Disco Elysium — A chat with Robert Kurvitz, lead writer and designer

The 2018 EGX Rezzed conference interview with Robert Kurvitz, run by Eurogamer's events arm, given before Disco Elysium's release — when the game was still being shown under its earlier working title No Truce With the Furies. The conversation is roughly an hour and is one of the most-cited making-of interviews because of Kurvitz's expansive answers about the world of Elysium, the intended player experience, and the design ambitions that the released game would later be evaluated against.

Recorded in spring 2018 at the EGX Rezzed event in London and posted on Eurogamer's YouTube channel afterward. The setting is a journalist-led interview rather than a presentation; the interviewer (a Eurogamer staff member) takes Kurvitz through the game's conception, the relationship to the 2013 novel, the twenty-year history of the tabletop RPG that preceded both, the design philosophy behind the 24-skill internal-voice system, and the literary influences (China Miéville, Émile Zola, the Strugatsky brothers, Hammett, Marx). Kurvitz's now-much-quoted line that after reading Miéville he thought yeah, I'm way better than this is from this interview.

The piece sits as a primary source for Kurvitz's stated design intent before the game shipped. The post-release interviews (Eurogamer 2019, GamesRadar 2019, others) are useful for what Kurvitz thought after the reception; this 2018 piece is what he was saying when the game's reception was still hypothetical. The hour-long format and the live conversational register make it a genuinely informative source rather than a press-release performance — Kurvitz's answers ramble in the productive way and are richer than later more-rehearsed interviews. The Helen Hindpere interview of 2025 provides a complementary view from inside the same design programme.

The stake is creative and self-promotional in the standard way pre-release interviews are. Kurvitz is making the case for the game to a Eurogamer audience that would influence early reception; the answers should be read with that incentive in mind. The factual claims about the project's history are largely confirmed by subsequent reporting; the design-intent claims are useful context for evaluating what the released game did and did not achieve. Read it before any post-release writing on the game.