The Making of Disco Elysium - Part Three: Writing
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0:00 (Ident clicks) (Ambient drones) (Click) [DANNY O'DWYER] If you talk
0:09 to a fan of Disco Elysium about what makes this game special,
0:12 chances are they'll quickly bring up the writing.
0:14 Disco is a game with writing at its core.
0:17 When combat was stripped out of the gameplay early in pre-production,
0:20 it put even more pressure on the writing to not only be enjoyable to read,
0:24 but to drive the gameplay forward.
0:26 The skill system, worldbuilding, audio interface,
0:28 and art would all have to support this central pillar of the experience.
0:33 Disco Elysium has eight credited writers,
0:35 and in this episode we're going to explore the work of each of those people.
0:39 In our previous episodes, you've already met Robert, Helen, Argo,
0:42 and Märten and in today's episode we're
0:45 going to introduce to you to Olga Moskvina,
0:47 along with the work of Justin Keenan, Cash De Cuir,
0:50 and Martin Luiga before he left the project.
0:52 Crediting who with what is a particularly challenging
0:54 effort given the collaborative nature of the project,
0:57 but it does allow us to explore
0:59 some important production processes that the studio developed.
1:01 Not just how they collaborated as a team,
1:03 but the critical work of editing– where
1:05 writers would both clean-up and modify the work
1:08 of others in an effort to add flavor and consistency to scenes and characters.
1:12 Later, we're going to explore many of the characters you know and love,
1:15 alongside essential worldbuilding like The Pale,
1:18 how Harry and Kim evolved during development, and much more.
1:21 We've tried to keep this series as spoiler-free as possible,
1:24 but there's no getting around it in this one.
1:26 I'll also be honest, and say that this episode relies on you
1:29 having played the game more than the others,
1:32 as we're diving deep into the creative backstories
1:34 of the game's many rich and complex characters.
1:37 In any case, first we begin at the start of production,
1:40 with a writing team attempting to come to grips with the universe of Elysium,
1:44 from both a narrative perspective and the tools they used as developers...
1:54 [ROBERT KURVITZ] The writers team was...
1:56 I was most connected.
1:58 That was who I was most working with, after the programmers
2:03 after getting the original design structures for the dialog up,
2:07 which me and Irv did together.
2:08 We got this pipeline from Articy[:Draft]2,
2:11 the dialog engine, down, and we developed what...
2:16 Rules like "a passive skill can never speak
2:20 before..." A normal character needs to speak before,
2:23 it always comments on things.
2:24 And then, after that, we needed more writers on the team.
2:27 So we just started looking for them.
2:30 [HELEN HINDPERE] We were all working from Tallinn.
2:33 So, in the writers' room, we had me, Argo Tuulik, Olga Moskvina.
2:41 Then we also had Märten Rattasepp, who has now done work on Pentiment.
2:47 [MÄRTEN RATTASEPP] The whole test character was,
2:50 literally, to me and Helen and Argo,
2:53 was just "come up with someone new and write an interesting scene.
2:56 "A new additional character to the game." And I wrote Tommy.
2:59 Yeah, a lorry driver, who had a hidden pleasant side,
3:03 because every other lorry driver at the time was a huge jerk (laughs).
3:08 [ROBERT] Argo– because we'd written so much together,
3:12 and we'd played so much together, and he knew the world– Argo was the writer I
3:16 could use to pass the baton over in the main story,
3:19 if it was slightly peripheral to the main story.
3:22 So, for example, he wrote Titus and I wrote Klaasje.
3:26 It did gain a lot from having an external voice there,
3:30 too, because Argo has this...
3:32 he brought this Steinbeck-like quality to Titus.
3:35 So that's one example of this tennis-playing dynamic in writing.
3:40 And then Olga Moskvina came on board.
3:43 Olga is a Russian-American writer.
3:47 She's a Russian person who speaks with a Californian accent.
3:51 Russian soul, Californian accent.
3:53 And she wrote Lena and Morrell, the Cryptozoologists on the coast.
4:00 Roy, Bird's Nest Roy.
4:02 And a really important part of the main quest: she wrote Ruby.
4:05 I think her biggest– or even bigger– contribution than this, perhaps,
4:10 is that she was the primary language editor on the entire thing.
4:14 Olga is a poetess, and she has incredible language,
4:19 and she's responsible for the final sheen of language quality on Disco Elysium.
4:25 [OLGA MOSKVINA] I was on leave from Princeton.
4:29 I had a friend, Quintis Andersson,
4:32 who contributed some ideas and thoughts to Disco Elysium as well,
4:38 and they really wanted somebody who was an English
4:42 speaker who would be able to support their writing.
4:45 And they wanted Quintis at first, but he wasn't available to move to Estonia.
4:51 I was, and I thought I'd only do it for a few
4:55 months to fix a few things after their initial demo...
5:00 [ROBERT] Cash was a writer we got in the last
5:02 year to do a lot of structural edits.
5:04 Cash is a structural genius.
5:05 He can really keep things in mind.
5:07 Like the arch, sole mystery.
5:09 The game had a lot of structural
5:12 programming which is just mind-bendingly difficult,
5:14 and he filled in some of the missing parts and some of the dialogs on the coast,
5:19 and did a lot of game design for putting containers on the map.
5:23 This final part of the game came together with his help.
5:26 [ARGO] The teething period, the teaching period,
5:28 for a new Disco writer it takes about between four to six months,
5:32 to actually get from...
5:34 Okay, you start learning the tools, the methodology,
5:38 and now you're more or less able to write independently.
5:43 The first month we mostly just did lore lectures.
5:47 Robert was giving big Elysium lore-dumps.
5:51 It was like going to the university, but in a fun way.
5:55 [OLGA] I do get a little bit (uncertain noise)
5:59 about some of the vibes people tried to present.
6:02 About everybody just being punks who never finished
6:06 college because (laughs) many of us were actually,
6:09 like, fucking, teachers in college.
6:11 Like, I taught college writing for six years.
6:14 Märten has a Semiotics MA from Tartu University,
6:20 which is the best university in Estonia...
6:23 [DANNY] Irv was a professor as well, wasn't he, in Tallinn University?
6:27 [OLGA] Yeah, yeah.
6:29 He's one of my favorite people in the world.
6:34 So we actually had a lot of academics.
6:37 So, the person who wrote "Fuck The World" Kosmos,
6:42 was a producer and he's also a famous poet in Estonia.
6:47 [ROBERT] For example, Siim Sinamäe,
6:49 "Kosmos" a producer on the project is also a really cool, funny writer.
6:53 And then he wrote Piss...
6:55 "Flaubert" as we called him, and "Fuck The World".
6:59 And I think the Mega Rich Light-Bending Guy was also his draft.
7:04 And then we had a writer called Märten Rattasepp,
7:09 who took a lot of work from Martin Luiga,
7:12 who, sadly, had to leave the project after about a year.
7:17 So he took a lot of work over from Martin
7:20 and did second drafts of Net Picker and Call Me Mañana.
7:24 My favorite Martin character– which has most
7:28 of his tone in it– is Tommy Le Homme.
7:33 It has, like...
7:34 When Martin's friendly.
7:35 That's the soul of friendly Martin in there, which I really like.
7:39 [MÄRTEN] Yeah, so at the time the studio was using Articy: Draft 2.
7:45 It's one of those node-based, visual programming tools,
7:48 with a lot of little dialog fragments that link up,
7:52 and you can put your little global variables or booleans,
7:55 to create interesting structures with little switches that build reactivity.
8:01 The onboarding was basically, I think we sat in the main room of the office,
8:05 and Robert just basically showed on a big screen...
8:09 He opened Articy and just demonstrated how to build
8:12 a dialog structure of an NPC that you are encountering:
8:16 the whole greeting part, and how to get to the hub,
8:19 and how the hub works; what's a fragment,
8:22 what's a conditional, what's an instruction, what's a boolean;
8:25 what's a white check, what's a red check– which,
8:28 those had already been designed at the time– what's a passive,
8:31 with the skill it was talking to, how to set everything up...
8:35 He basically, over the course of maybe a couple of hours,
8:38 wrote an example dialog, with everything that we needed to know.
8:43 [HELEN] Articy Draft had such a huge part
8:48 of influencing the way the entire game was written.
8:52 'Cos every writer knows that if you're staring
8:55 at a blank word document, nothing comes out.
8:59 There's just...
8:59 "I don't know, today's not the day.
9:01 I'm not writing anything." It's not the same, when you're writing in Articy,
9:06 because you are creating those dialog boxes with short sentences,
9:12 and it is so much fun just creating more, and more, and more, and more.
9:17 So I think every one of the writers that we had
9:21 on the team previously had a problem with not writing enough,
9:24 and then, for the first time ever,
9:26 the problem became that we were writing too much.
9:28 There wasn't enough time to edit it, to go over it.
9:31 We were like, "We have to cut some parts." But then
9:34 everything that was written was so good, you were like...
9:36 We were like, "We're just gonna have to find
9:38 the time." And that was all because of Articy.
9:41 There was a lot of dialog, so it got like...
9:43 quite janky (laughs).
9:46 At some point it froze completely, 'cos it definitely wasn't built for it.
9:50 We contacted them as well, and they were also like, "Yeah.
9:53 This is the first time anyone's coming with those problems to us,
9:58 "so we don't really know what to do." But they were great.
10:02 And it's also so easy to learn that, as a program.
10:07 I hope Robert's okay what I say about it,
10:09 but he's not a natural, learning-about-a-program kind of a guy.
10:15 He's all over the place.
10:17 But it's very easy to teach Articy to someone.
10:21 It's so intuitive.
10:22 [ARGO] But once we got past this tutoring phase, we had...
10:27 This was one of the key reasons why Disco's writing
10:32 ended up being so cohesive in the end, was that yes,
10:37 we did these group editing sessions where we
10:40 were all sitting behind a TV on the wall,
10:43 and we were going through Articy, was the writing program.
10:47 In Articy, going through the dialog card, by card, by card.
10:51 [MÄRTEN] That's an interesting process, and I think at the time I, ultimately,
10:56 didn't get on exactly the same level as the other writers,
11:00 because several of the ZA/UM people– like Argo,
11:03 and Helen, and Robert– they grew up together,
11:06 and they had done their tabletop stuff,
11:08 and their writing stuff together in their little culture/society thing.
11:11 And they already had some similar understandings
11:15 and views of the world, and "style".
11:18 So much longer than...
11:22 Learning Articy Draft, and learning the structures,
11:25 the thing that took much longer is getting into this type of headspace,
11:30 and the style guide that Robert kind of...
11:33 We didn't have a "style guide", but he had examples, and he had his own writing,
11:40 and tried to explain and "teach" a particular type
11:43 of vibe that the dialogs are supposed to have.
11:46 [DANNY] I'm not sure if there is an Elysium "Bible",
11:49 maybe it's just in your head...
11:51 [ROBERT] There isn't, that's one of the things in this, is that it's like jazz.
11:55 You have to just learn how to play it.
11:57 There's no note to it, there's no bible to it.
12:00 There's no...
12:03 It's just something that one artist teaches another,
12:07 and over years of learning how to play it, learns how to play it.
12:13 It's not an IP.
12:14 It's a way of thinking, and a way of dreaming,
12:18 and a very, very specific emotion that everything needs to work around it.
12:24 [MÄRTEN] Long story short,
12:25 it was just slowly learning to imitate this over several months,
12:29 and getting into a headspace.
12:31 At least, since various characters, various NPCs are...
12:36 in the world, as well– different people,
12:38 they obviously cannot all sound exactly alike,
12:41 so you can have something that is more like you or like I, right?
12:47 in some, perhaps, slightly different ways.
12:50 And this fits a different character who is a singular person.
12:57 So, if everything and everyone sounded exactly alike then that would be weird.
13:02 [ARGO] The writer gets a character,
13:04 some kind of a kick-off meeting with Robert...
13:07 Often, with these kick-off meetings,
13:08 we did [them] as a group with all of us present.
13:12 Then you go and you write your first draft.
13:15 Then, you get a first editing section
13:17 with Robert to see if the direction is right,
13:20 if the voice is right, if the mood is right.
13:24 If not, then you go back and do another draft.
13:28 If yes, then you move into the next phase.
13:31 [HELEN] 'Cos we were given a lot of freedom to edit, edit, edit.
13:35 I mean, this is maybe a misconception that some people have,
13:37 we're just geniuses of writing and the first drafts were amazing.
13:41 We're not.
13:43 I think the only thing we're actually good at is editing, editing,
13:46 editing and just keep working on one dialog for a really long time,
13:52 until it's good enough.
13:54 Even with all the experimenting that had gone on with Robert and Martin
13:58 and others they did eventually end up in a fairly standard RPG dialog structure.
14:04 You have a greeting, it can’t be too short,
14:08 it can’t be too long and that was the part that voiced as well,
14:11 when the game originally came out before “Final Cut” when everything was voiced,
14:15 we only voiced the introductory part.
14:18 Because that’s the ammount of funds and time and resources that we had.
14:21 So you kind of establish the character, and voice and hook and tone.
14:27 And then it ends up in a standard hub.
14:30 Like many RPGs too you ask questions,
14:32 and then it sort of loops back to the central
14:35 hub whenever you have gone through a branch.
14:38 [ARGO] I would say that different characters had,
14:40 of course, a different amount of editing sessions.
14:43 I think Robert has said in an interview before, that 70% of Disco is a rewrite,
14:50 and 50% of that is a rewrite of a rewrite.
14:53 There is a lot of rewriting, and some of the most legendary rewrites were...
15:00 I think Cuno was rewritten...
15:02 I rewrote it 15 times?
15:04 Evrart, I think, probably like seven times.
15:09 This became a bit of a joke in the office.
15:13 It's, "So what is Args doing?" "Oh,
15:15 he's writing Evrart again." And we're three months away from launch.
15:19 "Why is he writing Evrart again?!" But it was extremely necessary.
15:25 This is another thing I've noticed, in working in the modern games industry,
15:32 that quite often it is expected that the first draft is good enough.
15:35 But you do need the polish,
15:39 and you do need to have the freedom to throw away bad stuff.
15:44 You should never be pressured to put low
15:47 quality work in just because it already exists.
15:50 [MÄRTEN] ...bring more life to these characters that you then
15:52 need to go and write over the next several weeks–
15:55 or occasionally even months if it was a very hefty
15:58 thing that had a lot of going back and forth,
16:01 and branching, and maybe interconnectedness with other characters.
16:07 So some characters took a month or two
16:10 to write (scoffs) which is insane for RPGs.
16:13 Like, "Oh no!
16:14 No one else writes things that long!
16:17 "You need to be done in three days.
16:19 What are you doing?" Right?
16:22 (gentle piano arpeggio) [DANNY] Disco Elysium is
16:27 a game packed full of memorable characters,
16:29 and the stories of their creation are as distinct as the characters themselves.
16:33 So, for the next 20 minutes we're gonna bounce around the district of Martinaise
16:36 and talk about some of the characters
16:38 players enjoyed the most– and, more importantly,
16:40 some of the characters the writers enjoyed the most.
16:43 One note before we begin, though: In the credits of Disco Elysium,
16:46 some of the writing team are credited
16:48 as "writers" while some others are credited as "editors".
16:51 While the core writing team that began
16:52 the game did a lot of the initial heavy-lifting, it's clear that, for many,
16:56 the line between "writer" and "editor" was a thin one.
16:58 Many of the writers edited other people's works,
17:00 while many of the editors were responsible for much
17:03 more than just simply "tweaking" the work of others.
17:06 This would later become a bone of contention
17:07 for some of the folks working on the game.
17:09 We'll explore this in later episodes.
17:12 For now, let's dive into how all these people wrote and collaborated.
17:15 And an appropriate first stop is Harry's
17:18 first human interaction which, as it happens,
17:20 was the first interaction with the game for many of the initial writers.
17:29 [HELEN] When me, Argo, and Olga joined the company then,
17:34 surprisingly much was already done.
17:36 So the entire first dialog with Klaasje with the "I want
17:41 to have fuck with you" line (laughs) was already in there.
17:45 And this is the first thing we learned about the project at all.
17:48 Robert did not tell me anything and was like,
17:51 "Just play it." I was like, "Okay, yeah.
17:53 I wanna get on board.
17:55 I wanna write that." So, at some point, I became the sidequest person (laughs).
17:59 I kinda realized that all the sidequests were thrown at me.
18:03 I think it was, yeah, the Doomed Commercial Area.
18:06 It was the church, the ravers, and definitely the entire apartment building.
18:11 I'm actually...
18:12 I've been trying to figure out what exactly inspired it.
18:15 I think it might've been our own studio, and kind of...
18:19 There was the video game studio that we had in the same building,
18:22 there was a bookstore,
18:23 there was a tattoo shop, and also previously there had been an art gallery.
18:29 So many different things.
18:31 And at the same time, the house itself,
18:33 our studio, was almost like this labyrinth, this mystery.
18:37 So we wanted to put that into the game,
18:43 I think the most difficult part was actually getting the level design correct,
18:48 in the sense that there had to be something hidden that you discover.
18:53 That there is, in fact, one thing that has succeeded:
18:57 the Dicemaker's little cave that she has built.
19:03 So this took a lot of concepting.
19:06 There were so many versions of it.
19:09 And then of course there's Plaisance.
19:12 The way she uses spirituality to protect herself against the world.
19:17 It's very clear that the world is very unstable.
19:22 Revachol has this very difficult history,
19:25 and there's almost always this feeling that "I don't
19:29 know what's gonna happen." And if you're just a small
19:32 business owner who's trying to get by, then you
19:35 just want some kind of explanation for everything that's happening.
19:40 So yeah, I think Plaisance is the key character there, yeah.
19:45 PLAISANCE: "No!
19:46 Please just talk to me, officer...
19:48 "Come here and let's talk this through before
19:51 you decide to do anything 'extreme'..." HALF LIGHT: "Lies.
19:55 Rip them open, we say!" Märten: The whole bookstore part,
19:58 that was a lot of fun I have to admit.
20:01 This is one of those parts I really enjoyed as a creative process as well.
20:06 Everything involving Plaisance who was for once
20:09 a character who wasn’t pleasant that I could write.
20:12 A really different approach to having this magical thinking person who is
20:18 very shrill and wants to compell you into buying books and other stuff.
20:25 And really wants to keep you out of the doomed commercial area.
20:28 Yes so Annette, I think Martin Luiga had written a lot of her stuff already
20:35 at least the idea or concept was
20:38 there but the actual dialog was heavilly revised.
20:40 She’s like another pleasant person who stands there
20:43 and is trying to get you into the book store
20:45 to make sure you go in there and maybe
20:47 get involved with the whole doomed commercial area bit.
20:49 [HELEN] My kind of most, I don't know,
20:52 dearest character is the Working Class Woman questline.
20:56 I think it's also because it was the very first thing I started work on.
21:00 So I remember me, Argo, and Martin, we all got hired around the same time.
21:07 This is like...
21:09 We had...
21:09 They already had the Plaza, art for that.
21:12 "This is the Plaza, just write some kind of NPC there." Y'know,
21:16 short, quick, no long backstory.
21:19 And I think all of us came up with someone who became actually...
21:24 There's a huge backstory to them.
21:26 So Argo wrote René and Gaston, Martin wrote Tommy Le Homme,
21:30 and I wrote the Working Class Woman.
21:33 WORKING CLASS WOMAN: "He went to retrieve my book and he promised,
21:35 "he 'promised' he'd walk straight back home." [ARGO]
21:39 I think Robert wanted some kind of a game.
21:41 That there should be somebody playing some kind of a game.
21:44 It makes, also, sense then that Robert also said,
21:48 "Maybe it's two guys playing some kind of a game." I think
21:51 it was me who said pétanque because we had this strong French theme.
21:57 Why I chose the people I chose?
22:00 I've always been very good at writing, best at writing, old men.
22:05 Why that is, is that most of my career before ZA/UM,
22:09 I worked in various proletariat jobs where the huge majority
22:14 of my colleagues are men with alcohol problems past their 50s.
22:21 I am particularly familiar with this demographic.
22:24 And also, I very quickly learned this lesson, writing René and Gaston,
22:30 that it is so much easier to write a scene
22:34 there that has more than one character in it,
22:36 because they can play off each other.
22:38 You don't hit these choke points where it's, "Well,
22:40 somebody should say something!" but nothing natural comes up.
22:44 GASTON: "Evrart and I have these long talks where..." RENÉ:
22:48 "Where he tells his little 'penman' exactly what to say!"
22:51 [HELEN] And this is when we discovered the writing style.
22:55 We discovered, oh, we can actually put stuff in like...
22:58 I was working on writing this dialog,
23:01 but at the same time I was watching a lot of videos about cockatoos.
23:05 And then I was like, "Okay,
23:06 I'll just put that in" (laughs) 'cos I'm procrastinating.
23:08 So...
23:09 And then it grew into this tragic story.
23:13 I think she's very inspired by my love for Émile Zola, the French novelist,
23:22 who would write those incredibly realistic portraits of working class France,
23:28 and the people there.
23:30 So I wanted to write the character...
23:34 Even at first glance, she seems boring.
23:36 Almost like there's nothing to talk to her [about],
23:39 There's nothing really extravagant about her.
23:43 But then, as you speak to her more and more,
23:48 you discover her backstory and life.
23:50 And also, it's the mystery where, finally,
23:52 when you get to her apartment you can look
23:55 around and there are clues there that she has kids...
23:59 All this story kind of comes to life.
24:02 So I think that's why I like her.
24:04 She's surprisingly simple for Disco Elysium who has so many colorful characters.
24:10 But I think she stands out.
24:13 Yeah.
24:13 And I think the final bit– so this is spoilers here– but the final
24:18 bit where you go to tell her and give her the death notice,
24:23 I think this is one of the hardest things
24:25 I've written because it took a lot of research, I wanted to do this bit right,
24:32 and there was a huge question of, y'know,
24:36 Harry's such a humorous character, how do you do it seriously?
24:41 Like, how do you make it so that Harry, as a character,
24:45 also understands that this is not the place for jokes.
24:49 This is just something very moving and serious.
24:55 So it ends up that the one who's making the jokes is the Working Class Woman.
25:01 Who is like, "Oh, have you come to talk to me about the cockatoos?" And, yeah,
25:07 I think this is the moment I'm proudest of in my own writing.
25:12 WORKING CLASS WOMAN: "He was just..." EMPATHY: "But he was just here.
25:17 Alive." KIM KITSURAGI: "We understand this comes as a huge shock.
25:20 "I want you to know that me and my partner
25:23 are here for you if you have any questions.
25:25 "Take your time, ma'am." WORKING CLASS WOMAN:
25:29 "What happened to him?" [HELEN] And then,
25:31 I think Argo's best character is, obviously, Cuno.
25:33 I mean, Cuno is just...
25:36 amazing (chuckles).
25:37 CUNO: "Get your snout out of Cuno's ass!
25:39 "Cuno knows how hard Cuno pushes it.
25:42 Cuno pushes it hard-level..." (Cheery orchestral music)
25:45 [HELEN] I remember the first version of it.
25:48 I think Cuno is something that first came
25:53 out of tabletop games that Robert and Argo played.
25:58 So they were familiar with the character and I
26:02 think he's one of the most loved characters now (laughs).
26:04 So it's absolutely amazing.
26:06 [ARGO] The really difficult thing was to actually get Cuno's language,
26:13 Cuno's speaking written down to a point where it's not annoying.
26:16 I've seen even new writers try to write Cuno.
26:21 And it seems so easy, "just say fuck and shit a lot and refer
26:25 to yourself in third person." But in reality,
26:28 you kind of find this rhythm where it almost sounds like a weird,
26:33 melodic rap when Cuno speaks,
26:35 and find how often per sentence can Cuno say "Cuno" before it
26:41 becomes annoying and it's a feeling like someone hit the wrong note.
26:46 This is really difficult to fine-tune.
26:49 And also, there are moments where Cuno has to...
26:53 The mask has to slip for a moment,
26:56 and he has to say "I" to emphasize this crack in the facade, this vulnerability.
27:04 I remember, both me and Robert had this realization
27:09 that, after you've edited Cuno for two/three weeks in a row,
27:14 then you need to detox because your brain
27:18 starts also thinking in the same rhythm.
27:21 You can't speak or think like a normal person anymore.
27:24 You need to "de-Cuno" yourself.
27:25 CUNO: "Cuno can already see you soaring through the air like a fucking eagle.
27:29 "Pig's in Cuno's debt now.
27:31 Money-debt." "Cuno doesn't fucking care." [ARGO] Luigs and myself,
27:35 we always had this fascination with archaic
27:38 and odd phrases in the Estonian language.
27:43 We used to play around with language quite a bit.
27:47 The Estonian language doesn't have "genders",
27:51 but we have ways to express femininity in words sometimes.
27:58 For example, in Estonian, "dancer" is tantsua.
28:03 It's a gender-neutral word.
28:04 But if you want to emphasize that it's a female dancer,
28:07 then it becomes tantsuatar.
28:08 And in the same way, Luigs came up with Cuno,
28:15 Cunotar, which basically directly translates into "Cunoesse", a female Cuno.
28:21 And when the video game's time came around,
28:26 then the idea for Cunoesse was that she's even worse.
28:30 That, little by little, as you familiarize yourself with the scene
28:37 and start understanding what's happening,
28:39 you understand that she is the powerful one in this dynamic.
28:45 CUNOESSE: "I come from the woods, kyttā vittu...
28:48 "You don't wanna go there with me...
28:51 you don't wanna see what I've seen." CUNO: "Don't be traumatizing her.
28:55 Get the fuck out of here!" [DANNY] "Gary, the Cryptofascist"...
29:00 (Laughter) He's an interesting one.
29:02 [ROBERT] That's my joke.
29:03 Like, the Cryptos all are just like "Gary,
29:06 the Cryptofascist." It was almost a basic joke.
29:10 As a narrative designer, I set these characters,
29:12 I knew what they're gonna have to do.
29:14 A little bit of the structure, where the white checks are gonna be.
29:17 As a designer, I set these up.
29:19 And then that character is Olga Moskvina's.
29:23 It has this incredibly funny little moment,
29:26 where you become really paranoid and think that Gary,
29:30 the Cryptofascist is sporting massive anal beads.
29:33 And then Kim tells you: "You wouldn't hear them." (Laughs) "You wouldn't hear
29:40 them if he was wearing anal beads." (Laughs) KIM:
29:45 "You wouldn't be able to hear if he were wearing anal beads.
29:49 "Please excuse my colleague's humor.
29:51 "Working this murder case is taking a toll
29:54 on us both." [ROBERT] And then we had editors.
29:56 Quintus Gauti Andersson is an editor who did quite
30:00 a lot of work on these areas that were me-only stuff.
30:05 Like the island, for example.
30:07 And then Justin Keenan, who did a lot of work on The Jam Mystery side
30:15 and who later wrote parts of the political dreams for Final Cut.
30:21 Yeah.
30:22 [OLGA] We were close friends.
30:25 We edited a poetry journal together.
30:28 He was in English, doing a creative thesis.
30:33 I was in Literature, so, easy connection, right?
30:37 And I brought him into ZA/UM because I thought
30:40 we needed anotherperson who would be an editor (laughs).
30:45 I trained Justin in writing when he was in Tallinn for some weeks.
30:51 But apart from that, he was in the US.
30:53 One of the funniest things that Justin wrote is
30:57 some of the dialog for the Wild Pines rep, Joyce.
31:03 He was the perfect person to edit that.
31:05 I mean, he went to Harvard with me (laughs).
31:08 So, writing a New England sort of haughty type was natural.
31:13 [JAAGUP] Justin and Cash both were insiders enough that I considered them
31:22 the "grognard" guys (chuckles) But since they
31:27 were so heavily tied into the production,
31:30 I think Justin was very good at getting the vibe of how the writing is.
31:38 [OLGA] I think that a lot of people should have just been
31:43 listed as writers in the credits because we were all editing and writing.
31:50 Justin Keenan– who is still a Lead Designer at ZA/UM– wrote a lot,
31:57 actually, even though he's only listed as an editor.
32:00 He finished a lot of dialogs, he wrote a lot of new branches too.
32:04 Märten Rattasepp was also a very serious writer,
32:10 who did both writing and technical editing.
32:13 He should have been in the top list with me and a few other people.
32:20 Why that happened...
32:21 was for reasons I don't want to go into.
32:25 And we were always in each other's writing,
32:30 we were always adding branches to each other's writing,
32:32 we were always editing each other's writing.
32:34 CINDY THE SKULL: "I'm Cindy the fucking SKULL– what else do you want to know?"
32:40 [OLGA] Cindy was there in a greater form
32:43 than the rest of the characters I wrote.
32:45 There was already V.O.
32:46 for her in a trailer, so I had a lot to work with.
32:50 Y'know, this person who really believes in making
32:54 the perfect work of art, as a statement.
32:58 I easily dropped into that.
33:00 But Robert is very good at knowing where to direct people.
33:05 So he had me write the academics, the Cryptozoologists.
33:10 I knew how to write someone like Lena.
33:13 Robbie gave me instructions,
33:15 but I also saw her as this person who was even more than instructions.
33:21 [HELEN] Lena was also something that...
33:23 We really struggled, 'cos I think that Lena is a very difficult character,
33:28 because there's so much about the world she wants to tell you,
33:32 and is able to tell you.
33:33 So we were like...
33:34 We kept writing it, and it kept coming out as this lore
33:37 dump that you get right when you're just waking up, like,
33:41 "What's going on?" So this took a lot of rework,
33:44 and I think almost everyone– maybe not Argo–
33:47 but everyone else worked on Lena at some point, and did their own draft.
33:51 And it got rewritten, and rewritten, and rewritten.
33:53 I very much love what Olga did with Ruby.
33:59 Ruby is such a central character, and a very tragic character.
34:04 Maybe the most tragic out of everyone, and she gets very little screen time.
34:10 But she's super important.
34:12 I think at some...
34:13 There were times when we avoiding getting to Ruby, because we were like,
34:17 "How are we actually going to do justice to this scene?" Maybe
34:21 let's just write all of the other parts of the game (laughs),
34:25 let's just skip that.
34:26 'Cos we were just so uncertain if we could actually...
34:29 It's an entire showdown, that happens with her, where you discover
34:33 that you've been following this false lead.
34:36 And I think she did a brilliant job on it.
34:38 [OLGA] With Ruby, Robert very much said,
34:43 write her as a Californian, because that's something I know, right?
34:48 I think Robert is very, very talented at knowing people's strengths,
34:56 and how to get good work out of them,
35:01 even in the worst circumstances, and how to inspire them to do that work.
35:08 I worked closely with Kaspar on her character portrait, and how she would look.
35:12 I based her on a character from, visually,
35:17 Derek Jarman's Jubilee Her dialog was extremely fucking complicated to write.
35:23 It took all of the reactivity,
35:25 all the combinations of things that you could've done.
35:29 And after Martin left, I was kind of Technical Editor on the game anyway,
35:36 because I was basically very aware of every player state,
35:42 every game state, and where the variables could be found.
35:46 And also, writing someone who's genuinely a good person.
35:51 One of the few good people in the entire game,
35:56 who's truly just there for others, and fucked by life (laughs).
36:03 [HELEN] And for Martin,
36:05 I think Tommy Le Homme is a sense of normalcy in the madness.
36:11 so we both worked together on the Doomed Commercial Area.
36:14 So we did, I think, most work together with him.
36:18 But I would say that Tommy Le Homme, with the poems,
36:22 with all of it, it's a very Martin character.
36:25 TOMMY LE HOMME: "Stuck in the rain in a traffic jam, man.
36:29 What's on your mind?" (Dice clack) EMPATHY: "Ease into it, don't go too far.
36:34 This seems like a personal matter..." [MÄRTEN] Yeah, I do remember.
36:38 Especially since, in the beginning of the game,
36:40 in Whirling-in-Rags, you're really...
36:42 Harry's really getting dunked upon for a whole lot of time.
36:47 It takes a long-ass time to get out of that little motel,
36:50 and then most everyone– other than Lena, I guess– is being a real jerk to him.
36:56 And then, I thought, let's write someone who is just chill and kind of like a...
37:02 I guess he has more of a hippie/truck driver vibe.
37:05 He smokes, and has an inner soft side.
37:11 It is revised in some ways.
37:14 In the final stretches of the game until it got released,
37:18 it has gone through some little polishing.
37:20 Some things are more snappier, some of the check stuff is slightly altered.
37:26 some of the check stuff is slightly altered.
37:26 But yeah, initially, he even had a whole truck and worldbuilding
37:31 related check in, that I remember spending time on.
37:34 just because I was trying to figure out how to do white checks and all of that.
37:38 It was like a very Encyclopedia-heavy thing about various lorries and designs,
37:43 and nerd stuff, and that.
37:45 But yeah, just having someone personable who has a nice family life,
37:49 and misses their family far away, and is stuck here.
37:53 And someone who is more approachable when the other truck drivers...
37:58 Well, of course, you have your Racist Lorry Driver
38:01 just close by who is a completely horrible person.
38:04 Who I also wrote, and we wrote, to a significant degree.
38:07 So that ended up being really funny when I wrote...
38:11 "This is your nice little guy and this is
38:14 the huge racist jerk." [ARGO] Because again,
38:17 we didn't have this insight into how games are made,
38:20 and we didn't have a blueprint for this type of game either.
38:23 So we kind of very naturally...
38:26 The assumption was that, when you're a writer, then as you write the character,
38:30 you also design everything surrounding the character.
38:34 How its stats chain works.
38:37 You do your own programming in the writing tools.
38:42 You choose the voice actor when voice acting came around.
38:46 You figure out, in collaboration with animators,
38:49 you figure out what the animations are going to be.
38:53 In this part, of course,
38:54 I don't want to overemphasize the writer's role in that.
38:57 It's still...
38:58 Even 50/50 is giving writers too much credit.
39:02 But it is a very tight collaboration between Eduardo,
39:06 our incredible animator, who did all the animations.
39:11 We think of it as a character– or even a better way to say it,
39:18 it's a scene, and everything around that scene writing spirals out of it.
39:23 KIM KITSURAGI: "I think this racist is better than the last,
39:26 "but the next racist will be the really
39:29 good one." [DANNY] Through the characters in Disco Elysium,
39:34 the player is exposed to notes and whispers about
39:36 the wider world outside of the borders of Martinaise.
39:39 A world that, because of what happened with the IP after launch– something
39:43 we'll get into in time– many fans fear they will never get to see.
39:47 But I wanted to ask Robert about
39:48 the perspective that the game has, and crucially, how,
39:51 through the history of Elysium– a world distinct from ours– the game
39:54 is able to poke and prod so much at contemporary issues surrounding rule,
39:58 identity, economic captivity, and political ideology.
40:06 [ROBERT] It kind of happens to have a very good perspective on the world.
40:11 It can say some things that other people can't say.
40:15 So it has failed at Communism, and it owns up to these failures,
40:21 but at the same time it hasn't betrayed it.
40:24 It's not a traitor.
40:26 It still believes in something,
40:28 but it doesn't have any illusions about what that something is.
40:33 But, at the same time, it wasn't a part of this Communist project
40:37 that had the power to make all the mistakes (chuckles).
40:40 So it's...
40:41 People in the West really like guilt and victimhood, and so on.
40:46 It has a very clean victimhood profile.
40:50 And then, from that position, a very good perspective opens.
40:55 And that's why it can do tricks like talking about French-Africa,
40:59 for example, which is a good angle to talk about Africa generally.
41:02 And it does these little history games, to fight for the right to speak about,
41:10 and for, things that Eastern Europeans don't
41:12 necessarily have the right to speak about, is, I guess, what I'm trying to say.
41:16 And when we were making the game,
41:18 we quite often discovered that "the proud plumber race"
41:21 isn't really invited to talk about these and those topics.
41:26 You can come to London and you can do the plumbing,
41:29 and you can build some of our stuff, and you can pick strawberries,
41:33 but you don't talk about "race things", for example.
41:37 So it uses this different historical perspective to fight for that right.
41:43 MEASUREHEAD: "You have gotten these ideas from degenerate youth culture.
41:48 "Have you not?
41:49 You have picked them up from rock and roll songs?" [ROBERT] The part,
41:55 for example, where we talk through about Africa,
41:58 is Iilmaraa, and parts of South France.
42:01 I could show you some maps later, but it's formulated incredibly precisely.
42:08 It has hundreds and hundreds of place names in it, and it's manically scribbled,
42:15 and it's very, very detailed in its history and it's very, very large.
42:21 It has about seven of these isola, that it's comprised of.
42:27 And each one of these parts is
42:29 a certain representation of something in our culture,
42:31 but some things are changed,
42:33 and each one of these has genres of stories that fit best into them.
42:37 So one isola might be best meant for a war story,
42:43 and another one might be a great place for an autobiographical
42:47 novel to be set in, so it's not only...
42:50 Not only do they have cities and geographic formations,
42:55 and rivers, and characters,
42:57 and political parties that we all came up with over these years,
43:04 but they all have genres attached to them as well.
43:08 So this is like a spy thriller area,
43:10 this is one where you can do medieval knight stuff in.
43:16 Yeah.
43:21 [DANNY] While the grand scope of this universe and the golden
43:24 path of the game were constructed from Robert's imagination,
43:27 the two central characters of this story
43:29 would be touched by the entire writing team.
43:31 Harry and Kim, the two cops at the nucleus of this drama,
43:34 had been outlined by Robert early on.
43:35 But over the course of the game's production
43:37 they would evolve and mature often in surprising ways.
43:42 [ROBERT] I think, about the time I tried this World Autumn one,
43:46 that, I think, didn't add to the amnesiac story.
43:48 And I've even come to the conclusion that you can't do amnesiac stories anymore,
43:53 because Planescape: Torment did it so well.
43:55 And I was like, "Okay, that was the last one.
43:58 You can't do it anymore." But then I think I found another twist on it,
44:03 which is: What if it's just a stupid joke?
44:06 What if it's just that he drank so much that he can't remember.
44:10 And I knew that, if I would be
44:13 the game master in a pen-and-paper campaign and, for example,
44:17 you would wake up as Harry,
44:19 I knew that would be a really fun opening sequence because I
44:25 could tell you exactly who you are by the objects of your character.
44:29 Imagine waking up and you don't know anything about yourself.
44:32 All you know is you have these giant bootcut '70s pants.
44:36 Every one of these things is a really bad piece of news to you.
44:40 (Laughter) Every object you find is...
44:43 And then the coup de grâce is that you're a cop!
44:46 And you don't feel like one at all.
44:49 So I knew it was just this good sequence
44:53 of inserting the player into the character one by one.
45:00 MIRROR: "Behold!
45:01 You have no idea who this thing is,
45:04 do you?" [HELEN] I think I've learned now that, traditionally,
45:09 in video games, you have those character concepts,
45:13 examples of how they speak, stuff like that.
45:17 But we didn't really know how to make a video game.
45:20 I think there was one person in the studio
45:22 who had ever worked in a video game studio.
45:24 So it was like, no idea what we're doing.
45:27 So we just kept writing, and writing, and writing.
45:29 And then, at some point, it was like, "Oh,
45:31 your Kim is going in a slightly weird direction,
45:35 we have to rein him in again." NARRATOR: "A bespectacled man in an orange bomber
45:41 jacket "is tapping his foot on the floor.
45:44 Looks like he's waiting for someone." [HELEN] It
45:47 was the progression of Kim's and Harry's relationship,
45:51 and it progressed with our writing.
45:54 So we were able to edit it in, for this reason, that Kim did change around you.
45:59 'Cos the first concept of him was as this super dry person, the A+ student.
46:05 As a design function,
46:07 he worked to always remind the player of where they are in the quest.
46:14 What are they doing, what are they supposed to be doing.
46:16 We really wanted the player to be exploring around,
46:21 saying the most out-there options,
46:24 taking a lot of sidequests, and we needed someone to balance it.
46:28 And then it was obviously your partner.
46:31 Your partner is going to be the one who tells you: "Okay.
46:33 We've got the dead body to focus [on], and we've got a crime to solve."
46:38 And this is how he turned out to be really dry in the beginning.
46:41 But, a you progressed,
46:43 and at some point he's wearing the jacket (laughs) the famous jacket with you.
46:48 You're both wearing jackets.
46:49 Or, there are moments where he doesn't just berate you,
46:56 or be angry with you over something you've done,
46:59 he also starts offering compassion when you fuck up somewhere.
47:04 And this is where all the things that we discovered...
47:07 KIM: "The fact that one hasn't started already gives me pause.
47:11 An investigation, I mean.
47:12 "Especially id the Madre grouping is involved...
47:14 and I can't imagine they aren't.
47:16 "It's certainly worrisome." [ROBERT] So I don't think any of us...
47:19 Definitely, I didn't think that he was going to be so popular.
47:23 I didn't understand what the sum feeling
47:26 of hanging out with him was gonna be like.
47:29 And then I played the game before launch, in my one playthrough of it,
47:33 and I started realizing that it's
47:36 this "dream friend simulator"– that we made almost
47:40 a metaphor for the game itself–
47:42 and our desire to make this really friendly game,
47:47 or a friendly piece of writing that is in service of the reader.
47:51 Before I made the game, I made the book.
47:53 And the book is really hostile.
47:54 It is a very hostile, challenging piece of reading.
47:59 It's a mystery that doesn't have an answer– people
48:01 really hate those– and it's also all about itself.
48:04 It's all about the book, the writing, the language.
48:07 It's kind of "full of itself", purposefully.
48:10 And the game is a reaction to it.
48:13 It's slavishly in service of the player.
48:16 It feels that it's challenging, and so on, but you should read the book.
48:20 So it is very much that, and then Kim
48:23 is the personification of that: The handholding part of it.
48:27 So I was surprised at how nice I felt during that playthrough.
48:32 I knew I liked the character,
48:33 even to the point where I would kinda want him to be a little less.
48:37 Like...
48:38 His voice is so hypnotically beautiful.
48:42 It's very hard to now tell him some weird stuff, but a lot of good content is...
48:47 I think people should take him like, you know how you have a cat?
48:50 And sometimes, to make the cat do cute things,
48:53 you need to put a little water on the cat's head, or something?
48:56 You need to tease the cat a little bit.
48:58 So Kim's like that.
48:59 You can really push his buttons quite a lot, and he only becomes more lovable.
49:05 [MÄRTEN] In a way, yeah.
49:07 Harry and Kim were just fairly strong personalities at some point,
49:11 and it was easy to understand how you
49:14 were supposed to write their lines, and Kim's lines.
49:17 They were very fleshed-out.
49:19 But I have always thought,
49:20 one of the strengths of both of the characters, that they are clearly...
49:27 They are written by everyone.
49:29 Every writer had to write Harry and Kim's stuff
49:34 within their dialog with some particular NPC or scene.
49:38 And then, what you needed,
49:40 is just internalize the vibe of Harry and the vibe of Kim,
49:45 and just keep that cohesive.
49:46 And, obviously, like anything, helps that out later.
49:48 [OLGA] One of my primary accomplishments[] was saying,
49:53 "Justin should edit all of the writing for Kim," because they're similar
49:59 characters and I knew Justin would do such a good job with that.
50:03 And I think I pretty much won there,
50:06 'cos Kim is just such a fan favorite (laughs).
50:08 And we were all writing Kim so differently and it was a problem,
50:13 and somebody needed to take charge of that.
50:15 And I really, really admire what Justin did with editing him.
50:20 [HELEN] I very much enjoyed the energy, then.
50:25 Each and every time we wrote parts of Kim and Harry, which for us were shared...
50:33 So I know that some video game companies do
50:35 that, like all companions are written by one person.
50:37 We didn't do it.
50:38 You would go over and discover that their Kim had parts that you never knew.
50:43 So I just absolutely loved it, definitely.
50:49 (Jangling piano arpeggios) [DANNY] Harry's memory loss,
50:52 the opening mystery of the game,
50:53 is tied to several themes within the narrative of Disco Elysium.
50:56 But for a second, I just wanna talk about one of them: Pale.
51:00 The world of Disco Elysium stands under the shadow of a mysterious,
51:04 ever-expanding force and, while largely
51:06 tertiary to Harry and Kim's investigation, its presence is ever felt.
51:10 But before we talk about the Pale, first we have to talk about the Church.
51:14 The church was the original vertical slice of the game,
51:16 and an area of the game that almost every writer touched at one point.
51:19 That was for good reasons...
51:21 and also for bad ones.
51:23 [ROBERT] Here's a good example of the main quest,
51:27 and about how collaborative and fun it was.
51:30 First of all, we just had a concept art of a church on stilts.
51:34 We just wanted it.
51:36 It was a cool visual.
51:37 So Rostov did that one.
51:39 Then we had a writer, who later became a sound designer called Andrus Laansalu,
51:44 who was the first person on it and who
51:47 developed a little bit of the Pale concepts, there.
51:50 Which, I didn't actually want to have Pale that much in the game.
51:53 But because writers who start writing Elysium tend
51:56 to really want to have that Pale stuff, so he had the same one.
52:00 But he had a really cool take on it.
52:02 I said, "Okay." I explained how the Pale works in that way,
52:05 how the swallows work and stuff like that, so we could get something in there.
52:08 But it became much more ambitious than I wanted it to be,
52:11 and now it needs to be done justice because it has the Pale,
52:14 and stuff like that.
52:15 So I knew I needed a little bit of my writing to have a tone in there.
52:19 So I wrote the speed freaks in the tent,
52:22 because then I give it off to everyone else.
52:24 And then you have to have one element
52:26 that reminds you of some of the other writing there.
52:29 So I did that for the vertical slice.
52:32 The world building was all pre-done there.
52:35 The Dolores Dei thing.
52:36 Because I needed that for...
52:38 So, for example, I needed the Dolores Dei
52:40 stained-glass window for meeting Dolores Dei in the end.
52:42 So I needed to put that in.
52:43 Then Olga Moskvina came and wrote the Crab Man.
52:49 And Helen wrote those parts of Noid
52:53 that were written by Martin and then left there.
52:59 So it's this hodgepodge of things that people are doing.
53:03 And it's not a sign that everything's going well on the project,
53:07 because people are starting and then abandoning,
53:09 and then half-filled work is there.
53:11 Keep editing it, keep communicating with everyone until it comes together,
53:16 until it's not clashing with each other anymore.
53:19 The biggest thing that Helen did [was] with Soona,
53:21 so all the Soona dialogs really bring it together.
53:24 But, again, I don't think this is the right way to do things.
53:28 I could represent it as the most Utopian way, "Oh,
53:31 everyone came and did cool stuff," but that's not what it felt like.
53:35 It felt like constantly...
53:36 Like keeping something from becoming a catastrophe.
53:47 The Church serves as a good example of the frustrating
53:51 battlegrounds the writing team would often themselves in.
53:53 Not just fighting the game, but fighting each other too.
53:56 Many of the editors and writers felt like they were constantly
53:59 having to go back in and fix unfinished work left by others.
54:02 Often doing so secretly, hoping that nobody would notice.
54:05 There were arguments over how certain characters were portrayed,
54:08 and frustration over favoritism or how long
54:11 it was taking people to finish their work.
54:13 Much of the off-the-record conversations I’ve had with the writing
54:16 team reflects this frustration and tension at the time.
54:20 The type of arguments you have with close friends
54:23 or room-mates that fester and deepen the longer they go unresolved.
54:26 But these weren’t arguments about who didn’t clean
54:28 the dishes- it was far more personal than that.
54:31 What you have to remember was this was a group of highly skilled,
54:34 highly motivated people working on a project that felt significant artistically.
54:39 None of them wanted this game to be anything other than the best of their work.
54:43 This was a high-stakes project,
54:45 which means arguments took on even higher stakes.
54:48 Robert felt like he had ownership over this universe
54:50 and with a weight of responsibility that he often struggled with.
54:54 Cracks in the team were starting to form.
54:57 And again, whenever I'd talk to other people who
54:59 write games like this, they just look at it like,
55:02 "You're really making your life difficult,
55:04 there." "Just maybe have one guy write it?" Märten:
55:09 things were just chugging along in a slightly weird way
55:12 at that time already It was getting a bit frustrating.
55:16 In the first year when I was there it
55:19 was very fun and very creative and very interesting
55:22 to work on it and then on the second
55:25 year it started getting a little bit weird already.
55:28 There were some weird internal things and stress
55:31 and frustrations and “who knows what” happening.
55:33 *cough* I think a lot of arguments were also around how optional it should be.
55:41 'Cos it felt like such a beautiful magic that was happening there,
55:48 that at some point we were like, "Oh,
55:50 people can just miss it." And I think there
55:52 are definitely some players I've seen where it's just like,
55:54 "Oh, we just walk past it." But, in the end,
55:58 we decided okay, we're not gonna force anyone in there.
56:02 It's not part of the critical path.
56:04 Because I think this makes it even prettier, if you do discover it.
56:07 And the same, of course,
56:10 with the Cryptozoologist case where it's like, yeah, let's leave it optional.
56:14 This was the vertical slice precisely because this was
56:18 the area we definitely wanted to get in.
56:19 And that was super important,
56:21 'cos Pale is such a huge part of the world of Elysium.
56:26 But at the same time, we did not want an entire game to be about like...
56:31 You're chasing through the Pale.
56:34 This is your entire identity that you're researching, or something like that.
56:41 When you're a kid, you realize that okay, it's a science fiction story.
56:48 The things we know about the cosmos, or even the things we know about our world,
56:52 there's so much mystical about science that almost seems like it's not real.
56:58 So we wanted it to be in the background It's just something...
57:02 People keep living, go on.
57:04 It's just a fact of this world.
57:07 But then the question was how Harry would interact with it,
57:13 and how would Harry first learn about it,
57:17 because he has forgotten about everything.
57:19 So how do we bring that in?
57:23 Then the idea was to have it in a church.
57:26 There is a speck of Pale– which is a danger in itself because it might grow.
57:34 It also created this alternative explanation for Harry's memory loss, as well.
57:40 We never wanted to spell out the answer.
57:44 We even, among ourselves, never agreed what had happened.
57:48 'Cos that's the thing with mysteries of life,
57:52 you have theories, you have competing theories.
57:54 Was it just too much alcohol?
57:57 Was it getting too close to Pale?
57:59 Did he discover it before?
58:01 What happened there?
58:02 Is he just faking the entire thing?
58:04 Is it some kind of psychological, "I'm in denial" thing?
58:09 What we did, as writers, is came up with all of those theories,
58:12 and we tried to make sure that there
58:17 is plausible sides for each of those theories.
58:21 And the church was "the Pale theory".
58:24 [ROBERT] One of the things we discovered about worlds, and art,
58:30 and characters, and mysteries over that time– I'm of the X-Files school,
58:35 that was my first contact with mystery writing– and what we discovered
58:43 is that, you really cannot have a concrete answer to anything very interesting,
58:48 you only need to have theories.
58:50 Alan Moore has the same thing in From Hell, which is,
58:54 he says that, "We will never know who Jack the Ripper is.
58:58 "He will be a superposition of all of our theories about who it could have been.
59:02 "That is the extent of our knowledge." And that keeps mysteries mysterious.
59:08 And that's also Epistemology.
59:10 That's how knowledge works.
59:12 You only have these theories,
59:14 and then some seem more likely or more adequate at some times.
59:18 So there's the comedic theory, which is,
59:20 he drank so much that he can't remember.
59:22 The "Dude, Where's My Car?" answer to it.
59:25 But then there's the worldbuilding answer to it, the Pale one.
59:29 And there's a couple of others.
59:30 But the other thing is: It can't be only that tool.
59:35 There needs to be an actual preference from the storyteller,
59:38 like a "word of God" thing.
59:41 But that, the storyteller can never tell the people who hear a story.
59:46 [DANNY] Like, explicitly?
59:47 [ROBERT] Yeah.
59:47 You can never say it out...
59:49 So, Lynch does it in Mulholland Drive.
59:53 There's this DVD where he gives clues how you should...
59:56 Like, "nine clues how you should watch Mulholland Drive." Some of it is like,
1:00:03 "Notice the red lampshade somewhere." And they
1:00:05 in no way help you decipher Mulholland Drive better.
1:00:09 But what they do tell you is,
1:00:11 Lynch isn't just throwing stuff at you to be dreamy.
1:00:14 There is an underlying logic, and there is a preference there.
1:00:19 And, if it's this way– if it's both open
1:00:23 and systemic– then you can have your cake and eat it.
1:00:27 And this is also representative of what mysteries are in the real world.
1:00:31 We know that there's an actual truth of what happened.
1:00:34 We can't get to it.
1:00:35 And we'll have to deal with the superposition of possibilities.
1:00:43 [DANNY] Is that how you approached just Magical Realism writ large, then?
1:00:48 Because, in a '70s cop thing,
1:00:50 you don't necessarily feel like you need to have it,
1:00:53 but then True Detective comes around and it's The King in Yellow...
1:00:57 [ROBERT] Yeah.
1:00:57 [DANNY] ...but done in the South,
1:01:00 and suddenly that gets cracked open a little bit.
1:01:03 Was this a byproduct of the previous D&D stuff
1:01:06 or was it always essential to the world of Elysium?
1:01:09 [ROBERT] We kinda thought that, after analyzing mysteries long enough,
1:01:14 we might have come up with a new type of them.
1:01:17 It was a personal thing.
1:01:19 I think, at the time, structurally, The Prestige and movies like that were
1:01:23 a good example of what are very well-constructed mysteries.
1:01:26 And Alan Moore's stuff.
1:01:28 But there also seemed to be room for a new
1:01:31 type of mystery that I felt Lost should be.
1:01:34 So, you remember in the second and third series of Lost,
1:01:38 you felt as if there is some kind of really new trope underneath it?
1:01:42 It isn't a reality TV show, or like aliens or whatever,
1:01:46 it's something new that you're not coming up with the answer to this mystery,
1:01:50 because it's not an already existing trope.
1:01:52 It's a new one they've come up with.
1:01:53 And that was the essence of the excitement around that TV series,
1:01:57 and that's also the essence of the collapse of that excitement.
1:02:01 The moment people realize that it's just an already existing trope,
1:02:04 that's when the excitement went away.
1:02:08 And, for Elysium at the time, it was 2005, '06, '07,
1:02:13 I understood that it is possible to come up with new tropes.
1:02:16 So the Pale and its structures are quite novel,
1:02:20 and you can't know beforehand how the Pale operates.
1:02:24 Even the people in the world don't know how the Pale operates.
1:02:28 Me, on a good day, I have some idea, maybe.
1:02:31 But I mostly know how it doesn't.
1:02:34 Like, what trope it doesn't fall under.
1:02:36 It isn't this, that, and so on.
1:02:38 It isn't global warming.
1:02:39 It isn't a metaphor.
1:02:40 So anyway, the idea became that there would be these novel type of mysteries,
1:02:44 and that the player would not be able to realize what they are because,
1:02:49 using worldbuilding...
1:02:50 In our world, you know the foundations of how this works, generally.
1:02:56 There is no magic, there is no god.
1:02:58 So you know what revelations are passable within this ruleset.
1:03:02 But you don't know the ruleset of Elysium, actually.
1:03:05 So a very small example of that is the Insulindian Phasmid.
1:03:09 That you don't know whether, in this world,
1:03:11 there are Cryptids, or whether the Cryptid would be real.
1:03:14 But, on a very large scale,
1:03:17 the way the Pale functions, or what an Innocent sees,
1:03:21 were supposed to be these really long– hopefully new– types of mysteries that...
1:03:26 And I think they've proven themselves to be
1:03:28 that, because I don't think anyone online, from what I've read,
1:03:32 has stumbled upon the answers to the mysteries that we planned.
1:03:36 [DANNY] But there's also not a massive
1:03:38 amount of people who are deeply unsatisfied.
1:03:40 which, y'know...?
1:03:41 [ROBERT] Exactly!
1:03:42 Yeah.
1:03:43 So, there are people who are very unsatisfied with the ending of my book.
1:03:47 [DANNY] Oh, really?
1:03:48 (Laughs) [ROBERT] It's just a really, really bummer ending.
1:03:51 But that's kind of on purpose,
1:03:53 it just really wants to be a very unsatisfying ending.
1:03:56 And you just cannot know any of the mysteries of any of the structures,
1:03:58 'cos it takes 10 other episodes of the story
1:04:02 which we don't get to tell (chuckles).
1:04:05 But yeah, strangely enough, they don't leave you unsatisfied.
1:04:10 'Cos I think people just feel that there is some
1:04:13 logic to them which they haven't gotten around to yet.
1:04:16 Which would need more storytelling.
1:04:22 NARRATOR: "Dolores Dei— the innocence of humanism, internationalism,
1:04:26 and the welfare state— turns around to face you.
1:04:30 She has an airship airbag in her hand.
1:04:34 She seems to be in a hurry." [ROBERT] My favorite
1:04:42 characters of mine were Dolores Dei and the Insulindian Phasmid.
1:04:48 I don't have a favorite between the two,
1:04:52 but I wrote them in the very end, and...
1:04:55 Oh my!
1:04:56 The money-men were angry at me,
1:04:58 that I wasn't getting the ending of the game finished,
1:05:01 and I was so, so sad about it.
1:05:04 And a lot of what happens on the island, the Deserter especially,
1:05:07 that burnt-out dead feeling that he had was
1:05:09 just the feeling that I had at the time.
1:05:12 And after that, I wrote the Dolores Dei scene– which people can miss,
1:05:18 and it's meant to be a missable climax of types– the scene has,
1:05:22 the character has, a lot of layers of mystery around it that I won't spoil.
1:05:28 Even if I never do get to make anything in Elysium,
1:05:32 I just won't spoil these things.
1:05:34 But the interaction between Her Innocence Dolores Dei, and Harry's ex,
1:05:41 and the way they kind of manifest in Harry's mind,
1:05:45 they are, to me, the epitome of the new type
1:05:50 of mystery and twist that we wanted to do for Elysium.
1:05:54 You have something that's very sacred and huge,
1:05:56 and something that's very tiny and pathetic at the same time,
1:06:00 so when you finally meet an Innocent, it speaks to...
1:06:05 It's only in guise of your ex, or your ex in guise of the Innocents,
1:06:10 and these dichotomies between these two things are really,
1:06:14 really interesting in the scene.
1:06:16 And I was very proud of the final lines, that she tells you when she parts.
1:06:24 The love line.
1:06:25 I think I got...
1:06:28 It was one of the five or six sentences in the game that I think really...
1:06:40 That the game really boiled down to.
1:06:43 DOLORES: "Oh, yes.
1:06:45 This is real darkness.
1:06:47 It's not death, or war, or child molestation.
1:06:52 "Real darkness has love for a face.
1:06:55 "The first death is in the heart, Harry." [ROBERT] And, obviously,
1:07:03 the opposite of Dolores Dei is the Insulindian Phasmid one.
1:07:08 And I was just so, so glad that I'm able to still go into this register.
1:07:13 Into this happy place, that I'm able to write something
1:07:17 after these incredibly dark and burnt-out things,
1:07:19 that I can write something so pleasant and childlike, in that dialog.
1:07:25 My favorite part of the Insulindian Phasmid is, of course,
1:07:28 when you have to speak to the Insulindian Phasmid,
1:07:31 and there's a line that no one gets because they're too American for it.
1:07:35 There's a moment where you have a choice
1:07:38 to either say that you would rather be "it",
1:07:41 an animal like it, or you're glad you're you,
1:07:45 an incredibly sensitive instrument.
1:07:47 And because Americans love therapy, they always choose this line.
1:07:51 But if you choose the first one,
1:07:53 which I think actually would be more– how do I say?
1:07:57 therapeutic for Harry to reach out.
1:07:59 He always wanted to be a different type of animal.
1:08:02 So, after that, the Insulindian Phasmid tells you an absolutely
1:08:06 lovable little story about one of its antennas falling off
1:08:11 and growing back accidentally as a foot because the Phasmid
1:08:16 wants you to know that really weird things happen to it.
1:08:21 It's like, "Are you sure you wanna be one?"
1:08:23 And I had a Research Assistant called Andrus Laansalu,
1:08:26 who was also the Head Sound Engineer
1:08:29 on Disco Elysium and he's this cult [Academician].
1:08:36 People who are in his lectures really like...
1:08:39 I've been to one of his lectures about Cyberpunk, and it was really cool.
1:08:43 So it was a real honor to have him research for me.
1:08:45 And, you know, if you just go to Wikipedia, you can't get the coolest stuff.
1:08:49 If you get an Academician, they can get you really good stuff.
1:08:53 So, for example, he researched the autopsy scene for me.
1:08:58 What autopsies are like, what happens to a dead body.
1:09:01 But he also researched stick insects.
1:09:06 I think he's an entomologist, among the many, many things that Andrus is.
1:09:11 And it was like, in the beginning of the dialog,
1:09:14 if you're writing a scene and the first thing you can
1:09:17 write is something like this, the weird little childish story about it..
1:09:20 I was just like...
1:09:21 It helped me establish the tone for the entire
1:09:24 rest of the Phasmid dialog (chuckles) So it's really creepy,
1:09:28 but at the same time childlike and innocent.
1:09:31 Sometimes, when you write– you've written,
1:09:34 so you know when you're not doing very well– (pained
1:09:38 noise) and then sometimes you have that "I'm on fire" feeling.
1:09:41 Like, ah!
1:09:42 This is one of those rare occasions where I actually enjoy writing.
1:09:47 And then there's a little bit above it:
1:09:49 "I'm doing my best work." Very rarely do you get this.
1:09:52 And then there, I felt that– both with Dolores Dei
1:09:55 and that– I felt I was doing my best work.
1:10:00 So I really enjoyed those.
1:10:03 Yeah.
1:10:09 [DANNY] There's a a lot more to talk about
1:10:11 when it comes to the writing of Disco Elysium,
1:10:13 but for this episode, we'll end our story here.
1:10:15 As the writing team were toiling away creating characters, producers,
1:10:18 artists, animators, and programmers were constructing the stage they play on.
1:10:22 So in the next episode, we'll focus on the work of the artists;
1:10:25 the origin of the game's painterly style;
1:10:27 how characters were drawn, animated, and given portraits;
1:10:30 and how even the isometric frame contributes to the player experience.
1:10:36 As ever, you can view this episode a week
1:10:38 ahead of its public release over on our Patreon.
1:10:40 Along with bonus scenes, and eventually,
1:10:42 extended versions of some of the interviews,
1:10:44 where we'll dive a little deeper into the process of making this game.
1:10:48 See you then!
1:10:53 NARRATOR: "The man before you is naked,
1:10:55 but for a pair of underpants and white boots.
1:10:58 "His eyes are milky white and blind to the world,
1:11:02 "protruding comically from their sockets.
1:11:05 "There is no one home, just sub-aquatic terrors there.
1:11:10 "Dark brown hair grows on his head,
1:11:13 "his face is ready to explode from the organic processes inside.
1:11:18 "The death's head grin has passed,
1:11:22 what remains is an unrecognizable mess." EMPATHY:
1:11:25 "Underneath the curdled meat there is an expression,
1:11:27 "not carried on his features but below, inside: an expression of pleasure.
1:11:34 "This man was experiencing joy at the moment
1:11:38 of his death." (Dice clack) THE HANGED MAN: "I'm gone.
1:11:45 "Into the wild pale yonder.
1:11:49 "In the past.
1:11:52 Way out in the west.
1:11:55 "I'm a joke.
1:11:57 Look at me.
1:12:00 "A killer.
1:12:01 A motherfucker and a killer." HALF LIGHT:
1:12:06 "Takes one to know one." THE HANGED MAN: "Go ahead, Cobo, "The blue heart?
1:12:14 Oh, that's good shit, you'll love it.
1:12:19 "Just press down and fuck it open like you always do.
1:12:26 "Fuck it hard, Copopo the Clown." PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: "He means force.
1:12:35 It'll work." (Ident clicks) (Click)