People Make Games new doc on Disco Elysium drama.

People Make Games has released a new piece exploring the financial background and extensive interviews with most of the players in the conflict between ZA/UM and the creatives behind Disco's setting and writing. It's a mind-bogging complicated back story showing the many business connections between far more people than are publicly in the discussion.

Disco Elysium is a profoundly important game to me. My key take away, as many things in life are, is that two things can be true. Kurvitz may be a brilliant artist and a asshole. The shareholders of ZA/UM may have fired him for toxicity but also be embezzling money. The fact that these sorts of actions and people reflect from the creative work of the game remains...ironic? If that the right use of ironic? It's a beautifully synchronistic melody of sadness.

Even if Kurvitz and Kompus and the rest are all proven as villains, and Disco Elysium was tainted from the start, it will remain as a work something I cherish and admire on the merit of itself. And I feel that specific work speaks to us to question everything, including it's creators and itself. So please, wherever your opinions fall on this, please stay civil in this forum if you comment.

Anyway, here the the video. It's long, it's good journalism and if Disco means anything to you, it's probably a required watch.

I still think there's a degree of poetry to that idea that the people involved in making Disco Elysium are also just a huge fucking mess.

This docu is a bit too long for me but glad there's detailed coverage on this slice of games history. Important work going on here but also hopefully signal boosting it to the unaware.

Nobody comes out of this mess looking good that's for sure. Clearly something very dodgy happening around the finances with the CEO of ZA/UM, but that doesn't excuse the bullying that happened with Kurvitz. I'm not surprised Chris Bratt wasn't satisfied at all with Kurvitz basic dismissal of the complaints ZA/UM staff had raised.

I love Disco Elysium but yeah, "Death of the Author" means at least the game is out there for everyone to experience and form their own judgement.

@gbrading: that statement Kurvitz gave at the end was some really pissy, self-import any theater kid dramatics. “Sorry I’m such a crusader against crime.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure there was a crime, but that’s not the point, the point is that he despised his feelings outweighed their feelings and claimed communism as part of why and as a communist-leaning person myself I feel that very not-communist. It’s actually very emblematic of corrupted communism.

Helen at least put her statements through a PR pass.

I mean this is the game's industry, "Death of the Author" (or Death of the Publisher) is almost taken as read.

Nearing the end of the Ilmar interview, I’m struggling to figure out what the word for this kind of thing is. It’s part audio article, part interview, part podcast recap sans third person interviewer. It’s like watching a NY Times writer publish their article, share their sparsely edited primary interviews and host their own episode of The Daily summarizing their findings all at once.

I’m not even saying it’s bad…but it certainly lacks a lot of, say, traditional marks of journalistic filtration. It leaves me with an odd feeling, albeit significantly less odd than the story he’s covering. Like, in the abstract this isn’t at all different from what Danny does with NoClip, but the lack of b-roll and sitting so deeply in the interviews gives this less nuanced feel for me. I get the intent behind all this, I think…again, it’s just an odd format.

Edit: Having finished, all I can really say is...here I am starting my fifth version of "Det." Harry Du Bois.