ZA/UM will also release the last writer from the original Disco Elysium roster.
It’s Argo Tuulik, who played a major role in the People Make Games documentary about ZA/UM. Only, according to GLHF, he lost his job at the studio that was supposedly working on a standalone Disco Elysium expansion. The project was codenamed X7 and ended up in the trash after 24 people were laid off from the studio. A few of the original team remain (such as Justin Keenan, who wrote Final Cut and is listed as one of the original game’s editors), but this situation shows that the studio is essentially falling apart.
By 2021, the studio’s management was accused of financial malfeasance, and three key developers had left. Tuulik and Dora Klindžić, the lead writer on ZA/UM, told GLHF that most of the twenty-four developers who were fired were working on X7, and an email from studio CEO Ilmar Kompus also revealed that the project, codenamed P1, is on hiatus, while C4 and M0 remain actively in development. At least one game has already been canceled by ZA/UM since the release of Disco Elysium, indicating that the studio has become more decentralized.
According to Klindžić, when he started working in 2022, it was similar to Yugoslavia in the 1990s: missing all the good things, just existing in the midst of bloodshed. The last two months of the X7 project were full of crisis, burnout and conflict. Tuulik says that after the documentary, the atmosphere in the studio was like being back in post-Soviet Russia. At least five women have left (either under duress or by choice) since the release of Disco Elysium, and Tuulik cited Tőnis Haavel as a major factor. There are no women in the creative management team and few female managers in the company in general.
Tőnis Haavel was one of the producers of Disco Elysium and was convicted in Estonia of defrauding investors in a bad land deal in Azerbaijan. Haavel and Kompus are central figures in the legal dispute between ZA/UM and the three developers (writers Robert Kurvitz and Helen Hindpere, and artist Aleksander Rostov) who were ousted from the company in 2021. All three claim that the company and its valuable Disco Elysium IP were stolen from them, while Haavel and Kompus claim that the developers failed in their duties and created a toxic work environment.
And ZA/UM’s communication to PCGamer is typical PR-speak (they’re expanding during new projects and laying people off after cancellations, and it’s hard to lose talented colleagues and thank them for their work). Oh dear…
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