S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games drop the player in a completely nihilistic world where death and failure are commonplace. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. takes its fiction from the Chernobyl disaster (where there is a second, later explosion) and the anomalous zone and stalkers from Roadside Picnic to make a game series full with gameplay possibilities, and one that is intrinsically Ukrainian. GSC Game World, a small game development company based in the Ukraine, took from both of these very Soviet cultural possessions and made S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – a PC only first person shooter (FPS) that was to innovate in the medium and have lasting effects, at least in the PC space. – Project Lead Anton Bolshakov in PC Gamer UK, September 2007 Logically, it struck us as a cool game setting to explore.
When walking around such areas you can’t but think how the time froze at this place of man-made catastrophe.
Even our office is located at an ex-military factory with no more active production. Splinters of Soviet Empire are plentiful in Ukraine – forgotten productions, catacombs, neglected military facilities and so on. In the book men called stalkers risk their lives entering these “zones” to see what these unfathomable alien beings have discarded for humanity to find. A scientist in the book likens these visits to a “roadside picnic” in which people briefly stop by the roadside and eat their lunch, leaving their scraps and trash for the ants to discover. Roadside Picnic, a book written by the Strugatsky brothers well before the Chernobyl disaster, describes aliens landing briefly on earth and leaving both terror and wonderment in their wake. The zone was a trash-laden and scarred landscape left as legacy by a once mighty power. As governments changed the disaster zone was left in the intervening years, abandoned, uninhabitable, and burdened with rusting relics from another era. The Wall may have fallen four years later, but for many this was the precursor to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Although the disaster occurred nearly three decades ago, the threat seemingly over, it has had a lasting legacy on the Ukraine and the rest of the former Soviet states. The event was to have dire effects for the surrounding area as well as the rest of Europe. Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant exploded, unleashing airborne radioactive pollution into the atmosphere. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened in 1986.
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