A follow-up to the legendary Disco Elysium might have been ready to play within the next year⁠—ZA/UM's devs loved it, management canceled it and laid off the team: 'For a while it seemed like miracles were possible, and with them redemption'

When members of artist collective turned game developer Studio ZA/UM thanked Marx and Engels in their 2019 Game Awards acceptance speech for the RPG triumph Disco Elysium, I felt like I was looking at the future, the ecstatic debut of my new favorite developer, but that isn't how things panned out. Disco Elysium has been #1 on our yearly Top 100 games list four years in a row, but for much of that time, ZA/UM has been engulfed in an existential crisis.

Since 2019, A Disco Elysium sequel, a sci-fi RPG in a new setting, and a full-size Elysium spin-off game have been canceled or «paused,» while a heated personal and legal dispute between founding members hangs over ZA/UM's every move. That last canceled game, described as «a spin-off about one of the most beloved characters in Disco Elysium» and spearheaded by one of the first game's principle writers, wowed other teams at the studio in an internal demo at the end of last year. It could have been on our SSDs as early as 2025. 

This project was cancelled in February, much to the shock of most ZA/UM employees, and nearly the entire team⁠—including that Disco Elysium writer, Argo Tuulik⁠— was laid off. I spoke with 12 current and former employees, including Tuulik and fellow X7 lead writer Dora Klindžić, to find out what went wrong. Studio ZA/UM itself did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

In late 2021, three of Disco Elysium's most senior developers, including the setting's original creator, Robert Kurvitz, lead artist Aleksander Rostov, and Final Cut lead writer Helen Hindpere, left the company on acrimonious terms. The ousted artists have alleged financial malfeasance on the part of company management, with much of their ire focused on Tõnis Haavel, a producer on Disco Elysium who had previously been convicted of investor fraud in the developers' native Estonia in 2014. ZA/UM studio management, meanwhile, insists that the three were fired for refusing to return to work and creating a