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Activision and Call of Duty are once again in the news for the wrong reasons. A new skin for Vanguard and Warzone, called Doomsayer, has been called out for having an uncanny resemblance to a character model created by a former employee.
The creator of the character model, Robert Bowling, is the head of Dr DisRespect's Midnight Society gaming studio, which is currently developing a game called Deadrop.
Bowling took to Twitter after Activision released the skin and sarcastically asked the publisher to do the basic courtesy of naming it after him:
"At least name it after me."
The accusation comes just weeks after Activision was accused of plagiarizing the Floof Fury skin for Call of Duty: Warzone. The company has since apologized for the "misstep" and has removed the imagery from the game.
However, Activision has not yet commented on the accusations surrounding the Doomsayer skin.
How Call of Duty's Doomsayer skin and Deadrop's Four Zero Two variant are similar
Dr DisRespect and the Midnight Society company are now working on a "vertical extraction shooter" called Deadrop.
The community has been actively supporting the project from the beginning. Some even got Deadrop Founders Passes, which give them access to 10,000 variants (distinctive in-game NFT characters randomly given to the founders).
In a tweet on July 1, Robert Bowling shared one of the variants on his feed, welcoming the chosen few who would get access to the tokenized characters.
The character in the short video shares a lot of similarities with the recently announced Doomsayer skin in Call of Duty. Both have a neon holographic skull with a hood. This has led many to believe the skin is a ripoff of the variant posted last month.
In fact, Bowling is a former employee of Activision. He was a creative strategist for Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward before joining forces with Dr DisRespect and founding gaming studio Midnight Society. What's more, the alleged plagiarized model is literally his Twitter profile picture.
On August 15, Activision released their new Tracer Pack: Malware Ultra skin bundle, which includes the Doomsayer skin, for an operator named Shigenori Ota.
The skin, especially the one for Vanguard, is strikingly similar to the NFT variant titled Four Zero Two, which incidentally is also Bowling's Twitter tag.
Twitter outrage
Call of Duty fans realized something was off pretty soon. They began tweeting at the director of Midnight Society to take a look at what many felt was a plagiarized version of their asset:
Granted, the neon skull aesthetic cannot be tied to one game in particular. However, the hood and holographic bony skull do look very similar to Deadrop's Variant.
