A Group of Socialists Created a Hit Game That Tore Them Apart

[–><!–>Disco Elysium is a detective story with the soul of a tortured poet. A role-playing game that gives you the freedom to be a psycho, a saint or a human car crash. After Harry Du Bois wakes up on the floor, he must make sense of both a vexing police investigation and the smoldering wreckage of his personal life.–><!–>

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[–><!–>Along with those central mysteries, the game’s literary prose and serious politics resonated with an audience hungry for mature storytelling. The magazine PC Gamer ranks Disco Elysium, which was released in 2019, as the second-best computer game of all time.–><!–>

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[–><!–>Creating something so radical took a team of outsiders: a group of socialist punks and artists from Estonia who had never made a video game. Though the writers come from a leftist background — they thanked Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at an award ceremony — no ideology is spared from their lacerating critique. In Disco Elysium, you meet capitalists, unionists, monarchists, fascists and communists, all of them flawed, and must decide with whom your sympathies lie.–><!–>

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[–><!–>The creators had no idea that their game, a far cry from the first-person shooters and sports simulations that dominate the market, would become a meteoric success and Estonia’s most prominent cultural export in years. They also had no way of predicting how thoroughly everything would soon fall apart.–><!–>

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[–><!–>“Once it was done and success arrived, all this bad blood and pressure that was held in had a chance to surface,” said Argo Tuulik, a Disco Elysium writer who now runs a competing studio. “Of course it’s sad that it fell apart. But the way I started thinking about it in recent years was that it’s a miracle that the team stayed together for so long.”–><!–>

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[–><!–>There is a bitter irony that the key themes of Disco Elysium — class, labor, capital — would loom over the splintering of its own studio. That the competing voices narrating this real-world drama would come to resemble the warring personas of Harry’s psyche. That a fan base trained on the game’s detective work would become real-world sleuths, attempting to unearth what really happened in forum threads and nine-hour YouTube videos.–><!–>

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[–><!–>“This was a group of friends who had never made a game professionally, who could not have got funding from legitimate channels and so had to make enormous compromises to get it out of the door, like hiring a financial criminal or selling off more of the company,” said Dora Klindzic, who worked at the studio for two years after Disco Elysium was released. “Then all the bad decisions started to pile up when the game actually shipped.”–><!–>

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–>D&D Meets Cop Show<!–>

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[–><!–>The ZA/UM Cultural Association was a collective of leftist writers and artists who gathered in the Estonian capital of Tallinn starting in the late 2000s. They painted, made music and wrote edgy prose on a popular blog called Nihilist.fm. Some played tabletop role-playing games set in a universe of their creation known as Elysium. The steampunk world of urban decay, political turmoil and biting snow resembled their own Eastern Bloc childhoods seen through a cracked mirror.–><!–>

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[–><!–>The dungeon master was Robert Kurvitz, sharp-featured with a sandy sweep of shoulder-length hair, who earned a reputation for his visionary imagination and ability to turn stories into exciting, interactive gameplay.–><!–>

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[–><!–>“Robert loved stories, so he thought to give the world stories back,” said Martin Luiga, a co-founder of the cultural association who played those early tabletop games and then edited for Disco Elysium. Kurvitz’s storytelling gifts, he said, are an obsession with details and a talent for turning narrative into gameplay mechanics. There was also his powerful charisma. “He had intense energy and you got really carried away by his emotions,” Luiga said.–><!–>

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[–><!–>With his friends, Kurvitz, now 40, created a world so rich and layered that he decided to turn it into a novel, spending five years writing “Sacred and Terrible Air.” After the book sold only 1,000 copies, he told GamesRadar, he lapsed into alcoholism.–><!–>

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[–><!–>Kurvitz had published the book with the help of Kaur Kender, a bald, hulking figure with a maze of tattoos who was an enfant terrible of Estonia’s literary scene. In the years preceding Disco Elysium, Kender was charged in a high-profile case with the production of child sexual abuse material because of a novella containing scenes of sexual violence against children. He argued that his work was a satirical exploration of the dark impulses of the human psyche, and was ultimately acquitted of all charges.–><!–>

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[–><!–>It was Kender’s idea to turn the world of Elysium into a video game, leading Kurvitz to write a one-page synopsis: Dungeons & Dragons meets ’70s cop show, a story set in a poverty-stricken ghetto with serious moral themes and socioeconomic depth. They were inspired by computer role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment, which prioritized writerly storytelling and player choice over graphical spectacle.–><!–>

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[–><!–>“I remember going to the door to let him in,” Aleksander Rostov, Disco Elysium’s art director, has said of his early discussions with Kurvitz. “He looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘My friend, we failed at so many things. Let us also fail at making a video game.’”–><!–>

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–>Playing a Great Novel<!–>

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[–><!–>A production cycle that would last five years began in 2015 in a squat in the Old Town neighborhood of Tallinn, where the roof leaked and the electricity would sometimes cut out.–><!–>

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[–><!–>A ragtag band of socialist art punks had turned into a conventional business with shares, venture capital and dozens of employees. Margus Linnamae, who made his fortune from pharmaceuticals and owned one of Estonia’s biggest newspapers, became Disco Elysium’s lead investor.–><!–>

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[–><!–>“I think people naturally gravitate to anything that has a strong sense of integrity,” said Justin Keenan, the principal writer on the game’s expansion. He added, “The quality of the writing, art, music and voice-overs all say: Here’s a complete work of art, rather than simply a commercial product.”–><!–>

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–>Conflicting Narratives<!–>

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[–><!–>When ZA/UM released the game’s expansion in March 2021, which added full voice acting and four new missions where players can deepen their exploration of Harry’s political choices, it was working on a sequel and appeared to be riding high.–><!–>

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[–><!–>A short blog post about the dissolution of the Estonian cultural association that Luiga published in 2022 revealed that Kurvitz, Rostov and Helen Hindpere, another writer on the game, had involuntarily left the company. Kender, one of Disco Elysium’s executive producers, was fired not long after.–><!–>

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[–><!–>Kurvitz and Rostov claimed in a statement that the investors Ilmar Kompus and Tonis Haavel had illegally taken control of ZA/UM and then fired them for asking questions. “The company we built has been looted,” they wrote, arguing that “money that belonged to the studio and all shareholders” was instead “used for the benefit of one.”–><!–>

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[–><!–>At the time, the studio said the employees were fired for legitimate reasons, including failure to produce work, toxic management and attempting to illegally sell the studio’s intellectual property.–><!–>

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[–><!–>ZA/UM continued to design games, but in February 2024 news spread that it had canceled at least two of them, including another expansion and a sequel that Tuulik, one of the game’s writers, said “would have blown Disco Elysium out of the water.” The company also laid off a quarter of its staff.–><!–>

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–>A Five-Way Fight<!–>

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[–><!–>Most of the five games that Disco Elysium alumni are working on will not be released anytime soon, if at all. But that has not stopped fans from closely following the interpersonal conflicts and creative arms race.–><!–>

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–>ZA/UM<!–>

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[–><!–>Justin Keenan–><!–>

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–>Red Info<!–>

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[–><!–>Robert Kurvitz Aleksander Rostov Helen Hindpere–><!–>

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–>Dark Math<!–>

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[–><!–>Kaur Kender Margus Linnamae–><!–>

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[–><!–>Kender used a multimillion-dollar investment from Linnamae, Disco Elysium’s lead investor, to start the studio Dark Math, whose first game, Tangerine Antarctic, is a science fiction story set in a resort in Antarctica in 2086. Its trailer, released when the game was called XXX Nightshift, closely resembles Disco Elysium in layout and in that there are different voices in your character’s head. But Kender said he was planning to switch to a third-person perspective, differentiating it from the Disco formula.–><!–>

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–>Longdue<!–>

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[–><!–>Martin Luiga–><!–>

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–>Summer Eternal<!–>

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[–><!–>Argo Tuulik Dora Klindzic–><!–>

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[–><!–>Summer Eternal, another rival studio, has not announced any details about its game and is the most embattled. It was formed by Tuulik and Klindzic, who left Dark Math after disagreements with Kender and then contributed to Longdue’s story for Hopetown before departing under acrimonious circumstances. (Tuulik has been in legal disputes with Moola and ZA/UM over noncompete clauses and copyright.)–><!–>

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[–><!–>That the real-world drama has not eclipsed Disco Elysium itself is testament to its enduring power. Fans eager for easy resolutions may need to learn a lesson from the game — that there is no ultimate truth, no neat conclusion. Like Detective Harry Du Bois, they must patch together meaning from the ruins and try to move on.–><!–>

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