While Zero Parades, this year’s RPG from ZA/UM, is following in Disco Elysium’s footsteps in some obvious ways, the similarities could’ve been even more pronounced than the spy thriller that the team ultimately settled on. Early in development, principle writer Siim Sinamäe told PC Gamer, the plot of Zero Parades was focused more on the game world’s fictional equivalent of the real-life International Money Fund, leading to ideas that “essentially felt like police stories.”
They decided they needed to do something different.
“We did a lot of police stories with Disco Elysium,” Sinamäe said. Indeed, Disco Elysium followed amnesiac detective Harrier Du Bois trying to piece together his lost memory while solving a murder. But ZA/UM also astutely noticed that the tenor of conversations around cops has changed just a bit since 2019, when Disco was released.
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“You know how people think of the police these days, it’s a bit different,” he said. “As well, we wanted to challenge ourselves in a different genre. For us that didn’t mean ‘oh, let’s make a shooter’ or some other type of game, but the writing—let’s change the writing. Espionage, thrillers, are very fruitful genres, and we kind of took it from there.”
I asked Sinamäe how his own outlook on the police or politics have changed since he worked on Disco Elysium. “As a poet first and foremost, I think all creative people sustain themselves on whatever the world reflects back to them. And reflections of this day and age are different than the reflections of 1820, 1920, 2020. I would say that personally, if anything, I’m a bit more cynical than I used to be.”
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Writer Honey Watson picked up the torch from there. “It might just be because I was so much younger [in 2019], but there’s a greater sense of political urgency at the moment, particularly in the US, where a handful of our writers are based. But not [just] in the US—everywhere there’s a great sense of political urgency, and it feels like we are at a really decisive moment in determining what our political future is going to be.
“That makes it really interesting to write a spy story, because a spy is someone who is trying to shape the world in a certain ideological image from backstage.”
No pressure channeling all that into the follow-up to the most acclaimed RPG of the decade, right?
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