Will the Real Disco Elysium Spiritual Successor Please Stand Up?
Recipe for anarchy
by Khayl Adam · Push SquareThe developers behind groundbreaking RPG Disco Elysium famously (infamously) shouted out Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, while accepting their 2019 GOTY win at The Game Awards. As has been the case with Marx and Engels' own legacy, however, the question of who is creating the true Disco Elysium successor has devolved into messy factionalism (with no fewer than three studios emerging on Friday alone) in a sadly ironic turn for the sad, ironic game.
For those of you keeping score at home (thanks for the assist, TheGamer and IGN), that's a total of five claimants to the Disco Elysium throne, each with varying degrees of legitimacy. The playing field currently looks like this: Original developer (and official IP holder) ZA/UM is seemingly out of the race, having cancelled in 2024 (!!!) a Disco spinoff about "one of the [game's] most beloved characters", which reportedly could have been out in 2025.
Longdue Games is a 12-person outfit boasting several former ZA/UM employees, ex-Bungie, and Rockstar developers. Its unannounced game will be a "psychogeographic RPG," with the studio citing Fallout and Ultima as inspirations.
Dark Math Games has the most to show for itself, countering with a trailer for XXX Nightshift, which certainly looks and sounds quite Disco. Like holy relics, Dark Math has reportedly gathered almost a dozen devs who worked on either the original game or Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, with a total headcount of around twenty.
Then, again on the same day, Summer Eternal, which boasts two of the game's original five writers, dropped a big, red manifesto, claiming to be "artistically driven, creatively led, worker and player owned"; it seeks crowd-funding to create a successor by the people, for the people. Throwing some shade, Summer Eternal went on the offensive: "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 fifth anniversary of the release of this monumental game is approaching, and every corporation wants a piece of the fortune."
Finally, and quite frankly, the most promising project of all involves the lead writer and the mind behind the universe, Robert Kurvitz, and essential art director Aleksander Rostov. Funded by NetEase, the twosome are reportedly working on something new at a studio called Red Info after they were both fired by ZA/UM, kicking off a messy legal spat and the entire sordid affair.
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Was it inevitable that Disco Elysium's developers would fracture, forming rival, bickering factions, just like early adherents of socialism famously did? Rise up, seize the means of production, and make your own Disco Elysium in the comments section below.
[source thegamer.com, via ign.com]
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About Khayl Adam
Khayl Adam is Push Square's roving Australian correspondent, a reporter tasked with scouring the internet for the richest, most succulent PlayStation stories. With five years of experience as a freelance journalist and mercenary wordsmith, RPGs are his first great love, but strategy and tactics games are a close second, genres in which he is only too happy to specialize.
Comments 2
No matter how many "successors" pop up and wants a shot at the Disco crown, it's going to take quite a bit of luck and skill to catch even part of what made the original such a gem of a game.
Either way, to make a deep and interconnected game that has any chance to live up to it's legacy will take years of hard work to put together. Cream tend to rise to the top, so it'll be interesting to see who will half-ass it and who will deliver.
Just imagine seeing Marx as an example of "some of the great people that came before us" while living in the 21st century...
> Sorry for taking the bait, but that's on @khayl
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