, the lead designer and writer for
Disco Elysium Disco Elysium was developed by , a company founded in 2016 by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, who served as the game's lead writer and designer. In 2005, Kurvitz was playing in a band called Ultramelanhool and conceived of a fictional world during a drunken evening while listening to
Tiësto's "
Adagio for Strings". The group then created a collective of artists and musicians, which included oil painter Aleksander Rostov, the lead artist of
Disco Elysium, to expand upon the work of that night and developed a tabletop role-playing game based on
Dungeons & Dragons on this
steampunk-like concept. Overall, by the time of the game's release, had about 20 outside consultants and 35 in-house developers, The majority of the game's funding was provided by Estonian businessman Margus Linnamäe. The game uses the
Unity engine. Kurvitz said that an aim was to have a full, complex depth of choices and outcomes, limited by the practicalities of game development. Knowing they could not realistically cover all possible choices, Kurvitz and his team instead focused more on what he called "microreactivity", small acts and decisions the player may make such as an embarrassing comment, and how that may propagate throughout events. The dialogue of the player's various skills helped then to provide critique and internalisation of how these small decisions had larger effects on the game world, so that the player would become more aware of such choices in the future. An additional factor in writing was the recognition that there was no real solution to the game; while the player may resolve some portions of the story, the primary case is nearly unworkable, similar to the rest of Revachol. They created the companion Kim as a no-nonsense character to help keep the player on track of resolving some part of the game and recognising that there were some story threads they simply could not fix or resolve. Though had initially planned to publish the game through
Humble Bundle, they ultimately chose to self-publish it. In March 2025, announced an official mobile version of
Disco Elysium for
Android, aimed at engaging more casual users. The game released on Google Play on August 5, 2025.
Influences and inspirations The game's art, drawn mostly in a painterly style, was led by Aleksander Rostov, while the soundtrack was written and recorded by the English band
Sea Power (at the time of the game's publication, known as British Sea Power). Members of were longtime fans of the band, and approached the group directly to request the use of their music in
Disco Elysium. The band agreed to produce
the soundtrack, contributing a mix of original compositions and instrumental remixes of previously released songs. Several tracks from Sea Power's discography were reworked for the game's soundtrack. "Smallest Church in Sussex", from their 2003 debut
The Decline of British Sea Power, was adapted into "The Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns". "Fire Escape in the Sea" from the 2012
EP2 became "Whirling-In-Rags, 8 AM". "Red Rock Riviera" from the 2012 documentary soundtrack
From the Sea to the Land Beyond was reworked as "Instrument of Surrender". Two tracks from their 2017 album
Let the Dancers Inherit the Party, "Wants to Be Free" and "Praise for Whatever", were transformed respectively into "Burn, Baby, Burn" and "The Insulindian Miracle". "Cleaning out the Rooms" from the 2011 album
Valhalla Dancehall was remixed into both "Detective Arriving on the Scene" and "". The track "Tiger King" from the 2009
Man of Aran soundtrack was also remixed but retained its original title. Additionally, the name of the in-game hostel-cafeteria
Whirling-in-Rags is derived from a lyric in the song "Hail Holy Queen" from the 2013 album
Machineries of Joy. The voice-acting cast includes metal musicians
Mikee Goodman of
SikTh and Mark Holcomb of
Periphery. The original release also had voice-acting by
Dasha Nekrasova of the cultural commentary podcast
Red Scare and four of the hosts from the
left-wing political satire podcast,
Chapo Trap House; The television show
The Wire was also used as an influence for the game's
working class setting, while
Émile Zola's writings shared stories on the misery of human life that narrative writer Helen Hindpere said she felt resonated within the game. Studio founder
Robert Kurvitz has similarly acknowledged Zola’s impact, stating during a conference in France that he does not consider himself a writer, as he prefers not to draw comparisons with literary figures of Zola’s stature: “You are not going to be a better writer than Émile Zola.” The creators have also said that their work owes a lot to the Estonian urbanist poet
Arvi Siig. Kurvitz said while accepting the Estonian President's Young Cultural Figure annual award for 2020 "Without his modernism, Elysium – the world the game is placed in – would not be half of what it is." He also said Siig's vision of an international, radical and humanist Estonian culture lives on in
Disco Elysium. The main protagonist of
Disco Elysium was directly inspired by producer
Kaur Kender’s father, who served as a detective in the Soviet police. The scene in which the protagonist vomits due to the stench of a decaying corpse is based on a real incident experienced by Kender’s father during his career. During a livestream, Robert Kurvitz cited
Fallout as an influence, describing
Disco Elysium as being “from the
Fallout school of RPG.” He added that the original
Fallout and
Fallout 2 were among the first games to demonstrate that “video games can be forms of art.”
Re-release An expanded and reworked edition of the game, subtitled
The Final Cut, was announced in December 2020. According to lead writer Helen Hindpere,
The Final Cut was directed based on input from players of the original game. It included complete voicework for the nearly 100 characters including the game's narration and the player-character skills, encompassing over 1.2 million words according to Hindpere. Because of the importance of the characters to the game, kept voice directing in-house rather than outsourcing the task as typically done with RPG games of this nature. Brown spent about eight months with the vocal directors in recording his lines, keeping his voice otherwise constant, slow and meticulous for all of the different characters skills since these were explaining things to the player, but including small nuances to try to distinguish the various facets of each skill's personality. The voice-acting by Nekrasova and the
Chapo Trap House hosts was completely replaced.
The Final Cut allows players the option to use a selection of voice acting for the game, such as only having the narrator's voiceover while the other characters presented as text. including two additional tracks by British Sea Power. ==Release==