Exit Interview: Joseph Cross

Welcome to the seventh edition of Exit Interview, a series in which I interview people in the video game and esports industries who have experienced some kind of major career change. The conversations are shaggy and digressive — on purpose, I promise.

I’m going to keep this preamble short, because this might just be the longest Exit Interview I’ve ever done. For this edition, I spoke with Joseph Cross, a former artist at Bungie who was most recently franchise art director on Marathon, the studio’s upcoming futuristic extraction shooter. (I’ve written about the game before: here and here). In 2023, the game was revealed to heaps of praise over its visuals; two years later, it was panned over a lackluster closed alpha, then caught up in a scandal relating to the unauthorized use of an outside artist’s work. Now, it seems to have rebounded, vaulting up the top sellers charts on some online marketplaces in the lead up to its March 5 release date.

Over the span of nearly two hours, Cross and I discussed Marathon’s striking visual style, his decision to leave Bungie just weeks before the game’s release, and the risks inherent in spending years upon years toiling in secrecy on a high-stakes tentpole release.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.¹

ReaderGrev: I wanted to ask about a 2013 interview you did that appeared on Bungie’s website. Responding to a question about how you “keep your game sharp,” you said that one of the most important things for you is staying 18 years old, mentally. I'm curious if you feel like you've managed that 13 years on from that interview, and whether you still think that's sound advice.

Joseph Cross: Clearly I've gotten older and my role has changed and I've had to onboard a bunch of qualities that I know my 18 year old self didn't have, or wasn't capable of manifesting. But I think of all that stuff as essentially complimentary. I'm still the same kid. I still feel like an 18 year old in terms of my interest in what I do and the subject matter, and my fiendish, compulsive obsession with art and design and animation. I still feel like that.

The first thing that comes to mind for me with that stuff is that I still collect art — whether it's building just terabytes of inspiration or hunting down original animation cells or comic book pages or finding a new amazing genius artist that I'm just discovering for the first time and obsessing and being jealous and trying to understand. All those qualities still exist.

Do you have any recent exciting examples of something you've collected that has inspired you, or that you've been chasing after for a while?

Cross: I'm always looking for cells from animes that I grew up loving, and they're finally starting to explode in cost, but as of a few years ago you could still buy an original cell from Akira, for example, for a hundred bucks — or a few hundred bucks. And I always geek out over the — you know, not the money shots — like, some random shot of an angle of a motorcycle or something like that. I just picked up a few of those. I also obsess over Japanese woodblock prints, which I think are also undervalued in general.

One of my favorite artists of all time is this artist named Barry McGee, who was a graffiti artist turned fine artist and has become an incredibly successful contemporary fine artist. You can find on eBay original tags of his, and I just bought one of those. When he was doing graffiti, he called himself Twist, and so the same way I obsessed over Mike Mignola's original art or an original cell from Katsuhiro Otomo, I would obsess over a Barry McGee scrawled piece of text — and that stuff is all still relatively accessible. That kind of thing feeds my inner 18 year-old.

I have no context whatsoever for the collection of original graffiti, or work like that. What format does that come in?

Cross: Graffiti specifically, there is no real precedent there. I did graffiti myself, and part of the tradecraft, at least some segment of it, is carrying around a camera and finding the art on the wall of your favorite artists. You knew who they were, you don't know exactly where they did it necessarily because it's illegal, or sometimes there's legal walls. So you would develop a photo library, a scrapbook of images. You can buy prints. Occasionally you can get original sketches.

It almost feels like production art. I love production art. I love art that wasn't necessarily meant to be seen or celebrated. You know, it'd be amazing to have a Ralph McQuarrie sketch of a Star Wars costume concept, or something like that. I always loved that stuff. Posters, prints, proofs, that sort of thing.

Tell me a little bit about what you did at Bungie and what the job actually entailed on a day-to-day basis.

Cross: My most recent role was — for maybe a total of like five years or four years — I was called franchise art director on Marathon. When I joined the project I was not called franchise art director, I was just art director. I was probably the 10th or 12th person on that team.

Every project and every art director is different. At Bungie, there are multiple art directors on multiple projects and each one of them has their own qualities and strengths, and they vary widely. I think of it like a video game when you're choosing a character and everyone has these different stats and you have to decide: Oh, do I want to run fast or have heavier shields? That's how it ends up feeling, in some ways. I index very highly on vision. I come from the concept art field, so that's my background — it's very much about art and design and detail and taste, and less experience around the nuts and bolts of production and the nuts and bolts of asset creation. I ended up needing that kind of support around me early on.

It would be almost impossible to describe an average day, certainly in the span of the six years that I spent working on the project. They varied incredibly, from really getting in the weeds of defining style guides, working with individual artists, doing quick paint-overs or reference gathering, to working with the senior leadership team, pulling your weight from an art production point of view, managing various people, communicating to studio leadership and working on ways to communicate your vision and build confidence in the project. The evolution of your day-to-day varies incredibly with the evolution of the project and then the evolution of yourself as a role player within the context of a team that grew from 12 to several hundred. I could throw a dart at a day and try to remember what that might be like, but it would not reflect that same day six months prior or post.

Of all the tasks you described, probably the least exciting, I would assume, is selling your vision to senior leadership. I'm curious about what that process looks like.

Cross: It's one of those things where this was my first time in the role, and so I always felt this sort of Hobbit metaphor or whatever when Sam said every step he takes he's one step further than he's ever been from the Shire. You feel like that every day. It's all new, you have no experience to draw on, and you're basically just acting on instinct. That's how I felt. And my instincts, in terms of that challenge, took me toward a very production art focused place.

Within a year we had pivoted from a slightly more realistic style to a more stylized style. And I believed immediately in the simplified style — but the simplified style was the risk. This look that we went for and that you see an evolution of today in the game, it clicked for me right away. I was like: This is the horse I’m betting on. And I know it's challenging. That's a big part of the point. I knew very early on, it should make people nervous. Anything new like this, at this scale, by definition almost, should be a little bit nerve-racking to fund.

My instinctive way of approaching that challenge was to really approach the art side of it like production art — like we were doing product design, whether it was a weapon or a loot box or a character’s helmet. Product design, by nature, lends itself to production, regardless of the industry, where you're thinking about how stuff works and fits together, and shape language and color and all this stuff. We didn't spend a lot of time trying to sell the fantasy, if that makes sense, and at least early on, we didn't invest a lot of time in creating illustrations, for example. In hindsight, I would have commissioned more illustration work. Famously, that's what George Lucas did to get Star Wars sold, is these Ralph McQuarrie illustrations.

There's a big asterisk here for me personally, where I think that the kind of art director I was — the person they hired me to be — they knew I was a vision holder. I wasn't gonna come in and do something generic or basic. That's not why you would hire me. But that comes with risk. I think I had a certain amount of slack that was cut to me because of who I am and because the sort of impact I had on Destiny was significant within one slice of the visual world of that game. So I had a credit, I think.

It sounds like a big part of your pitch was the inherent risk of the design. Was making that pitch easy or difficult?

Cross: It was easy in a way for me, creatively and professionally, because I believed in it so much. I still believe in it. I was like, if we can pull this off, we're gonna be on the right side of history. Best case scenario, it becomes a big hit and helps usher in a new sort of stylistic aesthetic in the industry. Worst case scenario, it's a cult classic that people who are interested appreciate.

The difficult part was fostering consensus that it was in fact a good idea. I had at the time, probably for the majority of pre-production and production, I sort of had angels on my shoulder within the studio that believed in me, that interacted and interfaced with folks on a level that I didn't necessarily have to, and essentially stood up for me and vouched for me. And you need that when you're doing something new.

There's also something about the design of the game, where at a certain point I really did believe that art had potentially more of a responsibility for creating interest than it would if we were working on a different kind of game. The game design, nobody's reinventing the wheel here. We're putting compelling spins on established mechanics. The narrative is also not reinventing the wheel. It's an abandoned space colony where something mysterious happened. We've seen this a lot. It's about how you spin it, and at some point, for better or for worse, I told myself that this is an opportunity for art to sort of step up and provide a level of newness to this world.

I'm curious about when the game — like the actual stuff that you play — entered the equation for you, and how did the work you were doing change when it finally did?

Cross: This is probably a category of feelings or answers that I get a little bit nervous about, just politically. I don't know if there's a way to answer questions like that the way I would like to answer them without it seeming like I'm going to introduce a controversial opinion. But I can tell you, the game right away made a huge amount of sense to me. I really did love the sort of bashing or sampling of an extraction shooter, sort of battle royale style, cinematic, tense experience — Which, when I joined the project, I was just figuring out that Tarkov was incredibly compelling. I really did feel like this is it, this is the next thing, this is the future. I'm too terrified to play it and I suck at shooters, but this is incredibly compelling to watch. — and the idea of merging that with sci-fi and an abandoned colony, what Marathon has done and what ARC Raiders also has done, essentially, I really believed in that formula and I believed that the world kind of created itself in a way. Even from the very first playtests, I could see it. I didn't need convincing.

I think the controversial side of things is — or, I don’t know how controversial this is — it became clear that if we were going to work in the Tiger engine, which is Bungie's proprietary engine, I wasn't comfortable with the risk that I felt sort of manifested itself in the visual direction that we had designed on paper,⁵ translating into the Tiger engine and not ending up feeling like a first cousin of Destiny. To be fair, I didn't really put it through its rigors and there are a ton of amazing graphics engineers and tech artists that I'm sure we could have got there with but I made a sort of a pretty quick decision to pivot to something that I was sure was not going to look like Destiny. And I think I said this in another interview too, that if we were working in the Unreal Engine, I don't think the game would look how it looks now. For better or for worse, who knows?

The other big one was the game design itself having a pretty profound evolution midway through, and that changed the visual psychology a fair amount.

Can I ask what you mean by that?

Cross: Yeah, I mean the visual psychology you have to onboard going from a purely modular character fantasy — you are a runner, you are a modular cyborg, one of a hundred or a thousand, a kit of parts — to a psychology where you're now designing a capital-C character with a backstory and a name and everything that comes with it. You’re going from designing one vehicle in a fleet of a thousand to now you're designing the Millennium Falcon. The psychology changes. I think that gets back to your original question, which is like, art relating to gameplay and at what point do those collide? And that certainly was a big one. In the case of this production it was a fairly significant event, and had to happen incredibly quickly, too.

When Fortnite came out, there were critics and observers who noted the themes behind the battle royale genre — even the name “battle royale” — derive from a satire, a critique of hyper-competition. And the extraction genre, I think, is open to a similar political reading: You drop in, you get yours, you are ruthlessly competing with everybody else, and you try and get out richer than you came in. Those themes — what you are doing when you are playing an extraction shooter, the kind of competition that it is — were you thinking about that as you were designing the visuals of the world?

Cross: I'm not a game designer. I am an artist first and a game developer second. I'm a commercial artist. I'm here to solve visual challenges. But to the extent that you need to immerse yourself and be tuned into the fantasy and experience, part of the reason I was drawn to extraction — and battle royale to some extent — is just how intuitively real it feels as a video game experience. It feels almost like, when you boil it down, kind of the most realistic experience. You go to a place, there must be something there you want, there's risk, if you're killed or you're injured you lose your stuff. It just feels like such a natural, evolution of a gameplay experience — as opposed to an arena shooter or something, which feels incredibly manufactured in a way, a much less relatable experience to me.

It also tapped into sci-fi that I really love. It felt like that's what happened in Alien. The Alien franchise is essentially an extraction shooter. There was a movie called Prospect, which was a huge influence on us very early, which is an amazing film if anybody hasn't seen it — kind of a proto extraction shooter movie with Pedro Pascal. So the experience, the fantasy of it was very natural, and there was a lot of low-hanging fruit for us to draw on visually, thematically.

One of the things I advocated for just through art direction, something I probably said in a few meetings but didn't really die on the hill for, was that there was a component of the extraction shooter and in the Marathon universe that I think still persists even in the release version, the idea that there's these corporations competing for this stuff and that runners are contractors. I love that whole side of things. I love anytime there's an excuse to sort of create a product out of something like this. I love branding stuff and I love putting text on stuff and that whole side of things. A little bit of The Most Dangerous Game or Running Man. There was a crossover with sport, ultimately, that I really liked, and it complemented the fantasy that you weren't in fact a human — you're a shell — so death was kind of taken out of the picture, and it let you get away with a bit more of a cynical take on this sort of combat. I like the idea that as a runner you want to be seen doing runs so you can get sponsored and get better contracts and maybe better gear. And obviously, you kind of hit a wall there with a key part of the narrative which is that this is illegal work and this is an abandoned colony. You're a grifter, you're a criminal, you’re trespassing, and you don't wanna advertise that, companies don't want to advertise that necessarily. That was one of the fantasies that fueled a lot of the visual development of this in my head.

I want to go back a little bit and ask about the beginning of a project like this. I have no conception of what it means to go into the office and be tasked with beginning work on a new visual identity for a new game. Can you tell me a little bit about the first weeks or months?

Cross: There's no formula here. There are certain truths, game development 101 goals and deliverables that exist universally, such as creating some sort of art bible, creating a style guide, starting to lock in and define how you make content. A big thing for me is form language — like, why does stuff look the way it looks? That's one of my personal motivations, just period, in the industry. When you have this kind of blank check to design stuff in the future, whether it's a hundred years or 2000 years, stuff isn't gonna look the way it looks now. So much sci-fi design can be repetitive and cyclical, this cycle of influence where if you're going to design a crate and you want to make it look futuristic, you add a bunch of bevels and seams and 45 degree angles and glowing LED screens, that kind of thing. I'm really excited about not doing that stuff, even on principle. One of my mentors and peers at Bungie — I don’t know if he coined this, but — at one point we were talking about cosmetics and he was like: What are we doing different or what are we doing better? We should be doing one of those two things all the time.

So I spent a lot of time working with artists individually, developing style guides — you know, a this, not that, kind of thing — and you get to a point where those things start to feel real and you're presenting them more often. It's incredibly difficult to do, and one of those things I wasn't sure we were going to be able to pull off, especially because the style came from just a couple of us initially and you have to scale that. That starts with: Oh, we got five more artists on the team and they're seniors and they're juniors; and then: Oh, now we have to outsource stuff; and we also have to keep control of what we're calling the art style of the game, or the art direction of the game. If you imagine that, early on, a lot of the day-to-day is kind of intuitively working out how to best foster a development process so that you can scale the style effectively.

Do you have any examples of stuff from Marathon that you remember being either different from or better than something that already existed?

Cross:² Weapons are a good example. We tried to land in this spot with weapon design that felt like it had this hopefully compelling and different combination of industrial design qualities. They're simplified. They’re modular. There's something intuitively functional about how they're put together because the artists are very tuned in to form and function and product design. But then we also go this [other] way with color and graphic design into sort of a more playful space, a place that feels a little counterintuitive sometimes for a weapon — and we do risk those comparisons to LEGOs or Roblox, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. I had IKEA in our style guide because of their incredibly well-designed functional modular furniture, and I think that's a cool thing. We intentionally don't have screws and bolts holding things together. We don't have rust, really, in our game. There's very little metal. Those are the kinds of things where I just feel like: That's different. I can't say it's better because it's subjective, but it's a different approach.

Some stuff I will say I think is better is the character — I'm not sure what we’ll end up calling her, but Glitch, our speedster, punk character³ — I love her footwear. I'm a sneaker head, and I love the way we've designed those shoes. I would hold those up to any other game's sneaker design or footwear design and say those are legitimately compelling designs. So much so I believe a senior designer at Nike or something like that would appreciate those designs. And that's ultimately the goal. I don't want this stuff to be good for a video game. I want it to be good from a design perspective.

At the same time, I have to say: It's for the interested. None of this stuff should in any way detract from the gameplay experience because it's a polarizing design or something like this. This stuff should all be fun and intuitive to interact with. If you happen to appreciate the time we spent on the novelty of the design, great. If not, doesn't matter. It's just part of the game.

All of this seems like exciting, interesting work. It seems like you enjoyed doing it. Why did you step away?

Cross: It ended up being a confluence of things. It wasn’t one thing. I worked on this project for six years. I still consider myself essentially a commercial artist, and I have an identity as an artist, as an individual. And understanding game development culture, at some point I understood how I relate to all of this. You know, I'm not a founder of Bungie. This is not my company. And I'm conscious of the number of projects I get to work on in my life. I'm not getting any younger. I've spent what will ultimately be 15 years, essentially, on two projects for Bungie: Destiny and Marathon, with film work in between. So after six years, leaving a week or two before release lock, I felt an incredible amount of satisfaction in what we'd done. And the natural cadence of the kind of work that happens post-launch in a live service game, I also understood what that was looking like.

It's also true that at the level of seniority that I had, there are challenges there that don't necessarily exist as an artist, and getting to this phase of a project like this at that level had its own challenges that contributed also. But I’d say primarily it was just feeling like that's a good amount of time to work on a thing. I talked to a lot of artists and peers about it, and ultimately it comes down to your identity: who are you as an artist, as a creative? That was a decision I felt like I needed to make. And also, there is definitely a compulsive component to it. It's never easy making a decision to leave a project like this; I second guess myself all the time. I'm not some sort of guru type when it comes to stuff like this.

There was this month or two-month long span when the conversation around Marathon seemed to be preoccupied with the question of: Will this fail? Is this like Concord in some way? I'm curious how that felt for you, that stretch where the discourse around the game was not super flattering but also maybe not entirely about the game itself.

Cross: That kind of stuff hits everyone differently. We had both spells, where there was a lot of positivity and then there was lot of negativity. Personally, I'm able to compartmentalize a lot of that. And a big part of the reason I'm able to do that is just because, getting back to my own identity as an artist, the art is really the most important thing to me here. It's difficult for me to take any of that stuff personally because I believe in the art, because I believe in what we've done. I think we did something really cool, and I think it will pan out. I can't control the way the game plays. I'm not a designer. I'm not the game director. I can only control what I can control, and what I could control, I feel really good about. And you can't take that away from me, as much as the haters try online or wherever, and whether someone doesn't happen to like the art direction personally, whether they don't agree with some political thing Bungie did, or whatever the animosity du jour is, you can't take the thing I care about the most away. There's a part of me definitely that feels bummed, but sort of in the same way you feel bummed like you got unlucky. It’s like when you drop the toast and it goes face down. It's like: Damn, I wish it would have gone face up when I dropped the toast. It feels like losing a lottery ticket or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that stuff never feels personal, you know?

I will say also that as a leader, you have a responsibility to the team to weather that stuff — and that's a challenge. Especially working remote, you have no idea how folks are processing all of that. In my position, it's not enough to just process it internally. You have to advocate for and be there for the team and for the project and that's a whole other can of soup.

Something that sort of weighed on me, not super heavily, but something I've been aware of: You mentioned Concord.⁴  Marathon is such a massive project. The studio took such a risk on this. You know, often times we felt like we were sort of getting away with something. And I think about that in the big picture, the idea of studios funding unproven, unknown projects for six or eight years, for hundreds of millions of dollars, sort of on spec. How much longer are things like this going to exist? I’ve been part of a couple of them now.

How often were you thinking about that? Was it a daily occurrence, something you were very nervous about, or just a background thought?

Cross: Probably some combination of those things. It's just really easy to lose sight that you're being bankrolled by someone. You're making a product with a ticking clock that needs to launch into the world and make profound amounts of money. Once you're year four or five in, it's really easy to feel like: Oh, my job is to make pre-production or production content for a small team. And the profundity of releasing this stuff into the wild really can be kind of a mind fuck. Especially so in contrast to working on films, where everything is always on fire, you're always three days behind schedule, you have about a six month window total to shoot, and it's so finite and so quick compared to working in games.

It's not always intuitive to remember that above all of this is this product that's being funded and every day that goes by is a day you're going further into the red. You're not making money. The studio is not making any money. And so anyway, that's a big one, especially when you're really trying to channel creativity and get to the point where you feel like you can't impose anything that feels like a risk. I mean, what a mind fuck that is, right? That's where you have to sort of put on the armor of art and have faith in your perspective and experience as an artist. All great art, commercial art anyways, it’s doubted and there’s a level of skepticism — until there’s not.

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1  For transparency’s sake, my changes are largely focused on cleaning up “ums,” “likes” and “ahs,” whittling down questions to let you get to the answers faster, and cutting certain parts of answers (or entire exchanges) that are redundant or irrelevant or which make sense over audio but not over text. My goal is never to change the meaning of what’s been said to me, and I outline my approach to editing these transcripts to interview subjects upfront.

2  Cut for space but Cross started this answer with a long caveat, the most important bit of which is: “To be fair, simply by making that statement or that declaration, you introduce subjectivity, which is almost impossible to make the case for.”

3  I believe this shell turned out to be named Vandal.

4  A notorious 2024 flop, probably the most high-profile and devastating failed launch in recent video game history.

5  Just to clear things up: I believe Cross is referring here to the earlier more realistic style that he mentions in an earlier answer. Also, I know this footnote is out of order. Sorry.