What is Disco Elysium about? A lot of things, I suppose. It’s about failure, about loss, about redemption, about being a mess of ungovernable nerves and hormones, and it’s about communism—a struggle against a drab, alienating, and interminable now we’ve all inhabited since, oh, the ’80s at least.
It’s also, under its current stewards at ZA/UM, about lucrative merchandising. Thus, the €159 (about $165) Eternal Carrier plastic bag you can currently pick up at ZA/UM Atelier, based on the tremendously dernier cri ‘Yellow Plastic Bag Frittte!‘ you can get in order to collect trash for spare change in the game. It’s been brought to my attention by Rock Paper Shotgun, but it’s been on sale for a couple of months now.
Atelier is the label that also put out these admittedly fantastic jackets based on Kim Kitsuragi’s back in the salad days of 2021, and the bag is, apparently, “the last carrier bag you’ll ever need”. They’re designed to be “exceptionally lightweight yet incredibly tough” (same) and are made in Estonia from “Dyneema® composite fabric.”
What is Dyneema® composite fabric, you ask? Well, Dyneema® composite fabric “is up to 15x stronger than steel on a weight-for-weight basis and provides the highest tear and tensile strength of any competing materials.” That’s stronger than Kevlar, apparently. So that’s handy. The next time I’m called to war at Asda I can just slot my arms through the handles and equip it as a kind of rudimentary hauberk.
It’s such a patently ridiculous thing—a €159 replacement for those bags that cost me 30p a pop when I forget to bring an old one to Tesco—that I struggle to feel any emotion about it besides befuddlement. But let me try anyway. Yes, previous Atelier/Disco Elysium stuff hasn’t exactly been sold at proletarian prices, but they were also made-to-order clothes crafted by holy artisans. These are plastic bags. Dyneema® bags, sorry.
And maybe I’d just chuckle at the absurdity of it anyway, but it’s hard not to look at this through the lens of the current mess surrounding ZA/UM and the myriad DE creators it has pushed out or laid off in the years since the game’s original release. The game’s lead writer, Robert Kurvitz, has long since gone off with other studio luminaries like Helen Hindpere (lead writer on its Final Cut) and Aleksander Rostov (responsible for its incredible art direction) and denounced ZA/UM’s current bosses, alleging that they effectively took the company out from under Kurvitz and co using underhanded means.
So it’s hard not to see the pricey bag—available in both FALN and Frittte liveries—as a cynical cash-in: the sneering reduction of something with emotional and spiritual value into something of purely exchange value. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Not just my mouth, actually. DE fans did not respond well to the bag’s announcement. “This is the level of greed they talk about in the Bible,” said a Reddit user named luseen_. “‘Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead,'” quotes onion_offense from the game (and also from Guy Debord, more or less). “That’s comically ultraliberal,” says coralfire.
I’d be curious to know how many bags ZA/UM Atelier has sold.