How do you follow-up your work on Disco Elysium, without just making something that’s too much like Disco Elysium to be as innovative as Disco Elysium was? It’s a hell of a riddle, and also a thing that Summer Eternal, the new studio featuring ex-ZA/UM devs that came with its own manifesto, is grappling with.
So, naturally, it was one of the things I asked the studio’s Argo Tuulik, Dora Klindžić, and, Aleksandar Gavrilović about when I spoke to them about Summer Eternal for an interview which you can read the main bit of here and will be getting a bit more from on this very website over the next few days or so.
“Comparisons and expectations are inevitable,” Klindžić said of the studio’s approach to the game it’ll be making, “but the origin of our work will be our present conditions, our present team, our present reality, not the past which will never be recaptured again, and is a fool’s errand to chase.
“Ultimately, as we build and design this game from scratch, we will evaluate each element only on the basis of whether it does justice to what we as the team want to make today. Of course, as the big man’s quote goes, men do not make their history as they please, so our present will always be informed by our past. But we want to shed all unnecessary baggage and focus on building the future.
“We are approaching this process without intent to ‘outdo’ or even ‘match’ Elysium or to compete with any other company on Earth or in orbit, nor to lay claims to any targets of commercial success. We leave that business to the profiteers. We will work as artists do, which means both eyes on the work, not one on the audience and not one on the competition.”
Tuulik, meanwhile, said: “I think we’re just gonna wing it. ‘No man steps into the same river twice’, says obscure Heraclitus (obscurely). Rather than trying to be different for difference’s sake or same-y as if there was a formula for this, I will follow the dopamine. I trust that what we make will feel familiar but new.”
Gavrilovic, on other hand, went very biggest communism builder in his assessment of the task ahead: “When Lenin wrote about how best to ascend a high mountain, he outlined an important aspect – when you are already on a high vantage point, to ascend higher, you must sometimes take another path, and descend. This descent is often more perilous and is always followed by malicious glee of those who above all wish for you to not succeed. But if we are to achieve our ambitious plan, we need to take our time and first descend the mountain, before attempting an even higher peak, however long it takes.”
Summer Eternal isn’t the only new studio with ex ZA/UM devs taking on this kind of task with a new game – Longdue and Dark Math Games, announced that same week earlier this month, will have to work out how they want to ascend Lenin’s mountain.