It’s impossible to name just one studio as the successor to Za/Um, but the developers have not left the game industry.
Some of the Disco Elysium developers (more on that later in today’s news…) have founded Summer Eternal, an art collective and RPG studio in one. The team wants to bring in writers and designers who have worked on Disco Elysium at Za/Um, but they also want to see new talent on the team to create something fresh and original in the future.
The goal of the studio is to create a collaborative, liberating, worker-owned space where all workers, all creators, and all players can have a voice. The staff of the studio includes Argo Tuulik and Olga Moskvina, who were among the five writers of Disco Elysium, Lenval Brown, a voice actor known for his voice work on Disco Elysium, Dora Klindzic, who was a principal writer at ZA/UM, Anastasia Ivanova, who was a senior concept artist at ZA/UM, Michael Oswell, who was a graphic designer at ZA/UM, Aleksandar Gavrilovic, who was the CEO of game development studio Gamechuck, and more to be announced in the coming weeks.
“I believe that last time we made something genre-breaking. Discipline-breaking. Something completely new. I am not ready to give that up. The lessons learned, the skills developed, the experience forged – for five fucking years I’ve been waiting to use them. So we went back to the drawing board with one goal in mind, let’s do it all over again, but this time let’s not fuck each other the moment the checkered flag drops. It makes the whole of humanity look bad.
Honesty, transparency, and true equality to the best of our ability are what we vow to uphold in our relentless pursuit of artistic excellence and social change. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, the goal here is to “support the masses against the classes all over the world. We invite you to judge us by our actions, not our words. You *should* question our integrity and scrutinize our methods, for many a money man will put on a ‘Sex Pistols’ shirt to tap into punk chicks. Ask to see our hearts and hold them up to the light,” studio co-founder and Disco Elysium writer Argo Tuulik said in a press release.
And what are the others doing? We’ll talk about that later.
Source: Gematsu, Summer Eternal
