Ex-ZA/UM developers reveal Red Rooster, an "incendiary RPG" that is very intenti

Résumé de l'actualité

Back in 2024, we heard about the formation of Summer Eternal: a new studio composed of Disco Elysium writer and world-builder, Argo Tuulik, and other veteran ZA/UM staff such as Dora Klindžić, Anastasia Ivanova, and Michael Oswell. Aleksandar Gavrilović, secretary of the Croatian Game Development Alliance, and Lenval Brown, Disco Elysium's narrator, are also part of the crew.

Since then, we've heard nothing from the new collective, but earlier this month, the studio got in contact with me to gauge interest in the Summer Eternal Anthology, a 500-page physical book that's part-treatise on the cultural and labour impact of the video game industry, and part-development journal for its newly-announced "incendiary RPG", Red Rooster.

In Red Rooster, you play as Redrick Roost, a white-collar inmate thrust into the role of an arson investigator who partners up with an opiate-dependent mathematician. Together, they investigate a string of arson that all seems to connect to Redrick's brother who is none other than - you guessed it! - the city's fire chief. Per Summer Eternal, the game is set in a "fractalised border archipelago" of the tri-partie city of Arta-Tantor. It's all very political alternate history stuff, with a "strong science-fiction undercurrent". As Red Rooster's tagline puts it, "Fight fires to get to the truth of your world. Start fires to get to the truth about yourself."

Summer Eternal is calling Red Rooster an "incendiary, physics-driven RPG combining the best of cerebral, worldbuilding-rich RPGs with the genetics of physics-driven immersive sims". Very ambitious, then. The studio also notes the game is "fully physics-driven" and full of objects you can move, manipulate, and burn - the team wants you to "exert your physical existence" upon the world. "RPG worlds are often static, frozen maps," it says. "We're aiming to build the urban archipelago of Arta-Tantor into a reactive playground of physical interactivity and evolving human stories through scripted and emergent events."

Red Rooster is being built in Unreal Engine to make use of advanced physics engine features, and the studio adds it's "breaking away from isometric constraints to drop you into a three-dimensional world with dynamic camera movement. " Elsewhere in the release, it name-drops Expedition 33's Sandfall Interactive, noting the collective is aiming for a "double-A production budget" similar to the "compact team" that worked on 2025's breakout RPG.

Summer Eternal says the game is "nearing the end of pre-production" and that an internal playable tech demo already exists. The book shows a little of this, and while I appreciate the team is trying to put distance between itself and Disco Elysium, you can't help notice the similarities in some aspects. Below, you can see a quick pic I snapped of the eponymous Red Rooster - he bears more than a passing resemblance to Harrier 'Harry' Du Bois, right?

Elsewhere in the game, there's 'The Coop', which is reminiscent of Disco Elysium's psychological manifestations in the 'Thought Cabinet'. Here, Red's internal mental space is populated by roosters; versions of himself that represent different motivations, urges, and personalities. Summer Eternal references games like Exanima, Half-Life: Alyx, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, Planescape: Torment, and Larian's Divinity engine games as inspiration. Influences outside of games include Chris Carter's Millenium, Fringe, Netflix's Dark, Better Call Saul, Fargo, and the works of Ted Chiang and John Steinbeck.

A lot of this information comes from the book that's been used to announce the game, and the Summer Eternal Anthology is a very interesting read. It includes interviews about the state of games and tech with economists Yanis Varoufakis and Richard Wolff, a chat with science fiction visionary (and one of my favourite authors) Ted Chiang, conversations with Bioware veterans Mark Darrah and David Gaider, as well as stories from worker-run organizations such as the UVW-CWA, Aftermath, and Peregrine Coast Press (who are wonderfully described as "paper perverts"). If you'd like a copy yourself, you can purchase one here - it's €69 for the Standard edition, and €99 for the Deluxe Firestarter bundle that comes with a vinyl and additional merch.

If you buy a copy of the book, you will also be entitled to a membership in the Summer Eternal Players Non-Profit organisation, which owns five percent of Summer Eternal; giving you a vote on matters regarding studio governance, and having a say in how five percent of profits generated by Red Rooster are used in the future. You can join that initiative here.

Summer Eternal, of course, isn't the only studio to have been born from the fracturing of ZA/UM's original team. There's also Longdue, an independent studio comprising former Disco Elysium staff, and Dark Math Games, a team that refers to itself as a "breakaway group from the original development team of Disco Elysium". ZA/UM also carried on as a development unit, and the studio launched Zero Parades: For Dead Spies back in June, before laying off a large chunk of its remaining staff. Prior to the multi-part split of Disco Elysium talent, game director Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov alleged that ZA/UM management had gained ownership of the studio and its intellectual property fraudulently, with the two claiming that they were "summarily fired and cut off from our life's work" after they began asking for financial records from ZA/UM's new owners. Counter-allegations of mismanagement and misconduct followed, and it only got messier from there.

Back in 2024, in a feature I worked on at VG247, game director Argo Tuulick told the site "he'd rather under-promise and over-deliver" when it comes to this game. This book, though, seems to have moved on from that maxim, and may well be one of the most ambitious project statements I've ever seen. It's made me incredibly excited, too; to see a studio commit to a worker- and player-funded model, using a game this ambitious as its banner, is something that can instil just a little bit of hope in an industry fighting to stay afloat under the yoke of late-stage capitalism.

"This non-profit will be the 'voice of the gamers'" - Former Disco Elysium devs break new ground with player- and developer-owned studio structure