When Bungie and Hasbro decided to create a real-life, dart-blasting Nerf version of one of the most popular Fate 2 gun, someone’s lazy — stealing a nine-year-old fan artist’s work instead of creating the Ace of Spades from scratch.
To Bungie’s credit, the game company announced that it would “make sure” to pay and credit Tofu Rabbit “for their incredible artwork,” after a quick investigation.
As you can see in the Tofu examples below, this is an incredibly clear case of copying, despite the changes Bungie or Hasbro artists made to the blaster.
While one would assume that Bungie owns the original underlying blaster design, Tofu has shown that details from his fanart, down to the brush strokes, have been copied. Bungie did not offer an explanation The Verge; Hasbro did not immediately respond.
But yesterday, Tofu said The Verge that Bungie has been “polite and encouraging” in private messages, saying he hopes the situation will be resolved soon, as Bungie has dealt with similar issues in the past.
In fact, this isn’t the first or even the second time Bungie or a contractor has cheated fate fan art, but it paid and credited some former fan artists after it was called out.
“If you’re an existing player, you probably have a lot of requirements to start earning the title but new players will require an almost ridiculous investment of time,” my colleague Nick Statt told me.
That’s a shame, because I would love to have this blaster. It looks like one of the best licensed blasters Hasbro has ever made, a six-shot revolver with two removable cylinders and battery-powered motors for blasting. It was years ago when Nerf made a licensee Overwatch revolver, it didn’t really cycle.
