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In case you were living underneath a rock with the insulindian phasmid, a whole bunch of new projects and studios that involve developers who worked on Disco Elysium and look like they could well appeal to people who liked Disco Elysium were announced last week. While they all look interesting, the last one that of these things that popped up like an outbusts from Harry Du Bois’ psyche might be the most looks like it might be the most Disco of them all – even coming with its own manifesto.
Coming after the announcements from new indie studios Longdue and Dark Math Games, both of which feature some ex-DE devs working on things that look like they could fit the bill of being spiritual successors of sorts to Harry and Kim’s adventure, there’s another one. It’s called Summer Eternal.
This studio is the brainchild of a group of ex-Disco developers headlined by Argo Tuulik, the last writer from the original game to depart ZA/UM – via a round of layoffs earlier this year – Summer Eternal also currently includes fellow ex-ZA/UMers Dora Klindžić, Anastasia Ivanova, Michael Oswell. Its numbers are rounded out by Aleksandar Gavrilović, secretary of the Croatian Game Development Alliance, and Lenval Brown, Disco Elysium’s narrator.
So, what’s it all about? Well, its creators sum it up thusly: “We must be living at the dawn of a cultural Golden Age, when like mushrooms after rain the companies promising ‘the next Disco Elysium’ are popping up every hour on the hour. It’s a sure sign that the 5th anniversary of the release of this monumental game is approaching and every corporation wants a piece of the fortune.
“However, often forgotten in this money lust are the creatives themselves, first instrumentalized for press releases and afterwards underpaid, silenced, bullied, sued, abused. But it is all of us – the creatives, the workers, the players – who should be holding control over the means of our creation and who should be celebrated on this day. Therefore, we announce today our own vision of a worker-owned co-operative, a complex structure that will ensure that not only moneylenders but every worker, every creative, even every player, has a seat at the table.
“The studio’s task is to gather authors, writers, designers who previously worked together on “Disco Elysium”, as well as new talent, all of us who have yearned to work together on something completely fresh and original, and create a liberating space for us and other veteran RPG developers to finally, after many years, collectively start innovating again in this game space.”
Yep, that sounds pretty disco, with the manifesto, first dev diary, and explanation of the studio’s complex structure – which Gavrilović suggests to be an attempt to create games in a more creative and worker-friendly fashion within the unavoidable constraints of capitalism – all not reading like they’d be out of place as texts you might find while wandering around Revachol.
“I believe that the last time around we made something genre-breaking. Discipline-transcending. Something completely new,” Tuulik wrote in the dev diary, “I am not ready to give up on that. The lessons learned, skills developed, experience forged — for five f**king years I’ve been waiting to put them to use. So we went back to the drawing board with one goal in mind — let’s do it fresh from the start, but this time let’s not f**k each other the moment the checkered flag drops. It makes the entire mankind look bad.”
So, this definitely looks like another thing worth keeping an eye on. Here’s hoping it and those other projects can help quench Disco fans’ thirst for more cool RPGs.