One last look at the mismanagement and misinformation campaign which killed Locust City.
In February 2024, ZA/UM cancelled the standalone Disco Elysium expansion which was then known by its codename X7 and is now known as “Locust City”. At the same time, ZA/UM announced they would make nearly a third of their workforce redundant. I was on that list. As co-creator of Locust City alongside Argo Tuulik, I was approached by GLHF.gg for comment and issued a press statement about joining ZA/UM in 2022, which I likened to “being born into Yugoslavia in the ’90s: you’ve just missed the Party and now all you get is the bloodshed.”
In Spring 2025, Chris Bratt from People Make Games informed me that they would be interested to do a new documentary on ZA/UM and what’s colloquially known as the new Disco Elysium “successors”, part of which would cover the tragic ruin of Locust City. I agreed to give Chris an interview and shared a large amount of evidence of the trail of broken relationships and agonizing workplace conditions behind the project. Our interview was filmed in April 2025 and took around four to five hours to film in its raw form, and we also had many pre- and follow-up calls to establish the course of events. I also detailed how the cancellation of the project and the imminent redundancy was preceded by a nearly 80-page formal Grievance complaint I had filed to the studio’s HR, highlighting a range of systemic issues at the studio which of course, the studio and its Leads and Directors issued a blanket denial of.
When the documentary aired in August 2025 — and you should really watch it on YouTube if you haven’t already, Chris put an enormous amount of work and expense in the making — I was appalled but not surprised to find that ZA/UM had issued a number of false and unsubstantiated allegations against my character under guise of an anonymous corporate statement. I was never shown their statement or their allegations before they were broadcast, and I was not given a chance to respond and refute before the video was published. Therefore I am doing so now.
In short:
ZA/UM made false allegations about things I never did in order to bring my character into question and distract from their shameful management failures,
A mistake led to the publication of a statement that I had been placed under an “external HR investigation”, which was never the case, but gave ZA/UM’s claims a false credibility,
ZA/UM claimed they had found evidence against me in an internal HR investigation and leaked my supposed confidential HR documents to People Make Games, but no such investigation documents existed during my entire employment at ZA/UM nor were they provided to my trade union representative nor myself, which raises questions into the legitimacy of their claims, with the possibility of the investigation being either forged and backdated or dated after my departure and therefore unverified,
and ZA/UM denied and covered up wrongdoing done by their leadership and management which I’ve previously raised and evidenced against them, attempting to further bring my credibility into question.
They themselves don’t even say what it stands for on the front of their webpage, so I guess they want to be known by that. Hey, you’re allowed to be called what you want.
Still feels weird to me, but I am stopping my judgement.
On Wikipedia it says it is a name of a Russian constructed language
“Kurvitz established the ZA/UM team to create the game, using the name “za um”, a reference to the Zaum constructed language created by Russian avant-garde poets in the early 1900s. Its name can be read in Russian as a shortcut for the idiom взяться за ум (vzyat’sya za um), which is similar to the English idea of bootstrapping. The use of all-capitals and the slash symbol is to present the team as “something that definitely exists and weighs eight tonnes”.”
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Ya know, I feel like a jerk, and I apologize.
They themselves don’t even say what it stands for on the front of their webpage, so I guess they want to be known by that. Hey, you’re allowed to be called what you want.
Still feels weird to me, but I am stopping my judgement.
Also, my apologies to OP.
I was thinking the same thing, thanks for taking the hit for us.
I don’t think it stands for anything.
On Wikipedia it says it is a name of a Russian constructed language
“Kurvitz established the ZA/UM team to create the game, using the name “za um”, a reference to the Zaum constructed language created by Russian avant-garde poets in the early 1900s. Its name can be read in Russian as a shortcut for the idiom взяться за ум (vzyat’sya za um), which is similar to the English idea of bootstrapping. The use of all-capitals and the slash symbol is to present the team as “something that definitely exists and weighs eight tonnes”.”