Former ZA/UM developers have unveiled Red Rooster, an "incendiary RPG" that isn't too deliberately trying to be a "Disco Elysium successor" or "disco-like."

In 2024, we hear about the formation of Summer Eternal: a new studio consisting of Disco Elysium writer and creator Argo Tuulik, and other ZA/UM veterans such as Dora Klind&zcaron;i&cacute;, Anastasia Ivanova, and Michael Oswell. Aleksandar Gavrilovi, secretary of the Croatian Game Development Alliance, and Lenval Brown, the narrator of Disco Elysium, are also part of the crew. Read more

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Since then, we haven't heard from the new group, but earlier this month, the studio contacted me to inquire about interest in the Eternal Summer anthology, a 500-page physical book that's part treatise on the cultural and labor impact of the video game industry, and part development magazine for its newly announced Incendiary RPG.

In Red Rooster, you play as Redrick Rooster, a white-collar inmate who becomes an arson investigator who teams up with an opiate-addicted mathematician. Together, they investigate a string of fires that all seem to be connected to Redrick's brother, who is none other than - you guessed it! - City Fire Chief In Per Summer Eternal, the game takes place in the "fractalized frontier complex" of the three-dimensional city of Arta-Tantor. All of this is a very political alternate history of Staches, with a "strong sci-fi current". As the slogan of the Red Rooster says, "Fight fire to get to the truth of your world. Start a fire to get to the truth of yours."

Summer Eternal calls Red Rooster an "incendiary, physics-based RPG that combines the best of cerebral, world-building RPGs with the genetics of immersive physics-based sims." So ambitious, the studio also notes that the game is fully physics-based, full of objects you can move, manipulate and burn - the team wants you to "impose your physical presence on the world". "RPG worlds are mostly static, frozen maps," he says. Our goal is to transform the urban archipelago of Arta Tantor into a reactive playground of physical interaction and evolving human stories through emergent scripts and events.

Red Rooster is built in Unreal Engine to take advantage of the advanced features of the physics engine, and the studio adds that it "drops you into a 3D world with dynamic camera movement by breaking away from the confines of isometrics." Elsewhere in the publication, it omits the name Expedition 33. The "compact team" that worked on the leading RPG in 2025.

Summer Eternal says the game is "nearing the end of pre-production" and that an internal tech demo is already in place. The book shows a bit of this, and while Man of the Tim tries to distance itself from Disco Elysium, you can't help but notice the similarities in some aspects. Below, you can see a quick shot I took of the eponymous Red Rooster - he bears more than a passing resemblance to "Harry" Du Bois' Harrier, right?

Elsewhere in the game, there's The Coop, reminiscent of Disco Elysium's psychotic manifestation in The Thinking Cabinet. Here, Red's inner mental space is filled by roosters. Versions of himself that represent different motives, drives and personalities. Summer Eternal is inspired by games such as Exanima, Half-Life: Alyx, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, Planescape: Torment and the Larian Divinity Engine games. Influences outside of gaming include Chris Carter's Millennium, Fringe, Netflix's Darkness, Better Call Saul, Fargo, and the works of Ted Chiang and John Steinbeck.

Much of this information comes from the book used to introduce the game, and the Summer Eternal Anthology is very interesting. It includes interviews on the state of games and technology with economists Yannis Varoufakis and Richard Wolff, a conversation with sci-fi visionary Ted Chiang, a conversation with Bioware veterans Mark Darrah and David Gaider, as well as stories from labor organizations such as UVW-CWA, and Perwhoma. Perverts"). If you want a copy yourself, you can buy one here - €69 for the standard edition, and €99 for the Deluxe Firestarter bundle, which comes with vinyl and extras.

If you buy a copy of the book, you'll also be entitled to membership in the non-profit organization Summer Eternal Players, which owns five percent of Summer Eternal. Gives you a vote on studio management issues and how to use the five percent of profits generated by Red Rooster in the future. You can join the initiative here.

Of course, Summer Eternal is not the only studio born from the failure of the original ZA/UM team. There's also Longdue, an indie studio made up of former Disco Elysium employees, and Dark Math Games, a team that describes itself as a "split-off group from the original Disco Elysium development team." ZA/UM also worked as a development unit, launching Zero Parades: For Dead Spies in June, before laying off a large number of its staff. Prior to the multi-part split of Disco Elysium's talent, game director Robert Kurwitz and art director Alexander Rostov claimed that ZA/UM's management had fraudulently acquired ownership of the studio and its intellectual property, and the two claimed that they were "summarily fired and cut out of our life's work" after they began petitioning ZA/UMs new owner. Counter accusations of mismanagement and misbehavior followed, and it only came to a conclusion from there.

In 2024, in a feature I worked on at VG247, game director Argo Tuulick told the site, "He prefers to under-promise and over-deliver." However, this book seems to depart from this principle, and may be one of the most ambitious project statements I've ever seen. It also makes me super excited. To see a studio committed to a worker- and player-invested model using a game this ambitious as its flagship is something that could inspire some hope in an industry struggling to survive under the yoke of late-stage capitalism.

Dom Peppiatt: Dom is a veteran video game reviewer with 12 years of experience in the gaming industry. Published author and consultant who has written for NME, Red Bull, Samsung, Xsolla, Daily Star, GamesRadar, Tech Radar and many more. They also have a gaming and music column in the Guardian.