Bungie is going to court, but maybe there’s nothing to worry about. The studio is being sued (via Game post) in a copyright infringement lawsuit for, according to plaintiff Kelsey Martineau, copying parts of the plot of Destiny 2 from Martineau’s work. He’s seeking damages and an injunction – which, considering you can no longer play the campaign that caused the violation, may be moot.
Writer Martineau believes that Bungie stole elements of the story he wrote for Destiny 2’s Red War storyline (archived forever and sealed in the game’s strange lore vault). Per Martineau Complaint: “In 2013 and 2014, Martineau, writing under the pseudonym Caspar Cole, authored original work about a unique and immersive fantasy world.”
Published on the WordPress blog, the story “introduces the notorious Red Legion, a powerful military force embroiled in an endless cycle of warfare.” They’re a brutal gang of lads, known for their flamethrowers, war beasts, and tendency to spread “chaos and destruction to civilian settlements.”
Which, hey, isn’t a million miles away from introducing Destiny 2 Red Legion: The enemy faction at the heart of the Red War that is crazy, evil, and risky to get to know. In the complaint, Martineau’s lawyers point out that Destiny 2 famously had a compact cut, suggesting that work overload and lack of time led the developers to create a story “based directly on Martineau’s work.”
There is an entire table (which can be found below) detailing the various similarities between Martineau’s work and the Red War campaign in Destiny 2. Martineau believes his argument is solid, but in compact it is as follows: The Red Legion of his imagination and Bungie’s Red Legion is quite similar – huge men with huge weapons and a penchant for war crimes, and led by similar power-hungry characters.
Additionally, they both have a sturdy desire to invade Earth and want to capture an orbital installation – a space station in Martineau’s work, the Voyager in Destiny 2 – to do so.
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Will this be enough to convince lawyers? I’m not so sure about that. Aside from the fact that both factions share the same name (and it’s sort of a generic name), the concept of a group of huge, warlike sci-fi villains preparing to tear humanity apart isn’t, well, recent. You could just as easily pick out the Turians (or Krogans or Reapers) from Mass Effect, the Covenant from Halo, or even the Klingons from Star Trek as similar riffs on the same idea.
It’s a bit like the Lord of the Rings fanfiction author who tried to take Amazon to court after accusing it of stealing his Rings of Power ideas: People trying their luck at getting a paycheck from huge companies based on similarities that only really come into play when when you squint. Although, to be fair to Martineau, his complaint seems much less brazen than the author of the LOTR fanfic. Maybe this is just the world we live in now: huge corporations take petite creators to court over petite baguettes, and petite creators take them to court right away. Is that… only fair?
