Gaming

‘Disco Elysium’ Is Receiving a Documentary Discussing the Infamous Behind-The-Scenes Controversies

‘Disco Elysium’ will be receiving the tell-all documentary it deserves, discussing the many controversies surrounding the beloved game.

‘Disco Elysium’ Is Receiving a Documentary Discussing the Infamous Behind-The-Scenes Controversies
Screenshot: ZA/UM

Disco Elysium is one of the most celebrated and beloved games to ever release. Rightfully regarded among the best-written gaming experiences of all time, Disco Elysium is still a transformative game for many players. Unfortunately, alongside its stellar quality, the game is also commonly known for its… many, many developmental controversies. Which inevitably spawned a thorough documentary.

In May of 2023, People Make Games, a YouTube channel dedicated to investigating gaming’s many scandals and incidents, conducted an investigation of their own into ZA/UM’s widely known fallout.

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Now, another YouTube channel dedicated to hard-hitting, purposeful gaming documentaries, Noclip, will be taking on a fresh perspective of the situation. Announced on their Patreon page, Noclip details the journey of properly cataloging events and interviewing some of ZA/UM’s former developers following their exits from the company.

‘disco elysium’ gets the noclip documentary treatment

waypoint-disco-elysium game
Screenshot: ZA/UM

“We’ve actually been talking to these folks for a few years now. And by ‘these folks,’ I mean Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov, and Helen Hindpere. If you know anything about the post-launch controversy surrounding ZA/UM — the art collective turned studio responsible for Disco Elysium — it’s most likely the fact that these three were fired in October of 2022. The justification for their firings has been the focal point of much of the online discourse surrounding the game and studio for the past two and a half years,” the Patreon post details.

“Our goal, as ever, is to document the development of this game with as much detail and heart as possible. I’ll warn you now, the patron-exclusive extended interviews are going to be pretty fantastic on these ones. We still have a bunch of work to do. But we hope to get our story on Disco Elysium out into the world in the next two months. It’s going to be long. It might be one video, or split into episodes. But we know this is the one opportunity to tell this story. So, we want to ensure we do it right.”

The documentary is set to release at some point over the next two months. In addition to being informative, I hope it serves as some form of closure for the affected parties involved.