OUTRO
Disco Elysium is an extremely unlikely object: a full-length RPG built not by a software company, but by a cultural organization. Not just any cultural organization! A roaringly unsuccessful group of writers, artists and political thinkers - from Estonia. A dark, tiny, angry, improbably stylish place where Tarkovsky filmed his undying masterpiece Stalker and Nolan also tried to do something with Tenet.
By the time development on Disco Elysium started we were full-blown pariahs. What's a village idiot who's not harmless? The village leper? We were that. Fresh off an unsuccessful "occupation" of a national cultural magazine - a suicidal manoeuvre that constituted the pathetic crescendo of our national careers, an unremovable stain, an unforgivable sin - we were somehow both far left and neoliberal. Here's the jiffy, Bob: We had help from the governing neoliberal party. The Minister of Culture resigned over the affair. It was Big Shit. And we were in it. Inside Big Shit. An unholy alliance of neoliberals and communists! Everyone who despised neoliberals, and everyone who despised communists, despised us. Which was everyone.
Let me tell you, to be despised in Estonia is not "cool" Estonians don't despise you in an overt and sanctifying manner. You're not a martyr, you're a joke.
So no, not a sound move. A comrade described our situation circa 2013 in his typically irreverent phrasing: "Can't get laid by my own mother."
So why did we destroy our careers commandeering a pitifully small piece of journalistic jetsam? (The fabled Cultural Magazine had a weekly print of 1,500 units!). The truth of the matter is, we did it because I was drunk. I was drunk, I posted something on our blog. Something-something. Gulp. Facebook. The passage of time smears the rest; all I'm left with is the memory of opening a bottle of champagne in the headquarters of that weird little newspaper. Thinking: This is history. And: I should get more champagne before the store closes at 10.
It wasn't exactly the October Revolution.
After the Not-October Revolution, our little group was facing a big problem. We couldn't do anything in Estonia any more. Probably ever. What had been an uphill battle had become sheer impossibility. You're left with an unsolvable puzzle. You can't write in your own language any more. And the lovely people you've spent your whole life concentrating under one flag have nothing to do there, because it's the flag of leprosy.
We had just one thing left to do - build a revolutionary RPG. Okay just one thing. We also had to learn to code, write in English, raise millions in financing, learn to produce software, QA software... wake up at 7 am for five years straight. Take two months off over sixty months of work. Hire people, lay off people, watch the entire development team and a producers walk out six months before release leaving us with one heroic programmer and one Polish white-label company to QA a million-word long RPG.
During those indescribable years our little Organization, ever fond of slogans, flew such mottos as: THE MAGNIFICENT UNDERTAKING, READ FIRE!, and TEN BRAINS HYPERTHREADING. The hyperthreading - the multitasking challenge of writing, leading a team of writers, designing, and participating in the leadership of the company - felt like it was
literally making my brain bleed. I felt lesions forming under my own skull. Others in the Organization reported similar sensations. We developed a lifetime of mental disorders, machine-like loyalty, and a martial adherence to sobriety. (The champagne train didn't make it far into production).
On October 12, 2019, we released Disco Elysium to a go+ Metacritic score. In December, we won four Video Game Awards. In 2020, PC Gamer placed Disco Elysium at number 1 in their "100 Games To Play Right Now" list, just ahead of Divinity: OS 2 and The Witcher 3. We got Mac Game of the Year, PC Gamer Game of the Year, three BAFTAs. Incredible fan effort helped translate Disco Elysium into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Korean, Russian, and French... Because you went on Steam and bought Disco Elysium, we got to pay back our investors. We also produced a perfected Final Cut edition of the game, for consoles, with "too cool to have in the original release" political quests and full VO.
For us, in our small lives, Disco Elysium is a miracle. Because what are extremely improbable things, if not that?
That miracle started in the headquarters of that absurd little cultural magazine in 2013, where we - in the words of the Swedish indie band Kent - "destroyed our lives with our friendship." We would not have done it otherwise. You don't reforge the tattered remains of your cultural organization into a blood-and-grinding-gears video game company because it's nice. And natural. You do it because you're utterly out of options. The pitiful absurdity of our national disgrace, and our vehement reaction to it, marks a point of divergence from fate. Something went wrong in the sequence of events. We lost our shit. In hindsight, it's almost as if we self-destructed strategically. Perhaps we did? I certainly saw little worth in my life, other than to smash it against the wall of the Magnificent Undertaking.
There is this mysterious moment in Werner Herzog's Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World. I'm talking, of course, about the Deranged Penguin - a solitary penguin who, for no apparent reason, takes off from its flock, waddling off toward an imposing Antarctic mountain range. A solitary black spot. Receding. Thousands of miles of nothingness ahead. Herzog asks, in his guttural German accent: "But why?"
Here's why: the Deranged Penguin was depressed. There was a chemical state in its head that gave the penguin suicidal intuition. An entire framework of possibilities that was unavailable to its kin - with their precious lives - became available to the Deranged Penguin. Within this vast and nothing-filled framework it tottled off on a fatal adventure. With a vanishing chance to become one of those strange penguins who suddenly appear on a beach in Australia - ready to start a new species.
2.
Desperation and willpower alone would not have delivered us from the bigness of the shit we were in. We also had Elysium - a collection of ideas in the form of another world, a paracosm we'd been working on since the turn of the millennium when we were about 15.
In child psychology, a paracosm is a mental construct developed by (often lonely) children and early teenagers. It is a fantasy world secluded from ours, featuring new words for common and novel phenomenon, intricate taxonomies of nations, animals etc. Emily Bronte had one. Henry Darger had one. Children tend to forget their paracosms as the Real World imposes its terms (around 13-15).
That did not happen to Elysium. Elysium was always going to be massive. Large enough to blot out our entire reality. Messianic. Transatlantic.
Elysium: the Crown of the World.
Elysium: the Real World is an embarrassing fantasy construct and Elysium is real.
Hence, Elysium survived contact with the Real World through competition. It had its genesis during the turn of the century as a high fantasy setting. With - I would say "some interesting ideas." Back then we were over the moon about it. We wrote incessantly. Mostly spells, hundreds if not thousands of them, each exactly one page. We visited Elysium via pen-and- paper role-playing, using a proprietary system that later became Disco Elysium's Metric. "We" were a group of 5-10 highschool dropouts called The Overcoats (it was terribly cold outside and we wore thick coats), anarchists of some sort, with the motto: "Today we drink tea; tomorrow we rule the world"
Unironically, we intended Elysium to be the vessel of this conquest.
After all - it was all we had. Truancy means vagrancy, unemployment, an assortment of mental illnesses. Seeing your friends go off to University to become "real people" and have things like a PC to play Baldur's Gate 2 on. The need for a paracosm did not dissipate as the Aughts rolled on - it intensified. With nowhere to go and -22 centigrade temperatures outside, we knew we had to become "artist-people" of some sort to survive. Yet it was hard to write anything in this "fallen world," as early Christians put it. The names themselves seemed compromised, a catwalk parody: London, Milan, Paris. A shudder of loathing still overtakes me as I write them.
Revachol, Mirova, La Scala del Mesque - now that I could write. An implacable air hung over the states and cities. The cold light of the mind. Grand. A quality we've come to call elytical. Even basic terms for everyday machinery needed to be changed to preserve this intangible quality. Motor carriage. Graffito. Sprechgesang. (What they call rapping.)
However, the version of Elysium we had then was not that. It was "Revachol, something-something, name missing, something lame." After a year or two of spell-writing the result was deemed "weak." Naive (which it was). We couldn't bin it, however - it was too big to fail. So we started replacing things: names, concepts, characters. Everything smaller and less credible than reality had to go. Circa 2002, we invented the pale. By 2005, we'd discarded medievalism, the pseudo-renaissance, and the industrial revolution, replacing it with modernity: plastic telephones, cops, communism, the international currency. (The spells, too, had to go. A term you have yet to encounter - extraphysics - pushed them out. Magic, we realized, needed to remain a complete unknown.)
The world around us was getting larger and darker. To keep up, Elysium needed to be even larger and more terrifying. Moreover, the world that ends all worlds ought also be more beautiful than reality. More extreme. We were anarchists, after all - growing into hardboiled Marxist-Leninists on empty stomachs. The alternative need not only to outgrow, but also to outclass the Real World and its satanic complexes. It quickly became apparent that in order to go "further than Pärnu" (Pärnu is a tiny beach town 100 kilometres from Tallinn) we needed to outdo History.
3.
Around then we started reading philosophy and history to supplement our missed educations. So as to not "remain idiots." Confession time: I did not know what "left" and "right" meant in politics until I was 20. Wikipedia, I remember, was an immense tool at the time (for those with internet access, which was not everyone). Soviet-era dialectical materialist works were also indispensable, along with newer translations.
Therein, a picture began to unfold before us: The Real World and its 8,000- year history were not so small and easy to outdo. There were obscure wonders, like the settlement of Piramiden in the Antarctic, or Sir Francis Younghusband, alongside grand central events like the French Revolution. This - by way of Soviet-era philosophy textbooks - led us to the central principle of Elysium's worldbuilding: Hegelianism.
The grand, impenetrable system of G.W.F. Hegel - the philosophy of history - taught us two things. First, any truly believable world not only has but is history. Second, the only believable history is progress. A domino-tumble of opposing ideas has led us here. Yet built worlds exist in stasis. They are theme parks where the past is not at all different from the present. The Old Republic is precisely like the New Republic: lame as balls. It's almost as if they barely had the imagination to come up with one version of their cosmos and were unwilling (or unable) to imagine it in motion. Commercial paracosms are static, reduced versions of reality. Just the space nonsense, please. I'll have the cyberhacker and nothing else.
We did not want a commercial paracosm. It was un-Hegelian. We wanted a quasi-sacral object complex. All that is interesting and terrible about history - and only that. Magnified. Rarified. Spreading outward from reality, like a dark grey solar corona. The crowning ceremony of the world.
So we took the previous, discarded versions of Elysium - the bronze age and the Age of Sail and the industrial revolution, even the medievalism - and turned them into historic periods within the setting: Palm & Pine, the Franconigerian Century, the LGM (Last Glacial Maximum). This
allowed for distinct esthetics, which in turn informed each other. Across two centuries the oily black gold of Franconegro melted into the cream of Dolorianism. The bright colours of Palm & Pine are still visible, faded underneath Modernitas - the present horizon of Elysium.
Circa 2007, this became Elysium's innocentic system. A procession of World Spirits on horseback - Polycarp, Dolores Dei, Her Innocence Sola. The innocentic system and the layers of history that came with it - an Elysium that suddenly and vertiginously expanded into the fourth dimension - was the final touch. Eight years and many pen-and-paper campaigns later it was finally time for the world to meet its Triumphant Adversary. Read it and weep, Asia. Greet the great, America.
This encounter would, of course, come in the form of a novel. In Estonian, a language (badly) spoken by one million people. Sacred and Terrible Air took five years to write. When we released it in 2013 it was read by one thousand people. But wait - not all is lost! I was recently informed a national literary magazine voted it number 2 in the "debut of the decade" category. It lost (by a long mile) to a young poetess who I'm sure is exquisite. In the "not debut - actual top novels of the decade" category, it was not mentioned. Still, even after all these honours, Sacred and Terrible Air did not make a dent in the international culture market. Star Wars was not de-throned.
4.
In 2013, after the release of Sacred and Terrible Air, "the international culture market" and "the Western culture monopoly" were the subject of much talk around the Organization. Something had happened. Around 2009, we relaunched as ZA/UM, an altogether more ambitious formation. ZA/UM was formed by first-phase Elysium-builders Robert Kurvitz (lead writer/un-official figurehead), Martin Luiga (writer/chief ideologue) and Jüri Saks (concept artist/spiritual recluse) - to the tune of D] Tiesto's remix of "Adagio for Strings" one rainy afternoon.
We had recently come to the realization that we were losers. Cast-offs. Excluded from the core of society by our inability to play ball with the education racket. And other "preconceived systems" like having a job.
Culture was hegemony, we declared - that's a cool word for “power" - and we had none. Power came from organization and organization came from people. We had some people. In lieu of a career we'd been building friendships and ideas. Argo Tuulik (writer/car mechanic) and Aleksander Rostov (art director/art director) quickly joined both were former Overcoats and hardened veterans of the Elysium project.
Together, we set out on a talent-grab. An eponymous blog - ZA/UM (both "for the mind" and "from the mind" in Russian) - became our beacon. We were doing some serious numbers. Two-hundred daily visitors. Sometimes 800. Success of this magnitude was bound to attract talent hungry to share in the limelight - and so it did. Our growing ranks included four crucial talent-acquisitions: Jim Ashilevi (VO director/vaguely familiar theatre-person), Ruudu Ulas (producer/visual artist with low self-esteem), Kaur Kender (producer/disliked 'gos relic), and Helen Hindpere (writer/ child prodigy - she was 14 (!) when she joined our doomed cabal). Yet with all our weight we could not move more than 1,000 units of Sacred and Terrible Air off the shelves.
I don't know, man. Maybe the book just isn't that good?
Either way, we lost our patience when it failed. We were hungry, angry, drunk, high, and desperate after 12 years of destitution. So, when the opportunity for corruption presented itself (as it often does where art and politics meet) we commandeered a national cultural magazine. I said I was mostly drunk and I stand by it, but I'm afraid "changing society" was also a motivation. (We had our Guy Fawkes masks on so tight they were squeezing our brains out of our noses.)
Aaaaaaaaaand it was a clownish disaster! So clownish, in fact, that it shifted us from "completely ignored" to "dark joke of the year" mode. Several desperate and unsuccessful attempts at rehabilitation later, personal belongings were sold and the private sector was met with an enticing opportunity. Maoist wildmen ZA/UM are making a... (am I reading this right?) computer role-playing video game?
At this time, we were reluctantly joined by a handful of professionals who wanted to make a video game and were relatively uninterested in Maoist- Guzmanist cultural politics. Sim Raidma (technical artist/semi-failed rock-person) and Kaspar Tamsalu (concept artist/wannabe Russian).
Our pitch - to ourselves, as much as to the world - was that we see a chink in the armour of the international culture market. A way past Pärnu. After the Soviet Union fell, Eastern European culture-people thought everyone in the West was just dying to buy their brown paintings and books about how bad Stalin was. The CIA was going to keep financing their little dissident movements forever - only now against the ills of capitalism! Here in the United States our art is so banal - if only Kalev Mark Kruzhinski and Yana "Polki Molki" Karisoo came and showed us what culture really is.
Surprise! The colossal culture monopolies of the West depend on their produce for prestige, capital gains, and planetary-scale psychological conditioning. They are quite happy without Polki Molki.
Unless, it turns out, Polki Molki is a video game.
I sound cynical, but I'm not. (I just like saying "Polk Molka" because i reminds me of my childhood, and of girls with hair like moonlight). Our intention was sincere. Hegel says there is a World Spirit. It is on the march toward Absolute Knowledge. As Soviet artists - perhaps the last soviets artists- it was our duty to add to the relay. To keep history moving. Onward to the outer cosmos and the stars.
Now, imagine you really believe this to be your duty. Something you have to do, or you've failed as a person. The Soviet project was always about messianic salvation. Soviet artists took on insane responsibilities: to fight against Heat Death, or to build a new God. The horizon was always millions of years in the future. We inherited this condition from our heroes: Arvi Sing, Tönu Trubetsky, Vladimir Mayakovski.
Built worlds were clearly the biggest thing out there. And we had a really big one: Elysium. So, with a pickaxe in hand, we hacked loose the financing for a AA/indie role-playing game and kept making it until its Metacritic score was predicted as 90+ and thus it was safe to launch.
If this all sounds like quite the ride then that's because it was. But let me impress on you, in closing, what it was not: chaos. Bohemianism. Rock- and-roll delinquency.
Software production is not impossible. It's not magic. It's scalable, quantifiable - a beginner can do it. But it's also meticulous, mentally taxing, and almost psionically psychological work. You have to wield yourself to an improbable degree, like a chess piece. You have to forgive and move on from things it does not feel natural to move on from. And you have to manage an immense amount of fear and paranoia.
It was crisis after crisis, but - in the end - I'm not surprised we were able to handle them. Production on Disco Elysium began in 2000, not in 2014. For 14 years we built the world and the organization. Even (and especially) under capitalism the most precious resource is access to talent. Talent is attracted by other talent - and is kept together by principles. You collect talent for it to collect talent. The critical mass appears to be around 4-10. Then it's about keeping it together before everyone self-destructs, while agents of competing talent-drives (private enterprise and Universities, mostly) try to steal them away from you with lures of income and social prestige - things you don't have. Against public and private power, the lonely utopian offshoot is always at a disadvantage. It takes a real idea to counter-pull against the dual abyss. (It doesn't hurt to be corrupt either - go for it! Be as corrupt as possible. Those who want you to remain lily- white have no ideas and no principles to compromise for.)
For us, Elysium was that idea. It kept us together and gave us something to work on. We couldn't say someone else can do this. The object was unique and we its guardians. We felt otherworldly promise in that interisolary mass, connected by invisible lines through the pale. Seol, Khasht-Kor, Innu NR, Marel-Över-Världen... 4.6 billion people, after all, are not easily let down.
Elysium is a collection of ideas into which we poured all of our love of the world. And its history. It's what we think is worthwhile in all this recollected, resequenced, and reconceptualized. Its people are heroic even when they're jokes. Its failures are majesty and terror. It's large. It is a geopolitical dream seen by non-entities. Nobodies from nowhere. Its value is inversely proportionate to our own size.
So far we've only managed to show you a tiny, insignificant corner of it: the district of Martinaise in Revachol West, on Insulinde. I can not begin to tell you how introductory it is. ("Disco Elysium" means "I learn Elysium"). It's small. A matchbox world. It's all we had money for.
Yet because of You - you angel, you legend, our comrade in arms - because of your interest in our idea, we get to see more of it. Jamrock, I hope. And then to other isolas.
Thank you. We hope you enjoy the Final Cut.
Robert Kurvitz, lead designer / lead writer
Brighton, England
December 2020
Scanned and Distributed by Hex
