On 11th October 2024, three video game studios announced themselves near-simultaneously as the creators of “spiritual successors” to ZA/UM’s mournful Marxist RPG Disco Elysium. First came Longdue, a conspicuously corporate operator who are making an untitled “psychogeographic RPG”. Dark Math Games followed around lunchtime - they’re making a sexy Antarctic ski resort mystery called XXX Nightshift. Finally, there was Summer Eternal, the mouthiest and Marxiest of the lot, who have set themselves up as a workers co-operative and have yet to announce a specific project.
All three new studios owe their rise to the sad break-up of the original Disco Elysium team – a torturous series of events involving legal proceedings, firings, allegations of misconduct and claims of a fraudulent studio takeover. All three new studios claim to have former Disco Elysium devs on the books, though Longdue have yet to share any names.
Dark Math’s founding members include former Disco executive producer Kaur Kender and art director Timo Albert, while Summer Eternal’s members include former Disco writers Argo Tuulik (who resigned from ZA/UM earlier this year, apparently because he suspected he was about to be fired for talking to the press) and Olga Moskvina, together with several former ZA/UM staff - principal writer Dora Klindžić, senior concept artist Anastasia Ivanova, and graphic designer Michael Oswell.
The triple Disco Elysulike announcement was a real gift to wise-ass leftists on social media - for what better way to follow up what is probably the definitive leftwing video game than by having the developers promptly Balkanise themselves into rival Monty Python factions. Summer Eternal, especially, seem up for a fight with the other two, commenting acerbically in a press release that "we must be living at the dawn of a cultural Golden Age, when like mushrooms after rain the companies promising 'the next Disco Elysium' are popping up every hour on the hour”.
Now here’s IGN's Wesley
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