Disco Elysium turns 5, spawns several new studios

It’s been five years since Disco Elysium and its curious detective story, set in the fictional, post-communist city of Revachol, was released. Disco Elysium has since been heralded as one of the best games ever made, a testament to its complex conversation system and brilliant writing that blends a compelling mystery story with the deep world-building of Revachol’s failed revolution. Disco Elysium is one of those games that comes up again and again — a testament of what games can be.

After the game’s success came the internal and external pressures of what would come next, and Disco Elysium maker ZA/UM seemingly started cracking under the weight of it all. It also makes sense that the undoing of ZA/UM — and the rebuilding of Disco Elysium’s legacy — would be just as complicated as the game itself. ZA/UM, of course, still exists in some form, despite reportedly laying off its writing team: It has several job openings posted, including one published within the last month. ZA/UM also still holds the trademark for Disco Elysium in the United Kingdom, too.

From the proverbial ashes, Disco Elysium lead writer Robert Kurvitz and Sander Taal (who goes by Aleksander Rostov) filed to incorporate a company called Red Info in 2022. There’s not much known about the company, except that there appears to be involvement from NetEase, according to PC Gamer. (That reporting seems to stem from the inclusion of Qihao Liu, NetEase’s director of investments, as a director of the company.) But in the lead-up to Disco Elysium’s fifth anniversary, three more studios were announced — not all making the spiritual successor to Disco Elysium, but each with some claims to its legacy.

The first additional studio is Dark Math, which has at least some involvement with controversial Disco Elysium producer Kaur Kender; his sibling, Heiti Kender, is listed on company filings. Dark Math founder and CEO Mihkel Oja also touted Kaur Kender’s involvement in Dark Math in a post on LinkedIn. Dark Math is making XXX Nightshift, described on Steam as a detective RPG set in a luxury ski resort. Then there’s a studio called Longdue, which is making an unnamed “spiritual successor” to Disco Elysium, reportedly staffed by ZA/UM, Bungie, and Rockstar Games veterans. A representative for Longdue declined to share names of those involved with Polygon, beyond those mentioned in the news release: former Rocksteady narrative director Grant Roberts and “investor representative” Riaz Moola (neither of whom are former ZA/UM). Though there’s no specific information yet about Longdue’s game, it’s described in a news release as a “psychogeographic RPG with narrative depth”; it promises to be a “steady and dependable voice in the future of isometric RPG design,” per the news release.

Roberts told Polygon via email that, despite the name all over the press release, Longdue is “not limiting [itself] to honoring any one game.” But it will explore “touchstones” found in Disco Elysium: “Psychological complexity, intelligent storytelling, rich interiority, seismic conversations with characters,” Roberts said. “All in a world like our own, with themes that are extremely relevant to our world — but allowing for the truly extraordinary both inside and outside the protagonist’s head.”

Asked whether he was surprised to see two other Disco Elysium-esque studios announced on the same day, Roberts said it was “just as surprising to us as it was to the rest of the world when we weren’t the only studio to announce on Friday.” He continued: “We’re really excited to create something new, but we also share the world’s excitement for so many titles aiming to build on the great things that Disco did.”

The last, and perhaps most revolutionary, is Summer Eternal, a studio that introduced itself with a manifesto acknowledging the “apocalyptic material conditions for game creators across the world.” Thus far, Summer Eternal is comprised of Disco Elysium writers Argo Tuulik, Dora Klindžić, and Olga Moskvina; Disco Elysium: The Final Cut narrator Lenval Brown; Disco Elysium concept artist Anastasia Ivanova; Gamechuck developer Aleksandar Gavrilović; and ZA/UM graphic designer Michael Oswell. The studio won’t have a traditional model. Instead, the experimental structure means the creative co-op holds 50% of company shares, with full-time workers retaining creative control. A second co-op for part-time, freelance, or outsourced help will have 25% of shares in the company. The next 20% is held by an LLC that investors will fund, while the final 5% of shares will be given to a nonprofit organization meant for people who buy copies of Summer Eternal’s games.

“We don’t want to live in the NDA-dystopia where employment law is weaponized against those too poor, broken, exhausted and stupid to defend themselves, and are often bullied into silence at an enormous cost to their self-worth and future mental health,” Tuulik told Polygon in an email interview. “Having injustice done to you is bad, not being able to talk about it could break anyone. We want to make it work on trust, not fear and backroom deals.”

That’s why the studio wants to build a culture of transparency, both internally and externally. “Our meme-worthy tagline ‘Every player – Member of the Board’ is not to be taken lightly,” Gavrilović told Polygon via an email interview. Tuulik added that the goal is for players to be able to hold Summer Eternal accountable; with that 5%, players can summon a general assembly meeting with the studio. It will be a bit of time before this part of Summer Eternal is set up, though, Gavrilović said, so as to ensure it’s “stable and robust.”

Tuulik, responding to a question about the other ZA/UM offshoots, said “all these bold new endeavours to look forward to is a cause for genuine excitement and celebration.” He continued: “I could not be happier to live in an era where offsprings of what we once started as kids in Estonia are now together shaping the role-playing landscape. It’s wonderful!”

The differences between the studios, he said, are “under the hood”:

“Disillusioned with the artistically stifling predatory nature of corporate culture we’ve decided to set everything up from the beginning to serve the ‘words of our house’ – ‘Artistically driven, creative-led, worker- and player-owned.’ We publicly ask our community to hold us accountable, judge us by our actions not words and scrutinise our actions so we can continue to do better. We don’t want to leave ourselves room to wander off the Radiant Path.”