How do you follow up on your work on Disco Elysium without just making something that’s too much like Disco Elysium to be as innovative as Disco Elysium? It’s a big mystery, and it’s one that Summer Eternal, a new studio made up of former ZA/UM developers, is grappling with and putting forth its own manifesto.
So naturally this was one of the questions I asked the studio’s Argo Tuulik, Dora Klindíi and Aleksandar Gavrilovi. You can read the main part of an interview I had with them about Summer Eternal, and you’ll get more from this site in the next few days or so.
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“Comparisons and expectations are inevitable,” says Klinde Ika. Speaking about the studio’s approach to the games it will make, “But the roots of what we’re doing will be our current conditions, our current team, our current reality, not the past, because the past can never be recaptured, and It’s a stupid errand to chase.
“Ultimately, as we build and design this game from the ground up, we’ll only evaluate every element based on whether it fits with what our team wants to make today. Of course, as the big guys say, men don’t create whatever they want history, so our present is always determined by our past, but we want to get rid of all unnecessary baggage and focus on building the future.
“We are approaching this process with no intention of ‘surpassing’ or even ‘matching’ Elysium, or competing with any other company on Earth or in orbit, or claiming any goal of commercial success. We leave this business to profiteers. We We will work like artists, which means our eyes are focused on the work, not on the audience and not on the competition.”
Meanwhile, Tulik says, “I think we’re just winging it.” Heraclitus says (vaguely) that “one never steps into the same river twice.” Rather than being different for the sake of being different, or being different because they seem to be the same. There’s a formula that I follow with Dopamine and I believe that we make something that will feel familiar yet fresh. “
Gavrilovich, on the other hand, became the biggest builder of communism in his assessment of the tasks ahead: “When Lenin wrote about how best to climb a high mountain, he outlined an important aspect — —To climb higher when you are already on the high ground, sometimes you have to go another way and then descend. This descent is often more dangerous and is always accompanied by the malicious joy of those who first wished you not to succeed. But if. For us to realize our ambitious plans, we need to take our time, descend first, and then try to climb higher, no matter how long it takes.”
Summer Eternal isn’t the only new studio with former ZA/UM developers taking on such a task with a new game – Longdue and Dark Math Games announced in the same week earlier this month that they’ll have to figure out how they want to ramp up Lenin Mountain.
