“I will follow the dopamine”: the co-author of Disco Elysium spoke about the approach to creating a new RPG

Summer Eternal founder Argo Tuulik, the last of the Disco Elysium screenwriters to leave the ZA/UM studio, spoke in an interview with VG247 about parting with the world of detective RPG and his approach to creating the team’s first game.

Image source: ZA / UM

According to Tuulik, as a creative person he is happy to try something new, but from an “ethical, moral and legal” point of view, “Kuno does not like this whole situation.”

«Kuno [worries] how this creative work could have been taken away from him and his friends who worked on it. For Kuno, this fight is not over yet,” Tuulik said meaningfully.

It was Tuulik who invented and wrote the young foul-mouthed Kuno

As for the Summer Eternal project, Tuulik has several ideas that are incompatible with the world of Elysium that have interested him for years, but fortunately he did not try them until he gained experience at Disco Elysium.

They are not going to follow the beaten path in Summer Eternal: “Instead of trying to stand out or repeat success (if only there was some kind of formula for this), I will follow the dopamine. I believe that we will do something familiar and new.”

«Disco Elysium shaped me as much as I shaped it, and for that I will be forever grateful,” says Tuulik

«What a year ago seemed like a generational tragedy today smells like spring and a new beginning. Instead of Disco 2, assembled on autopilot, trauma and psychostimulants by people with aneurysms, we got several distinct artistic directions… My head is spinning just thinking about it,” Tuulik shared.

The studio does not intend to compete with Disco Elysium, but they are positioning their untitled RPG as a “cultural mega-project” that “in terms of complexity and ambition will not be inferior to our wretched and beautiful world.”