[image description: Four screenshots of black text on a red background, transcribed below.
In child psychology, a paracosm is a mental construct developed by (often lonely) children and early teenagers. It is a fantasy world secluded from ours, featuring new words for common and novel phenomenon, intricate taxonomies of nations, animals etc. Emily Brontë had one. Henry Darger had one. Children tend to forget their paracosms as the Real World imposes its terms (around 13-15).
That did not happen to Elysium. Elysium was always going to be massive. Large enough to blot out our entire reality. Messianic. Transatlantic.
Elysium: the Crown of the World.
Elysium: the Real World is an embarrassing fantasy construct and Elysium is real.
Hence, Elysium survived contact with the Real World through competition. It had its genesis during the turn of the century as a high fantasy setting. With - I would say - "some interesting ideas." Back then we were over the moon about it. We wrote incessantly. Mostly spells, hundreds if not thousands of them, each exactly one page. We visited Elysium via pen-and-paper role-playing, using a proprietary system that later became Disco Elysium's Metric. "We" were a group of 5-10 highschool dropouts called The Overcoats (it was terribly cold outside and we wore thick coats), anarchists of some sort, with the motto: "Today we drink tea; tomorrow we rule the world."
Unironically, we intended Elysium to be the vessel of this conquest.
After all - it was all we had. Truancy means vagrancy, unemployment, an assortment of mental illnesses. Seeing your friends go off to University to become "real people" and have things like a PC to play Baldur's Gate 2 on. The need for a paracosm did not dissipate as the Aughts rolled on - it intensified. With nowhere to go and -22 centigrade temperatures outside, we knew we had to become "artist-people" of some sort to survive. Yet it was hard to write anything in this "fallen world" as early Christians put it. The names themselves seemed compromised, a catwalk parody: London, Milan, Paris. A shudder of loathing still overtakes me as I write them.
Revachol, Mirova, La Scala del Mesque - now that I could write. An implacable air hung over the states and cities. The cold light of the mind. Grand. A quality we've come to call elytical. Even basic terms for everyday machinery needed to be changed to preserve this intangible quality. Motor carriage. Graffito. Sprechgesang. (What they call rapping.)
However, the version of Elysium we had then was not that. It was "Revachol, something-something, name missing, something lame." After a year or two of spell-writing the result was deemed "weak." Naive (which it was). We couldn't bin it, however - it was too big to fail. So we started replacing things: names, concepts, characters. Everything smaller and less credible than reality had to go. Circa 2002, we invented the pale. By 2005, we'd discarded medievalism, the pseudo-renaissance, and the industrial revolution, replacing it with modernity: plastic telephones, cops, communism, the international currency.
(The spells, too, had to go. A term you have yet to encounter - extraphysics - pushed them out. Magic, we realized, needed to remain a complete unknown.)
The world around us was getting larger and darker. To keep up, Elysium needed to be even larger and more terrifying. Moreover, the world that ends all worlds ought also be more beautiful than reality. More extreme. We were anarchists, after all - growing into hardboiled Marxist-Leninists on empty stomachs. The alternative need not only to outgrow, but also to outclass the Real World and its satanic complexes.
It quickly became apparent that in order to go "further than Pärnu" (Pärnu is a tiny beach town 100 kilometres from Tallinn) we needed to outdo History.
So far we've only managed to show you a tiny, insignificant corner of it: the district of Martinaise in Revachol West, on Insulinde. I can not begin to tell you how introductory it is. ("Disco Elysium" means "I learn Elysium"). It's small. A matchbox world. It's all we had money for.
Yet because of You - you angel, you legend, our comrade in arms - because of your interest in our idea, we get to see more of it. Jamrock, I hope. And then to other isolas.
Thank you. We hope you enjoy the Final Cut.
Robert Kurvitz, lead designer / lead writer
Brighton, England
December 2020
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