odd story vault). Per Martineau’s complaint: “In 2013 and 2014, Martineau, writing under the pen name Caspar Cole, authored an original work about a unique and captivating fantasy world.”
Published on a WordPress blog, the story “introduces the notorious Red Legion, a powerful military force, that is embroiled in an unending cycle of warfare.” They’re a brutal bunch of lads, notable for their flamethrowers, war beasts, and tendency to wreak “chaos and destruction in civilian settlements.”
Which, hey, isn’t a million miles off the depiction of Destiny 2’s Red Legion: The enemy faction at the heart of the Red War who are mad, bad, and dangerous to know. In the complaint, Martineau’s lawyers point out that Destiny 2 had a famously tight turnaround, suggesting that an overload of work and shortage of time led devs to create a story “based directly on Martineau’s work.”
There’s a whole table (which you can find below) detailing the various similarities between Martineau’s work and Destiny 2’s Red War campaign that Martineau reckons makes his case a solid one, but the short and tall of it is: The Red Legion of his imagining and Bungie’s Red Legion are pretty similar—big men with big guns and a fondness for war crimes, and led by similar power-hungry characters.
Plus, they’re both big on invading Earth and want to capture an orbital installation—a space station in Martineau’s work, the Traveler in Destiny 2—to get it done.
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Will that be enough to persuade the lawyers? I’m not so sure. The issue that both factions have the same name (and it’s kind of a generic name) aside, the notion of a load of big, warlike sci-fi baddies gearing up to tear humanity a new one isn’t, well, new. You could just as easily pick at Mass Effect’s Turians (or Krogan, or Reapers), Halo’s Covenant, or even Star Trek’s Klingons as similar riffs on the same idea.
It’s a little reminiscent of the Lord of the Rings fanfiction author who tried to take Amazon to court after alleging it stole his ideas for The Rings of Power: Individuals trying their luck at getting a payday from big companies based on similarities that only really appear if you squint. Though to be fair to Martineau, his complaint seems much less ballsy than the LOTR fanfic author’s. Maybe this is just the world we live in now: Massive corporations taking small creators to court over tiny bagatelles and small creators taking them to court right back. That’s… only fair?