December 2019: I had recently arrived in Canada to start a PhD program. My first term had a heavy course load, but I managed to get those As. As a reward for my hard work, I bought myself a monitor so that I could play Disco Elysium on my old laptop. It was a cold, lonely winter as the pandemic started, but the game kept me warm inside. It was like having someone tell you: hey man, yes, you right there—you matter.
In the Disco Elysium subreddit, a fan going by the handle u/rTacoDaddy made the following prediction about a year ago: “The sequel to Disco Elysium will be a hundred thousand stories with a hundred thousand creators.”
Last Friday, when three studios made up of former Disco Elysium developers popped up on the map, teacher and game developer Joachim Despland-Lichtert said on X: “let a thousand discos bloom”. As I did some research on all this, I wrote a feature for DualShockers to discuss the rise of the Disco-like as a subgenre of dialogue-heavy RPGs and adventure games, tying into the promise of a thousand Discos.
XXX Nightshift by Dark Math Games might be the first of the newly announced to make it to release, but a release date is yet to be announced. However, I have covered a couple of other Disco-like games here on Blockhead.
Sovereign Syndicate
Sovereign Syndicate is a steampunk fantasy Disco-like with decent writing and compelling characters.
Clam Man 2: Headliner
Then there’s Clam Man 2, where you play as a clam man who takes up stand-up comedy and goes on wacky adventures.
The Thought Cabinet
Disco Elysium is not only a game in the sense that it stays with you for a long time. You may not even replay it often, but it stays with you. Even if you don’t see it in the news, you think back to it frequently. It just has that haunting quality where the characters and the writing of the skills sit with you, in your gut, like an old relative. It’s like having a dialogue with yourself and learning how to accept yourself.
This old interview with Robert Kurvitz on the development of the Thought Cabinet feature was very popular at the time, and it’s still relevant on this fifth anniversary.
This Game Design Thinking video also delves into the unique concept behind the RPG system in Disco Elysium and how it works in tandem with the peerless dialogue.
Finally, Robert Kurvitz also delivered a Game Camp France lecture this year on the importance of worldbuilding, which is perhaps the most complex element in Disco Elysium, and possibly the most original and integral to the game’s legacy.
It has been a privilege to follow Disco Elysium from the very beginning, when it was still known as No Truce with the Furies; when it was still a rumour going around RPG websites, and no one knew much about it. Then it came and it changed the gaming medium in a way that we are still only beginning to understand. It was only natural that it would become its own subgenre, and we will see what the future holds for it.