Disco Elysium Author Sues ZA/UM Amid Forced Departure

The Disco Elysium controversy reaches a new high with the latest development as series author Robert Kurwitz has sued ZA/UM over what we can possibly deduce is their forceful departure from the company.

Major Takeaways:

• Robert Kurvitz has filed a lawsuit against ZA/UM.
• The hearing will take place on November 28th.

While it has not been explicitly mentioned what the hearing will be about, we assume we will be able to scrounge up more detail in the coming days. The hearing itself is to take place next month on November 28th. 

The lawsuit itself comes from Kurvitz’s own company Telomer OÜ against Zaum Studio OÜ for “information and inspection of documents” and comes only weeks after a handful of key figures were forced out of ZA/UM due to a disagreement, one of whom was Robert Kurvitz himself. 

The departure of writer Robert Kurvitz and Helen Hindpere alongside founding member Martin Luiga and artist Aleksandr Rostov was among the news headlines mere weeks ago. In a post via Medium, Martin Luiga announced the dissolution of the ZA/UM Cultural Association. 

The reason for dissolving the cultural organization is that it no longer represents the ethos it was founded on. People and ideas are meant to be eternal; organizations may well be temporary. I find that the organization was successful overall and most of the mistakes that were made were contingent, determined by the sociocultural conditions we were thrown into.”

This was further corroborated by artist Aleksandr Rostov who later confirmed via Twitter that they were no longer working at the studio. 

It is honestly good to see the original creators fighting back against ZA/UM for how unfairly they were treated by the company.

Their utterly indifferent response to the entire situation a few days following the controversy certainly hasn’t helped smooth things over either. If anything, it only made things worse as people flocked to lambast the company even further. 

There is currently very little idea as to how this lawsuit will impact the development of future Disco Elysium projects, but it appears that many fans have accepted the idea that they won’t accept a new Disco Elysium project that doesn’t involve its original creators and writers who have poured years of work into this world. 

Regarding the lawsuit, it’s fairly impossible to guess which side will come out of this winning but fans of Disco Elysium have been on the side of the original creators since the day this controversy was first brought to light. 

Stay tuned for more updates on this matter as the situation develops further.