•Former ZA/UM staff have unveiled Red Rooster, described as an “incendiary, physics-driven RPG,” through the Summer Eternal Anthology, a 500-page physical book that doubles as both a development journal and a treatise on the cultural and labour impact of the video game industry.
The studio came together in 2024 around Disco Elysium writer and world-builder Argo Tuulik, alongside other veteran ZA/UM staff including Dora Klindžić, Anastasia Ivanova, and Michael Oswell. Aleksandar Gavrilović, secretary of the Croatian Game 開発 Alliance, and Lenval Brown, the narrator of Disco Elysium, are also part of the team.
The collective had been quiet until earlier this month, when it reached out to gauge interest in the anthology. The book was used as the vehicle to announce Red Rooster, whose tagline reads: “Fight fires to get to the truth of your world. Start fires to get to the truth about yourself.”
In Red Rooster, players take on the role of Redrick Roost, a white-collar inmate thrust into work as an arson investigator. He partners with an opiate-dependent mathematician to investigate a string of arsons that appear to connect to Redrick’s brother — who turns out to be the city’s fire chief.
The game is set in the tri-partie city of Arta-Tantor, described by Summer Eternal as a “fractalised border archipelago” with a “strong science-fiction undercurrent.” The studio calls it an “incendiary, physics-driven RPG combining the best of cerebral, worldbuilding-rich RPGs with the genetics of physics-driven immersive sims.”
“RPG worlds are often static, frozen maps,” the release states. “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.” The studio says the game is “fully physics-driven” with objects players can move, manipulate, and burn.
Red Rooster is being built in Unreal Engine to take advantage of advanced physics features. Summer Eternal notes it is “breaking away from isometric constraints to drop you into a three-dimensional world with dynamic camera movement,” and name-drops Sandfall Interactive — the compact team behind 2025’s breakout RPG Expedition 33 — as an example of the “double-A production budget” it aims for.
The studio says the game is “nearing the end of pre-production” and that an internal playable tech demo already exists. The book shows some of this footage, even as the team attempts to distance itself from Disco Elysium — a distinction not always obvious in practice.
The game features ‘The Coop’, described as Red’s internal mental space populated by roosters representing different motivations, urges, and personalities. This draws comparison to Disco Elysium’s psychological manifestations in the ‘Thought Cabinet’. Summer Eternal cites inspiration from games including Exanima, Half-Life: Alyx, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, ダーク Messiah of Might and Magic, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, Planescape: Torment, and Larian’s Divinity engine titles. Non-game influences cited include Chris Carter’s Millennium and Fringe, Netflix’s ダーク, Better Call Saul, Fargo, and the works of Ted Chiang and John Steinbeck.
The anthology itself includes interviews about the state of games and technology with economists Yanis Varoufakis and Richard Wolff, a conversation with science fiction author Ted Chiang, discussions with BioWare veterans Mark Darrah and David Gaider, and stories from worker-run organizations such as the UVW-CWA, Aftermath, and Peregrine Coast Press.
The Summer Eternal Anthology is available for €69 in Standard edition, or €99 in the Deluxe Firestarter bundle, which includes a vinyl record and additional merchandise. Purchasing a copy also grants membership in the Summer Eternal Players Non-Profit organisation, which owns five percent of Summer Eternal — giving members a vote on studio governance matters and a say in how five percent of Red Rooster’s future profits are used.
Summer Eternal is not the only studio to emerge from the fracturing of ZA/UM’s original team. Longdue, an independent studio comprising former Disco Elysium staff, and ダーク Math ゲーム — which describes itself as a “breakaway group from the original development team of Disco Elysium” — are also part of that split.
ZA/UM itself continued as a development unit before launching Zero Parades: For Dead Spies in June, then laid off a large portion of its remaining staff. Before the multi-part split of Disco Elysium talent, game director Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov alleged that ZA/UM management had fraudulently gained ownership of the studio and its intellectual property. They claimed to have been “summarily fired and cut off from our life’s work” after requesting financial records from ZA/UM’s new owners, prompting counter-allegations of mismanagement and misconduct.
In 2024, game director Argo Tuulik told VG247 that he’d “rather under-promise and over-deliver” regarding the project. The anthology appears to move beyond that stance, described as possibly one of the most ambitious project statements ever produced.
a feature I worked on at VG247
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