When Bungie and Hasbro decided to create a real-life, dart-blasting Nerf version of one of the most famous Destiny 2 guns, someone got lazy — stealing a fan artist’s nine-year-old work instead of creating the Ace of Spades from scratch.
To Bungie’s credit, the game company has just announced it will “make sure” to compensate and credit Tofu Rabbit “for their incredible artwork,” after a rapid investigation.
As you can see in Tofu’s examples below, this is an incredibly clear-cut case of copying, despite the changes that Bungie or Hasbro’s artists made to the blaster.
While one would assume Bungie owns the original underlying blaster design, Tofu was able to show that details from her fanart, down to the brush strokes, were copied. Bungie didn’t reply to The Verge’s request for comment; Hasbro didn’t immediately reply.
But yesterday, Tofu told The Verge that Bungie had already been “polite and encouraging” in private messages, saying she was hopeful the situation could be resolved soon, since Bungie has dealt with similar issues in the past.
Indeed, this isn’t the first or even the second time that Bungie or a contractor has plagiarized Destiny fan art, but it has compensated and credited some previous fan artists after it was called out.
The plagiarism wasn’t the only controversy around the new Nerf blaster. To order the $50 replica of Cayde’s Ace of Spades handcannon, players first have to unlock the Legend status in the game, which reportedly takes an incredible amount of grinding, something that Bungie has pledged to somewhat fix.
“If you’re an existing player, you likely have a lot of the prerequisites to start earning the title but new players would require an almost comical time investment,” my colleague Nick Statt tells me.
That’s a shame, because I’d have loved to own this blaster. It looks like one of the best licensed blasters Hasbro has yet made, a six-shot revolver with two removable cylinders and battery-powered motors for blasting. Years ago when Nerf did a licensed Overwatch revolver, it didn’t actually revolve.
(Originally posted by Sean Hollister)