A follow-up to the legendary Disco Elysium might have been ready to play within the next year⁠—ZA/UM's devs loved it, management canceled it and laid off the team: 'For a while it seemed like miracles were possible, and with them redemption'

Gaming IndustryGame DevelopmentDisco ElysiumA follow-up to the legendary Disco Elysium might have been ready to play within the next year⁠—ZA/UM’s devs loved it, management canceled it and laid off the team: ‘For a while it seemed like miracles were possible, and with them redemption’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

Harry and Kim

When members of artist collective turned game developer Studio ZA/UM thanked Marx and Engels in their 2019 Game Awards acceptance speech for the RPG triumph Disco Elysium, I felt like I was looking at the future, the ecstatic debut of my new favorite developer, but that isn’t how things panned out.Disco Elysium has been #1 on our yearly Top 100 gameslist four years in a row, but for much of that time, ZA/UM has been engulfed in an existential crisis.

This project was cancelledin February, much to the shock of most ZA/UM employees, and nearly the entire team⁠—including that Disco Elysium writer, Argo Tuulik⁠— was laid off. I spoke with 12 current and former employees, including Tuulik and fellow X7 lead writer Dora Klindžić, to find out what went wrong. Studio ZA/UM itself did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

The fall

In late 2021, three of Disco Elysium’s most senior developers, including the setting’s original creator, Robert Kurvitz, lead artist Aleksander Rostov, and Final Cut lead writer Helen Hindpere, left the company on acrimonious terms. The ousted artists have alleged financial malfeasance on the part of company management, with much of their ire focused on Tõnis Haavel, a producer on Disco Elysium who had previously beenconvicted of investor fraud in the developers’ native Estoniain 2014. ZA/UM studio management, meanwhile, insists that the three were fired for refusing to return to work and creating a hostile environment.

ZA/UM’s post-Disco projects

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

Cuno, seen here not giving a fuck

Y12:Cancelled. Full sequel to Disco Elysium, shelved after the departure of Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere.

M0:In development. A smaller-scale Elysium game targeting touchscreen devices.

C4:In development. ZA/UM’s primary remaining project, a large-scale RPG that is not part of the Elysium setting.

After the departure of Kurvitz and friends was revealed in 2022, fan sentiment largely aligned with the ousted creatives, with a backlash against ZA/UM escalating into harassment and threats against developers still at the studio. That situation cooled down somewhat with the release ofPeople Make Games’ 150 minute-long documentaryon ZA/UM, which featured interviews with senior developers still at the studio who had worked on Disco Elysium.

Disco Elysium writer Argo Tuulik, a longtime friend of setting creator Kurvitz, gave a raw appraisal of the studio and the ousted writer’s respective missteps, asking fans to let those still at the studio prove themselves with their work.

Tuulik and his team didn’t get that chance: They were laid off from ZA/UM in February alongside nearly a quarter of the studio’s staff, predominantly developers on Tuulik’s now-canceled project, X7, which would have been a spin-off “standalone expansion” to Disco Elysium featuring some returning characters and an advancement of that game’s distinctive conversation and “psychological RPG” systems.

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals

Tuulik and fellow X7 lead writer Dora Klindžić lay the blame for X7’s end squarely with management, particularly Tõnis Haavel, while 10 other current and former ZA/UM developers spoke with me under anonymity. They described a confused, rudderless studio that expanded too quickly in the pandemic, struggled to adapt to remote work, and has canceled three projects as the afterglow of its triumphant debut faded in the intervening five years.

“Most hardcore Disco since Disco”

“It was a spin-off about one of the most beloved characters in Disco Elysium,” explained one developer who worked on the project. “I feel like it was the best possible shot at a Disco-like game without [Kurvitz], Rostov, and other people that made the original Disco Elysium.”

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

A dream sequence

Klindžić said, “It was something no one else but Argo could have done, and it would have been 110% authentic, most hardcore Disco since Disco.” She added that X7 “would have advanced the story, the emotional threads, and gameplay elements all at once to truly evolve the genre of psychological RPG as Disco Elysium started it.

“For a while it seemed like miracles were possible, and with them, redemption.”

The internal response to a company-wide showcase of the game at the end of 2023 seems to have been uniformly positive, with developers on other teams at ZA/UM telling me they were impressed with the demo. “Everyone was looking forward to its development,” one of them said. “Its internal announcement lifted a lot of spirits after a rough time of bad press around the studio.”

They also thought it was “exactly the sort of game [ZA/UM] needs to put out,” and that it could “reassure fans that ZA/UM is not a husk, that the IP is in safe hands and that the studio is full of talented people with a genuine love for the world of Revachol.”

My sources disagree on when X7 could have been ready for release, with some saying a 2024 launch wasn’t out of the question, while others argued 2025 was more realistic. Klindžić, for her part, thought that with less interference from management, “it could have perhaps been a three-year development cycle start to finish.” Project X7 began development in 2022.

I left my job as an academic physicist and space mission scientist in order to work on Y12, the sequel to a masterpiece, Disco Elysium.Dora Klindžić

I left my job as an academic physicist and space mission scientist in order to work on Y12, the sequel to a masterpiece, Disco Elysium.

X7 was promising: positively received internally and poised to be a long-awaited second outing from ZA/UM after a five or six-year wait since Disco Elysium. Multiple current and former employees also attest to ZA/UM president Ed Tomaszewski having assured staff in a December 2023 all-hands meeting that the studio was on strong financial footing, and that they did not have to fear thelayoff crisis sweeping the industry. Two months later, X7 was cancelled and nearly a quarter of ZA/UM was laid off, primarily impacting the former X7 team.

Interference

Following the departure of Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere, there seems to have been an understandable crisis at the studio. “Executive leadership and management did not provide any information about what was happening,” said one developer who witnessed the transition. “It was very uncomfortable for everyone there.”

ZA/UM founders, investors, and executives

(Image credit: Za/um)

The protagonist of Disco Elysium

Robert Kurvitz:A primary creator of the Elysium setting, project lead on Disco Elysium.

Kaur Kender:Author and public figure from Estonia, producer/investor in Disco Elysium. His father, a Soviet-era police detective, was reportedly a partial inspiration for Disco protagonist Harry Dubois.

Tõnis Haavel:Producer on Disco Elysium and part of senior management at ZA/UM. Convicted of investor fraud in 2014 in relation to a land deal in Azerbaijan.

Ilmar Kompus:ZA/UM CEO and early investor, head of venture capital firm Koha Capital which he previously co-owned with Haavel.

Edward Tomaszewski:ZA/UM president, former executive at Take-Two and Private Division. Joined in November 2022.

Work on a full Disco Elysium sequel codenamed Y12 was eventually halted⁠. My sources described flagging morale and a lack of direction after Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindperre’s departure leading to a decision to regroup on new projects.

Multiple sources describe the cancellation of Y12 as having caused friction between Tuulik, Klindžić, and management, with one stating that Y12 was cancelled without input from the senior writers, and that it looked like they were being “pushed out.”

“In February 2022, I left my job as an academic physicist and space mission scientist in order to work on Y12, the sequel to a masterpiece, Disco Elysium,” Klindžić said of this time. “Upon my arrival, I was told all the leads were gone and replaced, but this was framed as a good thing, a healthy thing. Four months later the project was shelved overnight. I began raising concerns, as I felt I had just abandoned my entire life and career only to end up in a studio where the people I had come to work with were fired, and the project I was meant to work on shelved with no reason given.”

Tuulik and Klindžić were subsequently offered their own project, but under highly irregular constraints.

“In August 2022, after production on the sequel was stopped, management approached Argo and I to come up with a pitch for a standalone expansion under the Disco Elysium label,” said Klindžić. “We were given only around a week to come up with a fully-fledged game pitch, and we worked around the clock to come up with a new story, new characters, new gameplay mechanics, and a new creative direction, including an initial vision for design, art, and audio. We presented the pitch to management, it was a resounding success. It was greenlit and codenamed X7, and its initial production schedule was set for one year.”

Tuulik, Klindžić, and everyone I spoke to who worked on X7 attest to it not having been allowed a pre-production period, the industry standard planning phase of developing a game. Making a game without pre-production is analogous to writing an essay without an outline, or building a house without blueprints.

“We were set up to fail from the start and it was impossible to catch up,” said Klindžić. “Whenever we raised concerns about this and expressed we needed more writers if the deadlines were to be met, we were accused of not wanting to do our jobs.”

I don’t know if Dora and Argo ever felt in controlAnonymous

I don’t know if Dora and Argo ever felt in control

“Pretty much from the moment the writing team’s pitch was approved in August of 2022, the other teams started production,” Tuulik said. “We didn’t even really know what the story or the characters were gonna be, when art teams were already making first character and environment concepts. I’m sure you can see how this is a big problem, when you’re making a narrative-led game.

“Essentially, the writing team had to work double-time from day one to supply other disciplines with work, whilst trying to write the first dialogues and sketch out the rest of the game at the same time. The writing team consisted of myself and Dora at the time.”

A “be careful what you wish for” moment came for X7 with the cancellation of P1, a sci-fi RPG in development under Disco Elysium producer Kaur Kender, who after leaving the company sued ZA/UM with allegations similar to those from Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere beforedropping his lawsuit at the end of 2022. While the P1 writers added more hands to the project, X7’s breakneck pace and lack of planning in pre-production led to Tuulik and Klindžić struggling to bring the new writers up to speed while still building the narrative of the game.

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

Disco Elysium

One thing that may have fundamentally doomed X7 was an issue of hierarchy: even though Klindžić and Tuulik pitched the project and effectively led development at the beginning, neither was formally designated X7’s project lead. “I don’t know if Dora and Argo ever felt in control,” observed one ZA/UM employee. “You can’t back people into corners and expect them to behave.”

“I didn’t ask for a title, because titles used to be meaningless back then,” said Tuulik, noting that previously for ZA/UM, “writers who started projects had also been effectively leading them.

“That’s how it had been, and was at the time on other projects. That’s how it was on X7 in the first four months, the most productive months.”

“The work we were required to do throughout 2022 and 2023 was analogous to the work of other directors in the studio, but we were not given a title upgrade nor a wage adjustment to match,” Klindžić said. “It resulted in a situation where I performed labor well outside my original role for the studio for over a year without being properly compensated or recognized for it.”

They put Argo through a humiliation campaign.Dora Klindžić

They put Argo through a humiliation campaign.

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

Kim Kitsuragi observes Harry clean and jerking a 225lbs barbell

“Nobody says that things are going to change,” recalled one member of the X7 team, “But suddenly you have no more meetings with writers for some reason and you’re not allowed to send them your work for feedback.” Another ZA/UM employee who was not part of the X7 team told me that “in internal docs there was a lot of shifting around who was responsible for leading the project.”

Klindžić characterizes this as a form of retaliation for Tuulik’s statements in the People Make Games documentary: while the developer made a case for those still working at ZA/UM, he also criticized some of the studio management’s decisions and expressed some admiration and understanding for Kurvitz. “I felt that a strong resentment developed towards Argo for growing too big for his shoes, so to speak,” Klindžić said. “I got the sense that there was resentment for the fact Argo was getting so much support from fans, while [ZA/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus], Tõnis, and the company weren’t.

“They put Argo through a humiliation campaign. They made him apologize to people for what he said in the interview. They undermined his confidence and tried to make him doubt himself. They told him he was incompetent, unqualified, and unfit to lead his own project, demoted him and made him invisible inside the studio.”

A one-game studio?

Employees still at the company expressed confusion and frustration over the decision, especially considering president Tomaszewski’s remarks regarding layoffs in 2023. One common sentiment among those I talked to was that it was just hard to tell if there was a problem on another project or even in a different department on the same project, such is the extent to which ZA/UM’s employees are isolated from each other in its remote work environment.

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

Disco Elysium

There’s a quote from Disco Elysium itself that springs to mind here, one about capitaltaking off its mask of humanity to kill everything you love, but it feels a little on the nose.

“The entire X7 team loved the Elysium world⁠,” Klindžić told me in our last interview. “As fan artists, musicians, iconic voices⁠, we only wanted to keep it going, rather than leave it to wither in some dark decrepit cellar of corporate intellectual property.”

TOPICSBest of

TOPICS

More about game developmentYakuza/Like a Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi says his studio’s new game won’t be that big after all: ‘it’s not modern to have similar experiences repeated over and over again'‘Calm down!’ says Facepunch Studios: Garry’s Mod successor s&box is getting a fan-requested sandbox mode and an alternative to ‘Sausage Men’

More about game development

Yakuza/Like a Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi says his studio’s new game won’t be that big after all: ‘it’s not modern to have similar experiences repeated over and over again'‘Calm down!’ says Facepunch Studios: Garry’s Mod successor s&box is getting a fan-requested sandbox mode and an alternative to ‘Sausage Men’

null

Yakuza/Like a Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi says his studio’s new game won’t be that big after all: ‘it’s not modern to have similar experiences repeated over and over again’

A man with a sausage-shaped head

‘Calm down!’ says Facepunch Studios: Garry’s Mod successor s&box is getting a fan-requested sandbox mode and an alternative to ‘Sausage Men’

Latest

Double headed wizard man holding arms up looking sad

See more latest►

The fall#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

“Most hardcore Disco since Disco”#

Interference#

A one-game studio?#

The fall

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals

“Most hardcore Disco since Disco”

Interference

A one-game studio?