"And we used it to make a video game." More investment came from various contacts and friends, who have proved patient ever since, since they were initially sold on a game that spanned a huge world before the sheer detail of the game they found themselves making caused ZA/UM to squeeze and focus in on one small coastal town location. "He bought it because he was imagining how he'd drive it to Cannes, but they never gave him a prize, so he sold it," Kender says. "It was a very sad and pathetic Ferrari," he says. But they did have access to some money: Kender sold his Ferrari. An open-world RPG, are you insane? It just felt like it's completely beyond any of our abilities, beyond anything we could do financially, even intellectually." Tallinn, after all, had just one other studio at the time, a mobile developer, so there was very little experienced local talent. "And especially a roleplaying game, because the RPG is like the crown jewel, the most complicated thing to make," Kurvitz says. "We have to rub the idea of it into each other's dreams or something, to convince ourselves that it's something that can be done." "The idea that you can make a video game in Tallinn is completely ridiculous," Rostov says. Still, it was a huge deal for ZA/UM to make a video game. "So clear was the vision that I had zero doubts," Kender says. Exploring a vast, poverty-stricken ghetto. Realised as an isometric CRPG – a modern advancement on the legendary Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate. "I was thinking that we'd failed in enough things and I was just going to keep drinking." But Rostov jumped at the idea, so Kurvitz wrote a one-page synopsis which encapsulates what Disco Elysium has become in the four years since: "AD&D meets '70s cop-show, in an original 'fantastic realist' setting, with swords, guns and motor-cars. "I wasn't going to do a video game," says Kurvitz. How Disco Elysium captures our current political moment (opens in new tab) When I got the materials, the photos of the characters and the maps, in person, it was like, 'Oh, shit, this is the stuff'." It was like steampunk, but not vanilla steampunk, it was inspired by the French Revolution. "Before that, you'd hear these whispers going around about some crazy dudes who were doing this weird obsessive D&D thing that wasn't about dwarves and elves but motor carriages and people wearing top hats. "I think I met Robert when I was 17 or something," art director Aleksander Rostov says. "We realised we needed to do something about it, and we put on DJ Tiesto's remix of Adagio For Strings, because it's a really epic and stupid banger." The idea of making a video game wasn't remotely on their minds they simply wanted to open a creative outlet and make their voices heard, and so formed a collective of artists and writers who, over the following decade or so, created music, paintings and books, got into scraps with other collectives, and played Dungeons & Dragons. "We were just hanging around in total squalor and poverty," says Kurvitz, who was the singer in a rock band called Ultramelanhool at the time. Then again, it did come out of a drunken Tallinn evening in 2005. If you want more great long-form games journalism like this every month, delivered straight to your doorstop or your inbox, why not subscribe to Edge here. This feature first appeared in Edge Magazine.
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