Disco Elysium Is Bigger Than Its Auteur Creators

thegamer.com:

Disco Elysium is a masterpiece. It’s an RPG that changed the game for text-based narratives and political commentary in the medium, and is constantly named as one of the best PC games ever made, as well as being cited as the inspiration for countless more. This weekend, however, Studio ZA/UM founder and Disco Elysium editor Martin Luiga published an explosive blog post which detailed, first and foremost, the dissolution of “the ZA/UM Cultural Association,” an organisation entirely separate from the game studio. The association appears to be the developers’ original name for their collective of creatives, a place for ideas and discussion that the developer ZA/UM, in their minds, no longer represents.

However, the more distressing news that Luiga revealed was that three founding members of the studio are no longer working at ZA/UM, and haven’t been for some months. Disco Elysium’s lead artist Alexander Rostov later confirmed on Twitter that he, writer Helen Hindpere, and lead writer and lead designer Robert Kurvitz are no longer at the studio. Luiga’s assertion is that the key developers were ousted involuntarily, and that notion set the world on fire.

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To truly understand the reaction to Disco Elysium’s key figures leaving the company, you must first understand where they came from. Kurvitz, who came up with the world of Elysium, was more of an artist than a developer. He only made Disco Elysium into a game because a collaborator’s child suggested it. There’s a reason it was a book first, albeit one you probably can’t read, and before that a weird creative outlet in the vein of D&D. “My friend, we failed at so many things,” Rostov recalls Kurvitz saying. “Let