Studio ZA/UM's Tone-Deaf Disco Elysium Tweet

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. 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.

“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.”

“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.”

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. 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. “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.

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. 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. It was Kender’s idea to turn the world of Elysium into a video game. As the contributor most familiar with the economics of culture, Kender, now 54, was asked to raise money from investors. “Video games are art and business combined, and that’s the perfect place to be,” he said. He personally financed the first year of the new studio, also called ZA/UM. “I sacrificed everything to make Disco Elysium,”" he recalled. “I sold my Ferrari, my Bentley, even my apartment where my kids were living.”

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. When ZA/UM released the game’s expansion in March 2021, it was working on a sequel and appeared to be riding high. Then it became clear all was not well. 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. 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.” (Kurvitz and Rostov have sued the studio in an unresolved case; Kender filed and then withdrew his own lawsuit.)

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. 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.

According to Tuulik, back in 2020, the management wasn’t happy with Kurvitz and Rostov’s “volatility” and wanted to rein them in. Tuulik said that you could look at the situation differently, but “the malicious idea back then was to sort of also neuter them in a way.” The team wanted to work on a sequel, but the management needed them to finish Final Cut, so the sequel was like a “carrot,” in Tuulik’s words: in your line of sight but unachievable.

At some point, Kurvitz started feeling that he was losing his influence, he didn’t like being “just a writer,” and the shift in the studio’s leadership structure was getting to him. Moreover, Kurvitz would say that Tõnis Haavel, an investor and the studio CEO Ilmar Kompus’s brother-in-law, manipulated him and made him think Rostov was not fit for his art director role. Kurvitz wanted him to relinquish his position and focus on creative stuff only. Eventually, Rostov did admit he was not fit to lead, he was burned out. At one point, either Kurvitz or Haavel suggested they push Rostov out: he would be “sidelined,” and Kurvitz would get his shares. Kurvitz and Haavel pointed at each other when talking about who came up with the plan, so the details are not clear. Whoever the villain was, the damage was done: the members of the “resistance group” didn’t know who to trust. However, they trusted Justin Keenan, the studio’s writer and narrative designer.

In 2021, the developer Zaum Studio OÜ was acquired by Tütreke OÜ, a holding company owned by Kompus. Getting back from a vacation in summer, the team learned that ZA/UM had changed owners, and suddenly, they felt not as important, they lost their high positions. At that moment, Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere started suspecting that the management was trying to bring them down. After one of the “resistance group’s” meetings, where they discussed what to do with the change, Keenan reported it to the management, claiming Rostov called Haavel a financial criminal, and the leadership used his and artist Kaspar Tamsalu’s testimonies to fire Rostov.

In 2022, Kurvitz and Rostov accused Kompus and Haavel of obtaining control over ZA/UM by fraud. They allegedly bought the shares held by Margus Linnamäe, a businessman and investor, becoming the majority shareholder. Tuulik said that while Kurvitz, Rostov, and Kaur Kender, DE’s executive producer, held 10% of the shares each, Linnamäe had 30%, and by buying out this part, Kompus and Haavel managed to change the studio’s structure without the others’ permission, so it seems Kurvitz and Rostov’s open letter was true.

Its key members leaving ZA/UM didn’t stop it from continuing work on other projects. There was, of course, the sequel to Disco Elysium, codenamed Y12. As Klindžić remembers, the team was working on the game when suddenly, the leadership started approving changes to the script, which usually took much more persuasion. This was suspicious, and then one day, the management called a meeting and began discussing a new project. When asked about it, they confirmed the worst: Y12 was no longer in development. Naturally, the developers were devastated, but their questions were left unanswered.

While developers were scared for their careers, abandoning the DE sequel was a good move, in many people’s views, because it would not be the same without the original creators. Aside from Y12, there were X7, a DE spin-off, and P1, a sci-fi game led by Kender – both also canceled. From what we know, ZA/UM is now working on M0, a smaller Elysium game for touchscreen devices, and C4, a large-scale RPG.