The Cord Special: An Interview with NAPainter.

Tuesday, May 12th 2026 – I’ve just had the chance to speak with the, now infamous, Marathon player NAPainter. We sat down for roughly 45 minutes to discuss last week’s “Compiler Loot Room OOB” exploit, which made its rounds on Twitter and quickly became one of the most defining controversies in the title's history. We spoke briefly about Painter’s experience with Bungie games dating back to his time with Destiny 2, and how he initially approached Marathon before getting into the elephant in the room; covering the exploit itself, his intentions, how the situation is being handled both in public and behind the scenes, the backlash, and ultimately what he thinks is an appropriate way to handle what he acknowledges was an egregious offense.

(Note: Parts of this interview have been removed to protect the integrity of the game itself. All information removed relates exclusively to explicit details about existing, but publicly unknown, exploits that Bungie is aware of; these details being proliferated could lead to attempts to abuse these exploits, and as such, were consequentially removed).

GZ: “How’s the season going for you? Are you excited for Cryo Ranked?”

PA: “I’m Diamond II right now, I’m hoping to get to Diamond I before the end of the season for the Bully skin and then after that, I’m not sure. Cryo Ranked is interesting because there’s ranked based matchmaking. Cryo is very sweaty now, even on the low end, and ranked might give lower level players an easier time to rank up. I’m wondering if we’ll be able to Solo though”.

GZ: “Seems like we won’t be able to, I think Andy mentioned on Twitter that it’s going to follow the same infil. rules that Cryo currently does”.

PA: “Oh, that sucks”.

GZ: “I don’t want to take up too much of your time this afternoon so I want to get right into it here-”

PA: “The elephant in the room?”

GZ: “Exactly. The elephant in the room. I had to do some digging and ask around about your prior experiences with Destiny 2 because, forgive the ignorance but I wasn’t terribly familiar with your history with Bungie games. So my question is whether or not you entered Marathon with the intention of breaking the game open or if you just stumbled into one thing after the next?”

PA: “I was just having a good time, just gaming. [The exploits] started in Dire Marsh when the game fully launched and I started playing thief… I think the first time I ever did anything that would be ‘exploit adjacent’ was when I would use the drone to go into a lockdown field. I would grab the key by finding it with the drone first and eat the damage, which worked for most of the POIs and got around needing Anti Virus Packs… that’s where the seed started. When it really hit the fan was when Outpost was launched. The day Outpost launched, I did command wing once and as soon as I left I thought to myself ‘couldn’t I just come up through the other side?’”.

He stated that he’d left exploits alone largely until Cryo Archive launched before getting into exactly where his mentality was when he started looking for Cryo Exploits.

“I spent a long time looking for a way to exploit Compiler. I [didn’t want to have] 12 5-Key runs to get the subroutine. I want to see if there’s a way where people can get to the compiler and just skip the keys altogether. I eventually realized there were giant gaps, which hadn't happened at this scale since [Destiny 2’s] deep stone crypt; walls that didn’t have collisions and a lot of holes in the map. Once I realized that, I figured there was a way to get into the compiler parkour section. It always started with a way to get people to not have to need subroutines, and I got lost along the way. At that point I just wanted to break Cryo open like an egg. When I finally found [the loot room OOB] I was like ‘Yes! I found it!’ and I wasn’t thinking about how it would go horribly wrong. The strat that I found, which does break Compiler (which is what I wanted to do so people could get skins or ganglions without subroutines), came at the cost of human decency”. 

GZ: “Speaking of human decency, I’ve been seeing a lot of the backlash and I imagine you understand where it’s coming from, how has that been for you?” 

PA: “A lot of it has been hate, I’m gonna be honest, even when I was doing stuff in Destiny, I’d get hate comments. Someone made a wojack, I love it, it’s actually a sticker in one of my servers. There are so many comments about the nose”.

(He seemed to genuinely find the nose comments to be funny, as he’s used to the hate and is himself not one to shy away from trolling).

GZ: “Yeah I’ve seen quite a bit of the hate, and while it’s clear where it stems from, I think there’s a line or a degree where it’s just too far”.

PA: “Someone came into my chat and said ‘I hope you’ll be swinging from a tree in a few days’. The Wojack is really funny though. I want to use it as a thumbnail for one of my videos but I’d need permission from the artist”.

GZ: “Considering why it was made I doubt you’re going to get permission”.

PA: “Yeah but I’m not just going to use it without asking”.

GZ: “So, when you’re sitting behind the stairs in the clip and you’re aware that the clearing team is going to come in at literally any moment, was the intent to wipe the team or were you making it up as you went along?”

PA: “The intent was to wipe the team in the moment, I’m not gonna lie. We intended to kill the team and take the loot. It would’ve been funnier though, because, I look back on it and think about how it would’ve been funnier if I just walked up to them and said ‘hey guys what kind of loot do we got?’... I think what really makes it even worse, it would’ve been bad no matter what happened, but if we did this to like Wallah, who has like 80 compiler kills, it would’ve sucked, sure, meanwhile someone on their first compiler run… having that high? That’s different”.

GZ: “Yeah, I think that’s where a lot of the animosity is coming from. Ruined a ‘cherry pop’ to an effect. So have you had a chance to speak with that team? Considering Fired opened up this morning about it. What was that conversation like?”.

PA: “I don’t want to talk about what we talked about. We talked and made amends, I offered to help him out with subroutines and we’re hopefully playing this weekend”.

GZ: “And Bungie, have you spoken to them?”

PA: “I reached out to them. I heard back but it’s more so about reporting exploits in the future for now”.

GZ: “I think that’s the thing right, you’d be a valuable QA tester, there’s serious value in you being able to relay this sort of information directly to Bungie”.

PA: “I would like to think so. It’s crazy because getting outside of the map with your player is one thing, but the thief drone has over 20 ways to get out of the map. I’m trying to write out a giant document with video evidence of all the drone exploits”.

GZ: “Is there a tell for these exploits? You seem to come across them at an alarming rate. I consider myself the average player and I never come across these things or even think to push through a wall or look for areas with no collision”.

PA: “I started running Cryo and I found [the synapse cube hole] that they left. The second I found that, I went outside the map and realized there was so much you could do Out-of-Bounds, and that's when I started wondering whether or not you could get into vaults or the compiler loot room…

(Painter went on to dictate a specific exploit that could be very consequential if abused. For the sake of preservation, I decided to remove this section of the interview as it could be potentially catastrophic should people find out it exists and start trying to brute force it).

“As far as I’m aware, Bungie should be patching all of the OOBs by the next Cryo session,  except theoretically one, the one I'm thinking of is most likely not even possible, but even if it is, it’s risky and not worth it”.

GZ: “So you’ve seen the backlash and understand the gravity of the situation, considering Bungie is in a very unprecedented space right now, given that they’ve historically never issued bans over exploits, but are seemingly looking at a real consequence this time due to the magnitude. I myself said that a ban is probably in order, you know this. In private conversations I’ve had with people in the community, they’ve shared similar sentiments. So, in all honesty, what do you think is a fair punishment?”

PA: “I don’t wanna be perma-banned, i have a lot of fun, it’s a really fun game. But, honestly? One week, two weeks, until next season; I’d be willing to eat that on the chin. Something I was talking about on Twitter was unironically if they wanted to take my credit wallet, and just split it into thirds and give it back to the player team. I’d be down to take that on the chin. Something like this is horrible, and I think it really becomes a problem when it’s repeatedly abusable. Something that I’ve seen people say is that I’ve done it a lot, and I want to set the record straight here: While I’ve gone up there a lot, the team we killed was the only one. We did try again in the next game because we saw that Wallah was in the lobby, but we just exfild while we were up there. After that, we called it there. I went outside a couple more times just to test things, I’m going to leave the VOD up as long as possible [so people can see for themselves]. You can see I blacked out my screen to OOB a couple more times so people wouldn’t be able to easily figure out the OOB. Two of which were to see if you could open the Level 5 door, and I went up a 3rd time to say hi to Skarrow through the glass. In the video Skarrow posted, he actually used the screenshot of me standing out there. I didn’t do it again, and I did everything I could to keep the method from getting out because even after I stopped, I knew other people wouldn’t. I wish I could've done a better job because I knew people were going to abuse it, but I tried”.

GZ: “I think a perma-ban is probably off the table? I can’t imagine Bungie would want to seem like a company that’s just flippantly banning players; like banning them for a rule that doesn’t exist and then writing the rule after the fact-”

PA: “Well, to play devil's advocate, if they did perma-ban me, since I’m a decent portion of “exploit and glitch finding” in the game, my perma-ban would mitigate new ones from being found. But moving forward I want to be more open to talking directly to Bungie, [because there’s a couple more exploits that they should know about and] I want to keep the methodology under wraps, because if those methods are real then they should never be able to be abused”.

(I asked Painter if there was anything else he wanted to say on or off the record, if there was anything else he wanted to clarify that maybe I didn’t ask about, and he couldn’t think of anything additional).

GZ: “Oh, before you go, I told one of mutuals, Bridgette, that I’d ask you this: Do you fuck with Beyblades?”

PA: “Awh hell yeah man, who doesn’t fuck with Beyblades? Are you serious? That’s like saying ‘Do you fuck with Pokemon?’”.

—

 (Following the interview, I was contacted by NAPainter's teammate, Ivan (Player YoItsMcNoodles), who reached out to offer his own comments on the matter)

When asked about the backlash and how he felt now being a few days removed from the event, Ivan had this to say:

“I feel like the situation has been handled (for the most part). I have confirmed with Fired and Icy directly (2 of the 3 players affected) and personally apologized for my actions, and confirmed they received compensation. I do believe that I deserve to [receive a ban]. The backlash and such (let’s be fair here), I think is on some level deserved. I have been on the receiving end of it, but honestly I do not care that much; I did a shitty thing, so if people wanna call me shitty for it, I'm not going to disagree with them. At least for me, I think the worst I've received, in terms of personalized backlash, is just people telling me to uninstall and that I deserve to get banned. I will say however, to be 100%, during the "incident" at the start of everything, I thought it was funny, but taking a step back (and finding out that [that was the team’s first compiler clear]) I actually did feel really bad. As stated at the start I reached out to Fired and Icy and talked it over with them and apologized, but haven't found anything belonging to the third guy in terms of social media”.

Additionally, I asked him about whether or not he'd had the mentality of “if the exploit is in the game it’s fair”, to which he responded with:

“Personally, I see no issue with the OOBing part and getting to the room. However, everything after the Compiler spawn and us hiding, I will say, is wrong and was not fair. I think the mentality I had originally was ‘let's go outside the map and see the method’. As a former Destiny 2 player, I loved OOBing when DSC came out, but [at the point where] we were waiting, and knew a team was coming, i don’t think I really gave a fuck at that point/was too late to give a fuck, as horrible as that sounds. I’m speaking for myself here, not for anyone else on the team or anyone affected”.

When asked if he had anything else to add, Ivan provided this final statement on the matter:

“First of all, I'd like to formally apologize to the entire Marathon community as a whole, what I and my team did is/was just simply shitty, and there’s no other way to say it. We tainted the community and public perception of the game, and put Bungie in a very difficult spot in terms of what actions they should take against us. I standby whatever course of action they decide to take, even if that includes Public Taring and Feathering (banning). Second of all, I will not defend my actions as they were wrong. Simple as that, I am sorry that I did this and ruined Icy, Fried and Astro's experience of killing the compiler, but even more so to Fired as it was his first successful attempt on compiler. I am sorry for putting the community in such a difficult position”.