Disco Elysium creative lead Robert Kurvitz was quietly fired from ZA/UM in late 2021, files lawsuit against them

[Kalarion]

JFC this thread, the Codex, truly the best and the brightest of the White race

To the OP: put down that beer can and get help. If you have IRL mates, call one and get them to come over. If not, call a priest, a hooker, or a suicide prevention hotline. Do not do anything stupid(er) and irremediable while under the influence. And log the fuck off the Codex, this place is bad for you even if you're not falling apart mentally, and it's poison if you are.

Ok, but like, he's not wrong.

Yes, technically his advice to SDG was sound. That's not the point we were trying to make though. The point was, PJ jumped into the middle of that thread, where 99% of the people were trying to help SDG get a grip and step back from the ledge (including some pretty amazing personal disclosures from a lot of distinguished site members), and started bawling about how they were all terrible people because they... didn't wait for PJ's arrival to save the day, I guess?

He behaved childishly and irresponsibly (coming across as trying to yoink the spotlight away from someone who had at least mouthed suicidal ideations), while phrasing it to make it appear he was "just trying to help y'all omg!". Textbook self-absorbed twat behavior.

If you don't trust my or Clockwork Knight's appraisal of the situation, CK's quote link is pretty close to a perfect place to start to form your own opinion. Just follow it to the relevant thread and start one page back from where the quote is. Decide for yourself.

Learning that he backstabbed the people who worked on the game he was shilling here gives me a weird feeling, like it's satisfying to know but also not surprising. Very mynonlike.

Eh. Jobs require you not to publicly shit on your coworkers and/or the company line, big surprise. It wouldn't even surprise me if there was a requirement for remaining employees to be in support of their communications narrative. I'm not entirely certain some people around here have actually ever held a job.

Again (leaving out the jab about no-lifers/no-jobbers ofc), technically correct. But that wasn't my (or CK's) point either:

...

You know what he could have done if the subject made him uncomfortable? Try to be truthful. In the event of it, bow out. Anthony Davis had the integrity to do that during the Avellone/Feargus meltdown, pulled between sides when he felt sympathy for both. Not PJ though! No, instead he had to lie through his teeth to try to salvage his company's (company! Not even his!) image on the internet.

...

The point was, there's a good way to handle situations like this, and there's a self-absorbed, arrogant, dismissive and baselessly rude way to go about it. PJ, predictably (in the sense that he could always be counted on to behave this way, because that's what I almost 100% of the time observed from him), chose the latter. I explicitly pointed out the better course of action in the bolded portion, with an example here on the very Codex of someone who followed it. AD was caught between two contending sides and tried to present additional perspective on the whole thing. When he realized he couldn't get people to calm down and/or stop throwing bombs, he bowed out. You know who lost respect for Anthony on the Codex during the Avellone shitstorm? No one. It should have been obvious to PJ with like 5 seconds of thought how to behave, but I guess he just couldn't be fucking bothered.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

then he threatened to call the feds on DU & the rest of the admin team not too shortly after

apparently the better thing in his mind was to delete the thread instead of trying to help him?

 

[Junmarko]

"Lead Technologist" lol.

Prime Bludger.

 

[Zlaja]

PJ tried to make an argument that people in SDG's thread were acting irresponsible and not taking his threats seriously, even though most people in the thread tried to help. And those that were acting "edgy" were mostly arguing that the whole thing was a bluff and an act of attention whoring.

Of all the shenanigans on the Codex, PJ chose to quit the Codex over this. According to him, anyway. What a joke (whether true or not).

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Of course he looks like a massive nonce.

 

[A horse of course]

Prime Junta is fat.

Yes, you can quote me.

 

[Rocket-Propelled Game]

Who is Prime Junta, what did he have to do with a suicide, and how does he related to Disco Elysium here?

Sincere question, sorry for being out of the loop. New here.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Who is Prime Junta, what did he have to do with a suicide, and how does he related to Disco Elysium here?

Sincere question, sorry for being out of the loop. New here.

A guy who got a job at the company that made Disco Elysium by sucking up to Kurvitz. Then when Kurvitz and the original creative crew were ousted, he looked the other way.

He quit the codex on some drama queen grounds, the incident is linked to in above posts, not related to his Za/um history.

 

[Rocket-Propelled Game]

Who is Prime Junta, what did he have to do with a suicide, and how does he related to Disco Elysium here?

Sincere question, sorry for being out of the loop. New here.

A guy who got a job at the company that made Disco Elysium by sucking up to Kurvitz. Then when Kurvitz and the original creative crew were ousted, he looked the other way.

He quit the codex on some drama queen grounds, the incident is linked to in above posts, not related to his Za/um history.

Understood, thanks!

 

[Lyric Suite]

Prime Junta is fat.

Yes, you can quote me.

"Prime Junta is fat."

- Ed123

 

[Pound Meat]

How the hell did this turn into a SDG thread?!

 

[Longes]

View attachment 29190

It is pretty funny that the people coming to defend ZA/UM studio are all universally fresh hires from 2021-2022.

 

[Harthwain]

It is pretty funny very telling that the people coming to defend ZA/UM studio are all universally fresh hires from 2021-2022.

Fixed.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Commie-larper or no, and asshole or no, being robbed of your life's work is gross injustice.

Especially when the robbers are brainlet "kanata"s with pronouns who are going to shit all over what they stole from you destroying its value while preventing you to do something good with it.

Edit: I wrote the above in response to Infinitron's:

Kurvitz was like Avellone on steroids, a micromanaging meltdown-prone artistic genius who caused a lot of drama, including during Disco Elysium's development. ZA/UM's owners should have put up with it and looked the other way because he's just that good, but my understanding is that this was the reason he was booted.

 

[†††]

View attachment 29190

Woman moment.

Commie-larper or no, and asshole or no, being robbed of your life's work is gross injustice.

Especially when the robbers are brainlet "kanata"s with pronouns who are going to shit all over what they stole from you destroying its value while preventing you to do something good with it.

Get used to, in the age of snowflakes triggered by micro-aggressions, perfectionists don't have a place anymore in the corporate world. Their best bet is going as small as possible.

 

[Harthwain]

Woman moment.

The proper term is "Men of Wö", brüder.

 

[gerey]

A guy who got a job at the company that made Disco Elysium by sucking up to Kurvitz. Then when Kurvitz and the original creative crew were ousted, he looked the other way.

Since the place is basically a leftist commune, Prime Cunta didn't just suck up if you know what I mean.

 

[Alienman]

How the hell did this turn into a SDG thread?!

Everything does.

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

Commie-larper or no, and asshole or no, being robbed of your life's work is gross injustice.

Especially when the robbers are brainlet "kanata"s with pronouns who are going to shit all over what they stole from you destroying its value while preventing you to do something good with it.

Edit: I wrote the above in response to Infinitron's:

Kurvitz was like Avellone on steroids, a micromanaging meltdown-prone artistic genius who caused a lot of drama, including during Disco Elysium's development. ZA/UM's owners should have put up with it and looked the other way because he's just that good, but my understanding is that this was the reason he was booted.

Not a fan of DE, but I agree. It was Hindpere and Kurvitz who popularized pretentious twitter-like edgy writing. Regardless of whether you consider it a great artistic achievement or a crime against humanity (like me), you can't exploit all this collective effort nonsense to absolve the real instigators of responsibility.

 

[AwesomeButton]

There is another way to look at PJ's remaining in ZA/UM: you have a developer guaranteed to be in touch with Kurvitz' original vision

Not a fan of DE, but I agree. It was Hindpere and Kurvitz who popularized pretentious twitter-like edgy writing. Regardless of whether you consider it a great artistic achievement or a crime against humanity (like me), you can't exploit all this collective effort nonsense to absolve the real instigators of responsibility.

I'm having a hard time defining what strikes me about DE. Whether I like it or not, I remember scenes, places and conversations from this game, as if they are memories from my own past. I mean it in the way we have memories of our childhood street or block, or how we rememeber the details of the route we took when going to school. I can compare the experience with how I remember locations from Grim Fandango, or Thief, or Deus Ex. But the difference is that I've only played through Disco Elysium once, and for these other games it's been probably hundreds of hours. So, whatever they've done with DE, my assessment is that it's resting on correct analysis of what makes an experience memorable.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Seems i need to dust off this old classic again:



Now this is about women but it applies equally to feminized soy faggots at this point. As i've always argued, the real essence of art is invisible, and can only be percieved by a mind attuned to objective realities that exist outside anything either reason or empiricism can verify. I don't know how good this ZA/UM writer guy actually was as i have never played the game but i've seen this pattern occur many times, where people who are blind to the invisible and for whom only their own subjectivity is truly "real" end up outsting truly creative people because for them what matters is their own self-aggrandizement and social position where as creative people are always difficult to deal with because they are not all "there", so to speak, in the sense their minds are fixed on realities that exist outside of themselves which leads them to neglect anything that pertains to their own personhood and end up falling "behind" those driven purely by personal ambition.

I think this is what happened to Hollywood and its been happening to games as well for a long time. Identity politics just adds another layer of phony credentializing. I have no doubt future games from this company will lack anything that made DE popular among some people.

 

[scytheavatar]

Commie-larper or no, and asshole or no, being robbed of your life's work is gross injustice.

Especially when the robbers are brainlet "kanata"s with pronouns who are going to shit all over what they stole from you destroying its value while preventing you to do something good with it.

Edit: I wrote the above in response to Infinitron's:

Kurvitz was like Avellone on steroids, a micromanaging meltdown-prone artistic genius who caused a lot of drama, including during Disco Elysium's development. ZA/UM's owners should have put up with it and looked the other way because he's just that good, but my understanding is that this was the reason he was booted.

Game devs won't think twice about robbing investors of their money so you shouldn't be sympathetic of them. Ultimately ZA/UM needs to make money to survive and if Kurvitz is in the way of making a Disco Elysium 2 then he needs to be removed. The unfortunate reality is that Art has always been a business and not a charity, and you need pros to be running a business rather than drama queens.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

being robbed of your life's work is gross injustice.

this site doesn't allow me to use the reddit button more than once on a single post, so could you post this again for me to rate it?

 

[Lyric Suite]

Who gives a fuck about investors and their money? Lmao what a wierd thing to complain about.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Who gives a fuck about investors and their money? Lmao what a wierd thing to complain about.

Agreed, they should have made DE without investors.