Despite Disco Elysium Mobile aiming to ‘captivate the TikTok user,’ it looks surprisingly decent—but it’s still insulting to Disco’s ousted creators

Today, Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM announced a “reimagining” of the groundbreaking CRPG for mobile devices. Instead of the original top-down perspective, this version of the game will rely on semi-animated frames of art from more cinematic angles⁠—like a hybrid of Myst and a visual novel.

Before getting into its wider context and a retread of the ZA/UM saga so far, let’s break down the game itself: It’s not gacha microtransaction Disco⁠. ZA/UM may have an adversarial relationship with its game’s own fans, but I don’t know if even the most cynical, 2011 EA-brained composite of the worst publishing exec imaginable could have been that out of touch. It’s set to be ad-free, on the Google Play Store (not the Apple App Store as of yet), and will offer two free chapters as a demo.

The idea is pretty good in a vacuum. If it manages to preserve all of Disco’s reactivity and RPG depth from a new perspective tailor-made for mobile devices, that is a genuinely impressive creative and developmental lift. As a lover of this setting and story, I’d be thrilled to see familiar scenes and areas from a closer perspective.

What’s more, it’s a fairly clever way of expanding Disco’s potential audience. There have been mobile ports of PC RPGs like Beamdog’s Infinity Engine remasters or the Knights of the Old Republic games, but there’s just an inherent compromise to trying to fit a traditional game on a touch device⁠—that shitty little transparent touchscreen gamepad you so often see is the stuff of nightmares to me.

I don’t think I could ever convince my mom to sit down and play a CRPG with a mouse and keyboard, or even a gamepad, but with a phone? That’s a way I could conceivably get a lot of people I love to experience this story and world that I care about, and I can’t deny that the idea stirs something in me.

It looks good as well. When I spoke to anonymous ZA/UM employees about the game for an investigation into ZA/UM’s canceled Disco expansion (and accompanying mass firings) last year, I was told that some of Disco’s original art team would be providing work on the project, then codenamed “M0.” That definitely holds true with our first look: The art for Disco Elysium Mobile is pretty gorgeous.

But Disco Elysium Mobile does not exist in a vacuum. Three key artists behind Disco Elysium, including setting creator Robert Kurvitz, left studio ZA/UM in 2021 under acrimonious circumstances.

The three allege that Disco Elysium was essentially stolen by studio management through financial malfeasance, while that management in turn says that the three were fired with cause. The resulting legal battle played out in the press for a time, but I think the announcement of Disco Elysium Mobile quietly reveals its result: ZA/UM has retained ownership of the Elysium IP.

Last year, Disco Elysium writer Argo Tuulik was fired from ZA/UM along with his entire team when their Disco expansion, codenamed X7, was canceled. Tuulik, as well as 11 other current and former ZA/UM employees, describe the project as having been mismanaged, with a viable prototype having been produced despite untenable working conditions.

With that in mind, this project feels fundamentally disrespectful to those artists in a way I find difficult to reconcile. Their work is being transformed and recontextualized into a new product they will not profit from. Kurvitz has stated in interviews that the 5 million plus sales of Disco Elysium already do not reflect in his personal finances.

This industry is rife with the creators of fictional worlds and great games losing—or never even owning in the first place⁠—the wonderful things they put into the world. Fallout is a great example of that.

Original series creator Tim Cain and New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer have both expressed a Zen attitude about this simple fact. But it feels different when it’s Disco Elysium, a project born of a deeply personal vision and years of effort, covered in the distinctive fingerprints of singular creators.

It would almost be easier if this were some offensive mobile gacha Disco Elysium⁠—then the project would be easy to dismiss out of hand. On that front, I do not understand why Disco Elysium Mobile’s announcement needed to have the following quote from Disco Elysium producer Tõnis Haavel⁠, who sometimes goes by Denis Haavel⁠: “We intend to captivate the TikTok user with quick hits of compelling story, art, and audio, ultimately creating an all new, deeply engaging form of entertainment.”

Haavel has been the primary ZA/UM-side face in the legal and creative battle over the Elysium IP, as well as personally blamed by the X7 team for the project’s difficulties. For those reasons, Haavel is not well-liked among Disco Elysium fan communities online.

“Quick hits of compelling story, art, and audio” for the “TikTok user” (?) is not very Disco. I’m much more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to ZA/UM’s other project, codenamed C4. That espionage-focused RPG will be in a new fictional setting, a clean break from Elysium, and I’m willing to let its developers’ work speak for itself.