The Making of Disco Elysium: Part Six - Aftermath

0:00 (graphics clacking) (solemn music)- Like,

0:06 one of the main things that "Disco Elysium"

0:08 talks about is that some defeats are unrecouperable,

0:14 that there is permanent damage that you can't go on from.

0:19 And while people really, and I admire this about them, they really wanna make,

0:24 there's an expression, Estonian expression,

0:25 which is (speaking in Estonian), bread out of shit.

0:30 They wanna turn something, you know, unsavory into something that can be used.

0:35 Harry's story is not really about getting over anything,

0:39 it's about accepting that some things will never

0:41 get better and learning to live with those things.

0:45 (solemn music)- [Danny] Hello,

0:50 and welcome to the final episode in our series on the development

0:54 of "Disco Elysium." Once the original version of "Disco" was released,

0:57 there was no parade.

0:59 As we discussed in the previous episode, a large number of the original team,

1:03 including all of the original engineers, several writers,

1:06 producers and more, had been let go by ZA/UM leadership.

1:10 By now the studio was largely based in London,

1:12 and in the weeks and months that followed "Disco's" release,

1:15 and the groundswell of sales,

1:16 awards and recognition of the studio and it's story,

1:20 the studio was finally in a more stable financial situation,

1:23 and so they quickly got to work on a new version of "Disco

1:27 Elysium" called "Final Cut." This would add full voice acting to the game,

1:31 four new political side quests,

1:32 and a wide array of bug fixes and quality of life updates.

1:36 It would also see the series make its debut on consoles.

1:40 But for the people who had been working on "Disco" from the start,

1:43 there was no respite.

1:44 While everybody who had worked on "Disco" had crunched,

1:46 many of the team, including Robert,

1:48 Argo and Helen, had been struggling with the workload

1:51 for years for a variety of reasons.

1:53 This delta in energy and enthusiasm would be

1:56 a crowbar in the already emerging splits within the team.

2:00 And it didn't help when a global pandemic landed on everyone's front door.

2:06 (solemn music) (grim music)- After this period, things really changed.

2:19 Pandemic happened, and people weren't, literally, like, meeting up.

2:23 This is, like, kind of where, I think,

2:26 things started going really south, and relationships started going really south.

2:31 I don't know, I've been thinking about it now for years.

2:33 What has it been, four years?

2:35 Trying to kind of wrack my brain what exactly happened.

2:38 I think it was the pressure of the pandemic,

2:41 along with the fact that a lot of people who had stayed, they were very tired,

2:47 and then we had some new people coming

2:49 in, and some people returning, Justin and Kaspar.

2:53 Justin Keenan and Kaspar Tamsalu,

2:54 they had left to do their own projects at some point.

2:58 And now they had, you know,

3:00 rejoined and had a lot more energy than maybe me or Argo who had been,

3:06 like, working through the entire thing.

3:08 Culture started changing as well, of course.

3:11 I think part of it is natural and expected.

3:14 You know, we were now a different company,

3:16 a company that had released something.

3:18 So a lot of it was just like very, seemed normal in the beginning, like, yes,

3:22 we're gonna have to, like, you know, grow up,

3:24 you know, be a lot more, like, structured.

3:27 All of it seemed really good.

3:30 Regarding how things went, I cannot imagine how they could have gone much worse.

3:36 I just simply cannot.

3:37 Like, even in my worst nightmares,

3:39 I could never have cooked up, like, this kind of story.

3:45 It's like, you know, there's a...

3:46 You know, I'm a millennial, so I'm gonna,

3:48 like, resort to a "South Park" reference here.

3:50 There's a "South Park" story where they,

3:52 like, build this underdog team of, like,

3:55 little preschoolers who go against the biggest,

3:58 baddest ice hockey players, is this "South Park" episode.

4:02 And it ends with the underdog team of little

4:06 preschoolers absolutely annihilated by the grownup men because,

4:10 I mean, what do you think is gonna happen?

4:12 And it turns out to be their story, actually,

4:14 and then they get all the money and their endings for their, like,

4:20 personal psychological narratives with their fathers or whatever.

4:23 And these underdogs just get pulverized.

4:26 So I feel it's a little bit like that.

4:27 It's like this, like,

4:30 absurdly negative and they go almost like comically negative ending or like,

4:34 then the commies got pounded to smithereens again.

4:40 It was interesting because I thought that, okay,

4:43 this is actually where it's going to get easy.

4:45 Like, you know, we can lay back, you know,

4:47 we can just enjoy fruits of everything that we have achieved.

4:52 And it was the opposite,

4:53 where this is where I finally realized that I had really burned out when,

4:59 you know, I left the company.

5:02 Took me, like, years to recover before I was able to start working again.

5:09 I had, like, really strong questions of like,

5:11 "Do I even wanna work in video games?"- I did always have the idea,

5:15 and then all of us did,

5:16 that we're gonna get to tell the whole story of the return basically.

5:20 The little work that I got to do on "Disco Elysium 2"

5:23 was just basically taking all of these old dreams waiting to be realized,

5:26 and kind of structuring them into some kind of size,

5:31 content size, that's achievable by human beings.

5:35 Yeah.

5:36 [Danny] Are those dreams you keep close to your chest?

5:38 Do you think that they kept going with that initial

5:41 work or do you think they-- They gave up on it,

5:45 I think, about four months into it.

5:47 They're not doable, like, it's not something that, you know,

5:51 they're barely doable if the whole gang is

5:55 together and in a good company and under, like, normal circumstances.

6:01 Yeah, I don't think that's ever gonna see the light

6:05 of day unless everyone just makes up and becomes friends again.

6:13 (solemn music)- [Danny] In this new era of ZA/UM,

6:18 Helen had been promoted into a leadership role,

6:21 while Robert's influence on the writing had been given more guard rails.

6:24 This wasn't without good reason.

6:26 While the first "Disco Elysium" had been written over years and Robert,

6:29 by his own admission, had been hands-on with as much of it as possible,

6:33 taking on too much work and, as we discussed in the previous episodes,

6:37 becoming a production bottleneck for other areas of the game.

6:41 This was going to be a much bigger problem with a large

6:43 studio attempting to make a sequel in a reasonable amount of time.

6:47 Justin Keenan, who had contributed a lot

6:49 of important writing and editing work on the project,

6:52 had come back to ZA/UM and was

6:53 later installed as Robert's right-hand man or handler,

6:57 depending on how you look at it,

6:58 responsible for many of the elements of production and the management

7:01 that had become issues with Robert during the initial games development.

7:05 Robert, Helen and Rostov took a period

7:07 of extended leave to decompress after years of burnout.

7:10 But for some of the people working on "The Final Cut,"

7:13 the lack of input from these three during the project became deeply problematic.

7:17 It was seen by some as Robert and his inner circle taking extended time away

7:21 to enjoy themselves while the rest of the team

7:24 toiled on the new version of the game.

7:26 This ongoing tension only increased when work on "Disco 2" started,

7:30 a game that would have to be written from scratch,

7:32 with new characters, new locations, quests, side quests, and skills.

7:36 Unlike in films where scripts are written, re-written,

7:39 and converted into screenplays before the busy and expensive

7:43 rest of production kicks in, in narrative games

7:46 development you have a studio full of people

7:47 who are downstream from this writing waiting for direction,

7:51 or having to change elements of the game down the road as the narrative changes.

7:55 And in either case, burning money every month.

7:58 It was this schism within the team that would ultimately lead to its downfall.

8:03 Either because of a genuine existential threat to the game's development,

8:07 or as a convenient smokescreen for other nefarious

8:10 actions being taken by studio leadership at that time.

8:14 All of this came to a head in late 2020 when Robert,

8:17 Rostov and Helen were fired from ZA/UM.

8:19 The justifications for these firings are part of ongoing legal battles.

8:24 In the years since, ZA/UM has alleged that these three

8:26 took too much time away from the studio, were engaged in bullying behavior,

8:30 and that Robert attempted to steal the source code of the game.

8:33 While Rostov and Robert allege that ZA/UM leadership, namely Ilmar Kompas,

8:37 had engaged in an illegal takeover

8:40 of the studios shares using the studios own funds,

8:43 and had worked to push them out.

8:46 [Evrart] Mr.

8:46 Du Bois, I hear the meeting with Titus was a glowing success.

8:50 Now, what can Evrart Claire do for you today?

8:53 [Danny] When this news broke it immediately

8:55 created turmoil within the Disco Elysium fan community.

8:58 A living nightmare for those celebrating a game

9:00 that laid bair the power and machination of capital.

9:04 Because what makes this all so tragic for fans of the series

9:07 is that at some point during the development of "Disco Elysium," Robert,

9:10 despite protestations from some of his friends,

9:12 allegedly signed paperwork that handed the Elysium IP over to ZA/UM.

9:16 The details of this are complicated and covered

9:19 in great detail by People Make Games.

9:21 But currently, the rights to a now unlikely "Disco

9:24 Elysium" sequel lie across a number of shareholders and companies,

9:28 with Robert and Rostov ultimately owning around 21% of it each.

9:33 In any case, Robert has denied such knowledge

9:35 of the creation of this IP holding company, and signing any of the documents.

9:40 What this means is that the only people who

9:42 can make a game set in the world of Elysium,

9:44 the world that Robert and his friends created as young adults, rests at ZA/UM,

9:49 a studio that in firing Robert, Rostov and Helen regardless of the motivation,

9:54 has burned the mountain of goodwill the game garnered

9:57 the studio when Disco was born into the world.

10:00 At that moment an untreatable wound between the fans and the studio was created,

10:05 and ever since then it’s continued to fester.

10:07 Many fans rallied behind Robert, Helen and Rostov.

10:10 With little power to influence a perceived injustice,

10:13 fans turned their anger towards the studio.

10:15 They critiqued the strategies and motivations of ZAUM ownership.

10:19 They became distrustful of the people still remaining at the studio.

10:22 The story of Disco and ZAUM was now being told in the court of public opinion.

10:27 When People Make Ga mes released

10:29 a video detailing the allegations against Robert,

10:32 alongside a report into the alleged illegal activity

10:34 on the part of ZAUM it kicked fan anger into overdrive.

10:38 In the eyes of some it also conflated

10:40 two distinct issues one of alleged workplace misconduct,

10:43 and another story about alleged IP theft and crucially

10:47 it would seem to justify one for the other.

10:50 These allegations are the basis of ongoing court cases But while

10:54 fans around the world were distraught to hear about the firings,

10:57 for those original members who had left the studio, and those who remained,

11:01 the splitting of the soul of "Elysium" was a difficult pill to swallow.

11:05 (solemn music)- You know,

11:07 the rumors that I've heard later and stuff I've heard through people,

11:10 like, I wasn't there, I wasn't present for any of the weird

11:13 legal stuff and any of the accusations of, like,

11:17 abuse or whatever, that have come out later,

11:20 but at least, you know, when I started hearing stuff about them in news,

11:25 items started coming out, at least I have to admit,

11:28 like, one of my first reaction was like, "Okay,

11:30 this mostly sounds believable." And, like,

11:34 almost everything sounds believable, right?

11:36 Even though I, like, wasn't present for anything, but it's like, "Okay,

11:40 this kind of makes sense." It's like a worse

11:42 version of the thing that I already started, like, noticing in 2018, right?

11:47 This something had gone more intense and something had gone overboard.

11:50 Like, looking back, there was some sort of a burnout thing happening as well.

11:54 It was difficult for different reasons, not because it wasn't seen by people

12:00 because even after Robert and Rostov's departure,

12:04 like, so many of the original team members were still in ZA/UM.

12:10 So this kind of soul rejuvenating effect

12:16 that working together with other creative people has, this was still there.

12:21 I stayed for a while after Robert and Rostov and Helen

12:24 because there's a lot of good people in town and I had...

12:29 So I was tech art lead, I had a little team that I had hired on my own,

12:37 brilliant people, and I was really enjoying my little tech card bubble there.

12:42 So I was trying to keep myself quite neutral about,

12:46 like, the drama and stuff going on.

12:50 So I don't have any facts about it,

12:52 so I'm gonna just try to be undecided for a while.

12:57 But the problem that comes with that is

12:59 that you get paranoid about, like, everyone.

13:03 That kind of ate me away for a long time, until I decided to leave the company.

13:12 I'm not trying to figure out who's good

13:13 or who's bad or who's right or who's wrong.

13:17 So, instead of trying to figure out who's right and who's wrong,

13:20 I kind of went back to the feeling of I wanna

13:23 make games with my friends and who the friends really are because...

13:27 Yeah.

13:29 There's a lot of good people [at ZAUM],

13:31 and some of them are friends, and that's kind of what got me...

13:38 what was the deciding factor in the end.

13:41 (solemn music)- Well,

13:50 it was the collapse of everything I had ever known the death of my art movement,

13:56 loss of several important friends,

13:58 realization that several people who you thought were your friends,

14:02 that you were actually like a pig being led to slaughter.

14:05 It's like suddenly you have to look back at, like,

14:09 years of working together with these people and understand

14:11 that you are in their eagle hawk sight, so that was very wonderful.

14:15 I tried to seek psychological assistance through the NHS,

14:21 the healthcare systems of the United Kingdom failed me.

14:25 I don't know, there were a few

14:26 wistful thoughts about walking into the Brighton sea, ocean and not stopping.

14:32 Yeah, yeah, it was catastrophic.

14:34 The first couple of years or, like,

14:36 before it sort of went public, I felt, like, completely severed from it,

14:39 just like cut off from it, externalized from it,

14:42 like all of the work and the art, it's now, like, theirs.

14:46 That is quite a shock for an artist to be disconnected from his, like,

14:51 work and stuff 'cause all of this stuff, it's like an extension of myself.

14:56 I'm this big fat creature that's constantly just injecting stuff

15:01 into the world and all of this is my body,

15:04 or, like, it's this weird sense that you have about it.

15:08 It also, like, housed my paint, my brushstroke in it,

15:12 so it felt like my sort of, what I considered, my main weapon of expression,

15:17 the brushstroke, the thing that I had mastered over the years

15:22 of making the game that's basically only about the brushstroke.

15:27 And it really felt that, like, all of it was,

15:29 like, in there and that, "What am I to do now?

15:32 How can I paint?" Which is a little bit melodramatic and silly.

15:36 Of course you can paint, but also a lot of it is still, like, in there.

15:40 And I've been amputated, like, this entire...

15:42 The greatest thing you have ever made, all of these are like tiny pictures,

15:47 but Disco is like a massive thing, has been cut off from you.

15:52 Aye-yai-yai, what is a poor artist to do?

15:56 I don't know what the answer to losing something like that is.

16:01 I just don't know.

16:02 I expected to be able to tell those stories for the rest of my life.

16:10 And they're not these places and this montage

16:13 that I see of these places, it's also not...

16:15 It's more than just creativity or, like, a career or something.

16:20 It's also just a way of thinking and like going to sleep, for example,

16:27 I would come up with new names,

16:29 and then I would look at different cities in my head,

16:31 and I would add a couple of cities here, and I would,

16:34 like, place a couple of aesthetics, and then I would think,

16:38 "You know this place would be more, like,

16:40 would have the white of lilies on it, and, like,

16:43 the smell of lightning," and then I would

16:45 move these things around and kind of reorganize reality,

16:48 and it would become like a very, like, calming way of feeding my brain something

16:53 nicer to think about than this place here.

16:56 And the loss of that, just kind of, like,

17:00 completely unrecoverable, I don't really know what to replace that with.

17:07 I don't want to be too grand here, but, you know,

17:10 go to Abraham and say that, sorry, you've lost your IP.

17:15 You can't think about the ancient of days anymore,

17:17 I hope you like thinking about grain and swords, you know?

17:22 And, you know, of course, this is my view of it,

17:24 that a work of art belongs to the audience,

17:27 and then their opinion of it, just as much as mine, I'm just one guy.

17:31 But for me, that was how I looked at it,

17:34 how to live with defeat and continue going on.

17:39 I don't have this register of this bittersweet...

17:43 But then, you know, I think it's all a learning

17:46 experience or something like that, as a Soviet person.

17:50 There are just some dreams that forever fall away and they're not...

17:57 It's not guaranteed that they come back.

18:00 Just think for a moment about this amorality,

18:04 of the injustice of taking a world that someone has been

18:09 finding solace and kind of peace of mind for, at this point,

18:14 like 20 years, in Robert's case,

18:16 to not only just take away the ability to financially benefit from it,

18:21 but take away the ability to actually mentally visit it.

18:25 Like, this is just wrong in a whole new level.

18:27 Like, no matter how this IP war goes financially, like,

18:35 it should absolutely end in a way where Robert can,

18:38 again, dream in the world that he made.

18:41 Yeah, I think if there's something that I'm, like, really sad about,

18:46 is kind of that there wasn't this culture of, like,

18:53 mentioning those things before 'cause I think what

18:57 surprised and hurt me and why I didn't know

19:01 how to react a year ago was because a lot of it was a surprise to me.

19:07 I thought that, you know, some people there, I was, like,

19:12 meeting up as friends and everything seemed to be all right,

19:15 but, like, clearly there was hurt and just for it

19:21 to come out like that, I kind of wish that...

19:26 I kind of, to this day, I keep wondering and wondering and wondering,

19:31 like, what I could have done better to make sure that people could,

19:35 like, you know, come and tell me or even

19:39 mention it somewhere to someone else, things like that.

19:44 The great work has been interrupted.

19:46 Like, this was simply the prequel, the game, this project, like,

19:49 and the Elysium was going to be basically the life's work.

19:52 I did not much imagine what else I would be doing,

19:56 maybe painting with oils or something,

19:58 but even then I would have tried to link everything into this Elysium

20:02 to build this mega massive art effort out of this, like,

20:06 this giant work of art that is Elysium and then Disco would be a part of it.

20:11 I don't know.

20:12 I'm a robust person.

20:13 I have the tool of philosophy to help

20:17 me contextualize stuff into interesting and maybe perhaps

20:23 even slightly romantic chapters of this life I

20:26 intend to live so it doesn't feel so overwhelming.

20:33 And you can externalize yourself a little bit

20:35 and see yourself as a character in this story,

20:38 and you understand fairly obviously that, ah, this is the interesting chapter,

20:41 and now you need to, like, work on the following chapters.

20:44 Looking at it now, in a way, I am weirdly thankful for it.

20:50 Going through this crisis,

20:53 it's like you really need to get your shit together and, I don't know,

20:59 feels like it has made me

21:01 into a greater and better man 'cause without adversity,

21:05 without pain, how can one grow and become, you know,

21:09 the Nietzschean Ubermensch that you are supposed to become.

21:13 Adversity to overcome, what's not to love about it.

21:16 And now I get to say I have enemies now.

21:19 And there was a period of time where I felt much

21:22 more comfortable talking about the origins of us and of Disco

21:28 Elysium in this gang and all of the people who were

21:32 participating in and then contributing to the pen and paper sessions.

21:36 Because when you talk about friends with whom you're still very close friends,

21:41 you feel much more comfortable attributing

21:44 thing and talking about these memories.

21:47 So because that specific story is currently in a...

21:52 That doesn't mean that it's end state, but it is in a state that is not good,

21:57 then it is a little difficult or even painful

22:00 to talk about the past or where we come from.

22:06 And I don't even feel that I have, like, full possession of the past anymore,

22:10 I don't feel like I'm a reliable narrator of the past.

22:14 So that part of the interview where I talk about

22:18 that, maybe it's good if it has a little caveat that I

22:21 no longer feel that I am a reliable narrator of it

22:25 because I have my own bitterness and pain now that, you know,

22:35 might not be there in a couple of years or that I might get over.

22:40 But I'm not currently in that place where

22:43 I don't have any negative feelings about it.

22:47 (solemn music)- [Danny} When we tell these stories,

22:52 I like to stay out of the frame so that the developers

22:55 themselves can tell us what happened as much as possible,

22:58 but obviously as documentary filmmakers we

23:01 ultimately have control over the narrative,

23:03 and there are two things I want to give context to at this point.

23:06 The first is that while I talked off

23:08 the record with many people about the ongoing legal disputes,

23:11 and I stand on the shoulders of the work

23:13 done by People Make Games to explore exactly what's going

23:16 on, it is essentially impossible for us as interviewers

23:19 to get authentic answers about anything that directly touches those cases.

23:24 Nobody is going to admit, on camera,

23:26 to things that may incriminate them in legal cases down the road.

23:30 So anything they will say is inherently not the full picture,

23:33 which ultimately creates a narrative and factual

23:36 void that is wildly open to misinterpretation.

23:41 Secondly, and downstream from this initial point,

23:43 while I reached out to many of the original team for comment,

23:46 I chose not to reach out to those still working at the studio which

23:50 includes just over a half a dozen

23:52 people who touched everything from writing to art,

23:54 animation, marketing and technology.

23:56 My hope is that we celebrated their work, like so many others,

24:00 by having many of our interviewees talk about their contributions.

24:03 But if I was to talk to them, there is no way I could do so in good faith

24:06 and not ask them about the behavior of Robert, Helen and Rostov.

24:10 Doing so would require us to air more

24:12 dirty laundry from the other side of that argument,

24:15 conversations that would produce great headlines

24:17 but ultimately one-sided answers to complex interpersonal matters,

24:21 matters that are currently being argued in court cases.

24:25 A lot has been reported about all of this, and with good reason,

24:28 the fractures within the team are connected

24:30 to the future of this beloved franchise.

24:32 But for me there is an element of over-analyzing

24:35 of what essentially boils down to the sort

24:38 of managerial or interpersonal office bullshit that most of us

24:42 have unfortunately encountered at some point in our lives.

24:45 Conflating all of that with the many different waves of layoffs,

24:48 would seem to justify the actions taken by studio owners.

24:53 It's clear that many of the old team, be them at ZA/UM right now or not,

24:57 had or still have issues with how Robert and others behaved.

25:01 And I would say they are absolutely justified in doing so.

25:04 For me, though, a lot of the interpersonal issues within this story are,

25:07 frankly, none of our business.

25:09 Like in most office conflicts,

25:11 there is no singular truth here, people have different perspectives,

25:14 different motivations,

25:15 and different levels of baggage coming out of all of this.

25:18 Power is often something people see in others and don't recognize in themselves.

25:23 And it's clear that most of the people on either

25:25 side of this conflict are victims in some way.

25:29 Each of them will feel justified in believing what they believe.

25:32 So, for me, unpacking the dirty details of who says or thinks what,

25:36 and what people feel about all of this is something that should be done,

25:40 but between those people in private.

25:43 But sadly, with these court cases looming over everyone's head,

25:47 many of those conversations are currently impossible to have.

25:55 You know, what's not a good time to start a growth narrative,

26:03 is during free ongoing court cases.

26:07 There is something very specifically brutal about not being able to admit any

26:15 shortcomings if it can be used against you in the court of law.

26:19 There's just a complete difference between what I emotionally

26:24 feel and then what I would like to feel like, and then what, like,

26:31 I can say, No one's going to go out and generate court

26:37 acceptable testimonies against their own character

26:39 when they're in free court cases.

26:42 But I guess the best I can say is that I'm not an inflexible

26:48 idiot who just thinks that they behave in the best possible way in life.

26:55 I will develop the magnanimity over the time, I'm sure,

27:03 but as long as I still feel that my primary duty to the art is to try to get,

27:16 for myself and for all of us,

27:19 the opportunity to continue working, perhaps, in this intellectual property.

27:24 In a perverse way, if I become a sorry cop now, then we're not gonna get it.

27:32 And that's not an excuse.

27:36 I would very much like to, you know?

27:42 Who doesn't like someone who accepts their shortcomings and who doesn't wanna be

27:48 that, and I definitely wanna be that, but I can't do it publicly.

27:53 [Danny] Yeah, seems like a very frustrating position

27:54 to be in for a number of years.

27:56 Really, really, really fucking frustrating to be in.

27:58 And I don't have any of the...

28:03 Like, I don't have the antagonistic energy in me anymore.

28:06 I don't have...

28:07 I'm not angry at anyone, I really am just...

28:09 You know, even the tiger just is a tiger,

28:11 who just eats other animals, that's the way the tiger is.

28:16 So emotionally and I don't have any of that in me.

28:19 I would just very much like to be friends with my friends again,

28:22 and I would like it to be over but it just

28:27 seems like it's gonna take a very long time to be over.

28:31 I'm gonna ask you a question, is that okay for me to say that?

28:34 It's a very strange thing to ask an interviewer,

28:36 is it okay for me not to become sorry cop?

28:40 Like, is it understandable in a way?

28:43 You know, I'm not looking for compassion, but just an opinion.

28:46 No.

28:46 Well, I'll put it this way.

28:47 When you wrote the letter that was written,

28:50 I'm not sure if you've watched the people in the games video.

28:52 No, I don't, I'm not gonna watch this one either.

28:54 Okay.

28:54 There was a response that Chris asked you further questions,

28:59 and you responded with a text that he reacted to negatively

29:03 'cause he thought that it wasn't empathetic to those people.

29:06 Yeah.

29:06 [Danny] I read it as that person's in a court case.

29:09 Yeah.

29:10 So, no, I think you're in a difficult position.

29:14 I don't know what you do privately,

29:16 'cause you can probably reach out to these people

29:18 privately and it not be part of the court case.

29:20 Again, that's none of my fucking business.

29:22 I think the battle for public opinion around this thing is not the worst part,

29:27 but it's close to the worst part of it.

29:29 And I hate-- Humiliating is what it is.

29:32 Right.

29:33 It is extremely humiliating to have your relationship with your friends,

29:38 like, be part of some public domain.

29:43 It's kind of like...

29:44 It's participating in, not basically,

29:47 but completely and directly, in tabloid journalism.

29:50 It's just tabloid journalism.

29:52 If you want to be a dignified guy like Clint Eastwood,

29:55 then just let everything be taken away from you and say, (growls).

29:58 You know?

29:59 Walk off into the sunset.

30:00 It's very undignified to fight.

30:02 It is a very undignified thing to do.

30:04 [Danny] Why fight?

30:06 Elysium, it's just...

30:10 You just can't let it go.

30:12 You can't just let it be, like, destroyed or...

30:20 It's like a child of yours or whatever.

30:22 There's no other option.

30:27 If there's a possibility and you have to fight for your rights

30:31 as an author simply to just tell some cool stories to people.

30:37 Like, wouldn't it be great if it would

30:39 get to play this "Disco Elysium 2" one day?

30:42 Like, would you like, if there would be a chance, would you, like, break it?

30:48 Would you throw it away?

30:50 Like, you can't, you have to safeguard it even if it's a small chance.

30:55 (solemn music)- [Danny] In the years since all

31:01 of this, the world has continued to spin,

31:03 and the influence of "Disco Elysium" has

31:05 continued to inspire artists around the globe,

31:08 those who were part of that original story, and those who were touched by it.

31:11 At the time of this video's release in Spring of 2026, Robert,

31:15 Rostov and Helen are at work on a new project at their new studio, Red Info.

31:20 We conducted our interviews at their office, located in Tallinn's old town,

31:24 a picturesque, short walk from their original home.

31:27 Little is known about the project,

31:29 though they've received a hefty investment from NetEase

31:32 and appear years away from announcement, let alone release.

31:35 ZA/UM has had a difficult few years.

31:38 Online sentiment towards the company has

31:40 been fraught with negativity since the firings,

31:42 and there has been more layoffs in the wake of project cancellations.

31:46 One such game was a spinoff of "Disco

31:48 Elysium" which reportedly focused on Cuno and Cunoesse,

31:51 originally pitched by one of our interviewees,

31:54 Argo Tuulik, who has since himself been laid off

31:57 along with 25% of the studio upon that project's cancellation.

32:01 ZA/UM released a mobile version of "Disco Elysium" last year,

32:04 but most fans' attention is pointing towards "Zero Parades

32:08 for Dead Spies," an RPG set in a new world, which,

32:12 if you've played the recently released Steam Demo,

32:15 plays a lot like "Disco Elysium," but with some novel new additions

32:18 to encounters and how your player's psyche is affected by your choices.

32:22 That said, ZA/UM is a difficult studio to talk about these days.

32:26 It's clear that a lot of very talented,

32:28 passionate fans of the original games have made their way there,

32:32 and I'm sure most of them are kind

32:34 people who are determined to make a great game.

32:36 But the firings, court cases and alleged IP

32:38 theft have cast an inescapable shadow over the studio

32:42 and it's doubtful that "Zero Parades for Dead

32:45 Spies" will launch into a particularly sympathetic marketplace.

32:49 For the folks at ZA/UM who were part of the original team,

32:52 it must be particularly frustrating to work for years on a new project,

32:56 and know that there are so many people hoping it fails on release.

32:59 But I sincerely believe that most of the frustration within

33:02 the "Disco" community is pointed to the top of the ZA/UM pyramid,

33:06 To the people with whom studio decision making power ultimately rested

33:10 and whose decisions whether they believed they were justified or not,

33:13 ultimately led to the situation the studio now finds itself in.

33:17 It's a terrible shame that once again,

33:20 the workers will suffer because of decisions that were outside of their control.

33:29 There have been other breakaway studios, with some having more of a connection

33:33 to the creation of "Disco Elysium" than others,

33:36 some connected to that original team like Kaur Kendar's "Dark Math," and others

33:40 with more tenuous connections like "Longdue Games"

33:43 which includes the CEO of Knights of Unity,

33:46 the team who we previously mentioned took over

33:48 programming when all the original ZA/UM engineers were fired.

33:51 And they've also hired original ZA/UM member, Martin Luiga.

33:55 In fact, while we're talking about Martin,

33:56 he did jump in to the comments on our first

33:59 video to clarify exactly who he wrote first drafts

34:01 of and also mentioned that he didn't draw those early

34:04 sketches of Martinaise we had given him credit for.

34:07 Apologies, Martin, just another example

34:09 of our interviewees' memories being a little hazy.

34:12 Argo Tuulik and another post-Disco ZA/UM hire, Dora Klindzic,

34:16 worked on both these other projects for a time,

34:19 but have since founded Summer Eternal,

34:21 a game studio/art collective that hopes to fund

34:24 and release their own game in the future.

34:26 When we talked to Argo,

34:27 he was also attempting to wrestle the "Disco" franchise away

34:30 from ZA/UM in a separate court case to Robert and Rostov.

34:34 But what's heartwarming is the ways in which "Disco Elysium"

34:37 has encouraged developers around the world in more subtle ways,

34:40 encouraging indies and larger studios to add

34:43 imaginative narratives and decision-making into their own games.

34:46 For me, games like "NorCo" and "Citizen

34:48 Sleeper" feel steeped in this confidence.

34:51 While recently released indie Disco-like "Esoteric

34:54 Ebb" has come out to rave reviews,

34:57 clearly inspired by "Disco Elysium," without being cynically derivative.

35:01 It remains to be seen if we'll ever

35:03 see another "Disco Elysium" from the original creators,

35:06 but the fallout from the game's release can still be felt across the industry.

35:10 And it's my hope that this series is

35:12 full of lessons that developers can learn from.

35:14 A lot had to go right to make "Disco Elysium" a modern classic.

35:18 A group of friends with new ideas,

35:21 banding together to create something truly new and dangerous.

35:24 A workplace which gave writers the time

35:26 to edit and edit until the narrative was ready.

35:29 Non-traditional video game artists that created a world we'd never seen before.

35:34 Non-combat gameplay that challenged conventional design.

35:38 But "Disco Elysium" is also a cautionary tale about trusting capital,

35:42 about treating your colleagues with respect,

35:45 about crunch and burning out and making sure

35:48 that no matter what happens with the first game,

35:50 you and your team are ready for the second one.

35:53 There's a romantic idea that to make great art you have to suffer.

35:57 And I've worked long enough and covered

35:59 enough games to know this is sentimental nonsense.

36:02 There is a universe in which "Disco Elysium" came out as good as it did,

36:06 and a unified ZA/UM went on to bigger and better things.

36:09 We don't live in that world,

36:11 a fact that both fans of the game and the people we talked to mourn over.

36:16 Much like "Disco Elysium" itself,

36:18 there is no all-encompassing victory at the end of this story.

36:22 There's just people, their strengths,

36:24 their weaknesses, their dreams and their baggage.

36:27 Are there good guys and bad guys?

36:29 Outside of the studio leadership of ZA/UM,

36:31 this reporter doesn't really think so.

36:34 Just people who made decisions based on their egos,

36:37 desires and material conditions at the time, and who ultimately have to live

36:42 with those decisions as they move forward through life.

36:46 This story, much like Harry's, is to be continued.

36:51 (solemn music)- Believe me, these days,

36:57 I don't think a day goes by where I don't think how

37:01 incredibly difficult it must be to be a "Disco Elysium" fan nowadays.

37:06 Like, it's not just that Robert and Rostov were fired,

37:11 the original creators, the work was taken away from them.

37:15 But nowadays, like, every time you hear the word

37:18 "Disco Elysium," it's something shit that's attached to it.

37:20 It's been a long, long time when you've got

37:23 some good news associated with the word "Disco Elysium" so

37:26 I do really admire the people who still have

37:29 the resilience and the kind of faith to stand by it.

37:33 You know, quite often people who make games say we're very proud

37:36 of the creativity it has kind of induced in the people who play it.

37:43 I don't go online to the forums and stuff like that.

37:46 I have, you know, seen the subreddit, but I don't do that and I don't listen.

37:52 I don't read comments and reviews and stuff like that.

37:56 But people send me, like, screenshots and stuff.

37:59 And then I see people in real life on gaming conventions and stuff,

38:04 and they just seem like the coolest guys.

38:06 Yeah, they just seemed like heroes and poets to me, all of them.

38:11 That's amazing.

38:12 And that's like, I never...

38:14 I don't know, I just never thought it would happen.

38:16 I don't know, as I said, like,

38:18 I thought it would be like a small game and maybe there's,

38:20 like, 50 fans there and, you know, something like that.

38:23 Like, the amount of, like, video essays and art that has come out of it,

38:30 I think it's the kind of the best thing to kind of, you know,

38:35 set a spark to other people's creativity.

38:39 And it means very, very much that it means so much to people 'cause,

38:44 like, that's what art is.

38:45 It's like communication.

38:46 It's like it has to reach someone else.

38:49 Otherwise, you're just, like, talking to yourself,

38:51 like things that you described there have to reach someone else and touch them.

38:57 And, you know, when I was, like, thinking, like, "Was it all worth it?" Like,

39:00 the end result was always, "Yeah, it was, like, fucking worth it.

39:04 Absolutely."- I felt walking into, you know,

39:09 that building that I was walking into the building

39:12 of the most amazing people I'd ever met,

39:15 really just having all these great people really committed to a game,

39:24 just that sense of mutual belief and the fact that what we were

39:32 doing was the most worthwhile thing we could all be doing for our lives.

39:38 I stumbled upon, like, a YouTube video or, like,

39:41 a blog post that differentiated TV shows

39:45 based on whether they had hearts or not.

39:48 I think "Disco" is kind of one of them.

39:50 Like, it's a thing that kind of climbs into your heart,

39:53 makes a little mess there,

39:55 and it kind of plays into the bittersweet of the "Elysium"

40:02 world where it is to be continued and will forever be.

40:08 That's kind of the story of the world of "Elysium."- [Danny] You guys are

40:15 working on something else or trying to figure

40:18 out something else or whatever it is.

40:20 I hope we get to talk again in the future.

40:23 Yes.

40:23 [Danny] And hopefully, it's not seven or eight years from now,

40:26 but if it is, it'll probably have been worth the time.

40:28 Yes, I hope the same, yeah.

40:30 Definitely.

40:32 Life goes on.

40:34 Bills need paying.

40:38 I still know how to write some thigh-slapping material every now and then.

40:43 I still know to write characters and so on.

40:44 I still have all of my, like, tools of my trade and all of the aesthetic

40:50 things that we learned over those years.

40:53 But if I'm able to do something after this, it would have

40:58 to be something that stares right into the barrel of this defeat,

41:02 into losing another world,

41:04 into, into losing even the hope of anything else than this place here, right?

41:08 It's almost like a perfect hellish Aesop or fable.

41:13 So I guess the one thing that I can say is

41:15 clearly the answer is not to try to imagine another world now.

41:19 Like, that's not the answer.

41:22 The answer, creatively,

41:23 is to then look at this desert that we have here and say,

41:29 "Okay, what can we do about real history...." Yeah.

41:36 (solemn music) (solemn music continues) (keyboard sounds)