When Estonian writer Helen Hindpere took the stage at the 2019 Game Awards to accept one of the many prizes awarded to the video game Disco Elysium, she thanked Marx and Engels “for providing us the political education.”

Disco Elysium is a text-heavy role-playing game (RPG) about an alcoholic cop with amnesia investigating a murder in an alternative universe. Playing this strange and beautiful game, one can’t help but wonder how it got made — much less how it became a mainstream hit, grossing over $70 million. The game’s creators, too, seemed surprised by its success, with lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz calling it “an extremely unlikely object” and “a miracle.”

The game’s uniquely rich in-game backstory invited speculation about sequels, and there were soon rumblings that the game’s Estonian production company, ZA/UM, was planning to make Disco Elysium 2. This seemed like a story with a rare happy ending for the little guy: creatives and artists from a small eastern European country build a successful video-game franchise that brings a little joy in a world filled to the brim with increasingly uninspired, hypercommodified art.