During the speech for their second win of the night, ZA/UM, the team behind Disco Elysium, gave a special thanks to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the authors of The Communist Manifesto.
In this acceptance speech for the Fresh Indie Game Award, Helen Hendepere said that the team would like to thank “some of the great people that came before us.” The people they shouted out included the architects of communist thought, Marx and Engels, as well as Russian painter Vladimir Makovsky, and Viktor Tsoi, a Soviet singer and songwriter.
If you’ve played Disco Elysium, which features the vocal talents of the members of socialist podcast Chapo Trap House, you may not be surprised by these references. If not, I encourage you to read The Communist Manifesto, which is about how a ghost called “communism” is haunting Europe. It’s pretty radical.