"There is no way a boardroom can direct Disco Elysium 2": Community reacts to the news of founding members "involuntarily" leaving the company

For those who love it, Disco Elysium remains an experience like none other. The world is carefully and tightly knit, with its stories and characters drawing inspiration from the world at large and the devs themselves. Yet, according to recent developments, these very members who breathed the title into life are no longer part of the ZA/UM company.

Martin Luiga, a founding member and Secretary of the ZA/UM Cultural Association, shared a post on Medium where he stated that the association was being dissolved. He clarified that the cultural association should not be confused with the ZA/UM company.

He went on to state that neither Robert Kurvitz, lead designer, Helen Hindpere, writer, nor art director Aleksander Rostov are working at the company anymore and "involuntarily" left it at the end of last year. Luiga notes that this:

"would seem like bad news for the loving fans that are waiting for the Disco sequel."

Speaking about the reason for the dissolution, Luiga explained that "it no longer represents the ethos it was founded on" and that "people and ideas are meant to be eternal; organizations may well be temporary."

He went on to mention that the organization was indeed successful and the mistakes made were contingent, "determined by the sociocultural conditions" they were thrown into. He signed off on a bittersweet note:

"For a while, it was beautiful. My sincerest thanks to all that have rooted for us."

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Disco Elysium players are expectedly unhappy with the recent developments involving ZA/UM

The news would likely come as a surprise to many fans who regularly spent their time in Disco Elysium's beautiful world and were hopeful that a sequel from ZA/UM would further explore the lore. Earlier this year, ZA/UM had a job posting for artists with "a love of sci-fi and space."

As the news spread, speculation started to run wild regarding the reason behind the core members leaving, with many pointing fingers towards the tie-up announced by Amazon to bring Disco Elysium to the silver screen. Upon being asked whether the "money people" fueled this exodus, Luiga replied in the comment thread:

"The money people come from a background which says you gotta grab when you can even when it in fact does not make much economic sense."

In a comment on the Medium post, Luiga did accept that they would not have managed to get any initial investment without these people but that "they take pains to manipulate dozens of people to steal, in the end, from themselves, just because they happen to be very proficient in that kind of an operation."

Disco Elysium is a brutal take on the multifaceted nature of the human mind and the world that surrounds us. It paints a living history of a city informed by a violent past and lumbering towards an uncertain future. The very nuance in its political criticism is something that is hard to find.

Since the news emerged, fans have been sharing a quote from an in-game character Joyce Messier, a representative of the conglomerate Wild Pines Group. It goes:

"One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma's coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would *critique* capital end up *reinforcing* it instead..."

Fans are also worried about how any movie/show adaptation of Disco Elysium will turn out to be, given that the game's signature charm heavily depends on the agency that the player enjoys in shaping up the protagonist and figuring out what is going on.

The intricacies, critiques, and nuances will likely be streamlined in an on-screen adaptation with dialogs and paratexts tweaked to represent various entities differently.

One commented that they were not "particularly devastated" over ZA/UM's dissolution or Disco Elysium losing its original creators because they had a story to tell, which they did wonderfully. Furthermore, the creators can still band together to make more such stories.

Yet, what annoys them is that one of the lasting legacies of Disco Elysium will likely be the Amazon show, which, "instead of simply leaving [it] well enough alone and letting it be a great self-contained story with a creative vision behind it, would give it the Watchmen treatment and repeatedly reanimate it as a rotting corpse of its former self."

For those who wanted one more glimpse into the world of Elysium, Lugia did say:

"I think that things with the sequel are actually sweet enough, you might even get it the way it was meant, it might take a sh*t ton of time but RPG fans are sorta accustomed to waiting, ain't they?"

Yet, one will be worried about how such a sequel will turn out to be, given the heart and soul of its predecessor have "involuntarily" left the company. Only time will tell if we will ever see a Disco Elysium sequel, but fans will surely be hoping that they will collaborate again together sometime in the near future.

Maybe now, we will finally get the long-awaited English translation of Sacred and Terrible Air, Kurvitz's Estonian novel that inhabits the same world as Disco Elysium and was published back in 2013.