Disco Elysium writers marvel at how a game made 'in a f**king squalid flat' in Estonia had such a huge impact, and welcomes successors like Esoteric Ebb: 'We make games, but we also like them'
Disco Elysium was a singular experience when it dropped in 2019. There was really just nothing else like it: Most people who wanted to compare it to something reached back to Black Isle's 1999 masterwork Planescape: Torment, because such intricate, hyper-verbose RPGs that work so well are genuine rarities.
That's less the case these days: Esoteric Ebb "is the best game like Disco Elysium that anybody's made since Disco Elysium" in the words of Disco superfan (and PC Gamer editor) Ted Litchfield, Tangerine Antarctic (formerly XXX Nightshift) bears echoes of its forebear, and others are on the way. All of these games owe some amount of debt to the success of Disco Elysium—so how does the team making Zero Parades, the next game from ZA/UM, feel about the sudden uptick in competition in its very specific market?
They feel pretty good about it, it seems. "We make games, but we also like them," Zero Parades writer Honey Watson told our man on the scene Wes Fenlon at this year's Game Developers Conference. "So good games are always gonna be something that we enjoy."
Fellow ZA/UM writer Siim "Kosmos" Sinamäe first expressed wonder that "something we started making in Estonia, in a fucking squalid flat" has had such an enormous impact, particularly in a creative media that's still quite young. "You know, we are on the cutting edge of human culture with these videogames, right? We've had, for 30 years, narrative in videogames. We had movies for 100-plus years, plays for hundreds and hundreds, thousands of years."
But while it's good to celebrate that success, he continued, the studio doesn't want to rest on its laurels, seemingly suggesting that the competition ZA/UM now faces, which wasn't present for Disco Elysium, will help keep it on its toes.
"As they say in the stock market, past performance is not an indicator of future returns," Sinamäe said. "We try not to get stuck on, like, 'Oh, we did this once and now we are there.' No, we have to challenge ourselves constantly and daily, right?
"They have a saying in Russia: When going fishing, there are no czars, because you're only as good as the last fish you caught. There's no use saying, "Six months ago, I caught this, I got this really big one from the river.' We're there today."
It's still early days, but at this point it looks like ZA/UM's fishing trip with the czar might be successful. Wes had a chance to play an in-development build of Zero Parades, a spy thriller with stylistic similarities but its own distinct tone. While questions remain, he said "the writing is consistently fun, and suggests ZA/UM has plenty of ideas for how to turn the act of spycraft into a handful of text choices that rocket off in surprising directions." For a follow-up to a game like Disco Elysium, that sounds like a good place to start.
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