RPG
UPS
A follow-up to the legendary Disco Elysium might have been ready to play within the next year—ZA/UM's devs loved it, management canceled it and laid off the team: 'For a while it seemed like miracles were possible, and with them redemption'
When members of artist collective turned game developer Studio ZA/UM thanked Marx and Engels in their 2019 Game Awards acceptance speech for the RPG triumph Disco Elysium, I felt like I was looking at the future, the ecstatic debut of my new favorite developer, but that isn't how things panned out. Disco Elysium has been #1 on our yearly Top 100 games list four years in a row, but for much of that time, ZA/UM has been engulfed in an existential crisis.