S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Been to the Zone Lately?
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - the myth and reality - Part 1
Poring over the history of GSC Game World's first-person shooter
The former Soviet Union is a place where mankind's legacy of pollution has reached a mythological status. Areas of contamination and environmental distortion litter the former states of the Communist superpower.
The idea that the Soviet Union's greatest legacy would be one of cursed earth penetrated both the Soviet consciousness of the time, and that of the new societies that followed. It is this legacy that made one of this year's most interesting games possible.
Stalker, the game that we so enjoy, and that its developers, the Ukrainian GSC Gameworld, are so proud of, comes from a heavy, nebulous theme that hangs across swathes of the old republic: The Zone of Alienation.
These are the facts: in 1908 something exploded over Siberia with the impact of over a 1,000 nuclear bombs. No one knows what caused the explosion, but the impact felled over 80 million trees across 2,000 square kilometres. The event came to be know as The Tunguska Explosion.
Then came the pollution. The Soviet Union's rapid industrialisation placed huge demands on its infrastructure. Factories, chemical plants and power stations expanded voraciously, unchecked, spewing contaminants onto the land.
In 1957 an explosion at the Mayak nuclear reprocessing plant near Chelyabinsk spread radiation across hundreds of square miles, leaving vast tracts of farmland uninhabitable, and a huge amount of the Motherland off-limits to travellers.
Then, in 1986, an explosion within a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant spread radiation across Europe. Over 30,000 people were resettled and a 30 kilometre exclusion zone created.
This is the fiction: in 1971 a science fiction novella was written by two Russia authors, the Strugatsky brothers. The story was called 'Roadside Picnic' and it was the first work to make explicit mention of The Zone.
In the story something strikes the Earth from space - rather like the circumstances of the Tunguska event. This event creates alien zones that are hostile to life, in a manner analogous with human contamination of natural terrain in the Soviet Union. Fact and fiction begin to intermingle.
In 1979 came the movie 'Stalker', by Andrei Tarkovsky. This masterpiece of Russian cinema was very loosely based on the Strugatskys' book and it detailed the activities of a rather philosophical man (the titular Stalker) whose trade is in taking tourists into a forbidden zone to visit a room in which "your wishes will be granted".
Tarkovsky's Zone was created by an unexplained event, but the film seems to suggest that man had a role in its existence. It has also been suggested that the film prophesied the Chernobyl disaster, and perhaps it did. Certainly the production itself was blighted by the horrors of Soviet environmental pollution - but more on that in a moment.
In 2007 came Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. This game made The Zone explicit, contemporary, and interactive. Shadow of Chernobyl radically merges the fact of the Ukrainian disaster with the fiction of Soviet-era film and literature, delivering it in a first-person videogame of peerless ambition.
While a few ghost-seeking tourists are making their way through the real world Zone of Chernobyl, tens of thousands of us are exploring the nexus of fact and fiction in a videogame made by people for whom the disaster is very real, and The Zone close at hand.
If Thomas Edison was correct in his observation that genius is "ninety-nine percent perspiration", then that vital spark, the one percent inspiration, becomes all the more significant. It was that fragment of vision, of fact and fiction coming together to define The Zone, that made Shadow of Chernobyl happen.
Our exploration as gamers of the exclusion zone around the blighted reactor would not be possible without this unique set of circumstances and personal visions.
SPLINTERS OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE
The Stalker story starts not with Chernobyl, but another piece of Ukrainian history: the conquests of the warring steppe people of Eurasia, the Cossacks. GSC, who had formed as a small group of gamers in Kiev in 1995, started their career in games by producing their own historical wargame, Cossacks: European Wars, based on the Napoleonic era wars of the Russian nations.
That game has, to date, sold an astounding four million copies and was the title which put GSC on the international map.
Although not historically accurate (or even strategically accurate) the theme clearly had resonance for players across Europe, and the theme of rampaging Cossack armies in the time of Waterloo was one that GSC clearly relished. This success set the precedent for GSC as a company that used their own cultural materials.
The team clearly knew how to use Ukrainian history, and they learned how to integrate these ideas into an accessible game design. Few debut titles have been as popular.
Anton Bolshakov is a senior developer at GSC - he's a member of the team that willed Stalker into existence, and he has plenty to say about the origin and impact of his game. In 2000, the same year that Cossacks was released, Bolshakov and his associates began to brood over a science fiction concept they called 'Oblivion Lost'. It would be a first-person shooter of bold ambition.
"The game was to be the best in everything," he recalls. "We targeted creating the best engine, attaining realistic graphics, developing innovative concepts and delivering innovations to the genre."
Their design was, at first, based around the most successful shooter they'd played. "Until 2002 the initial concept was oriented on 15 linear levels, similarly to classic adventure shooters," Bolshakov explains. "An anomalous Half-Life, if you like. In spring 2002 the concept drastically changed, with Chernobyl made to be the centre of the game. We decided to implement a huge world of the 30 square kilometre zone around the power plant."
The team began to map the real Zone, the one just a short drive from their homes. "Splinters of Soviet Empire are plentiful in Ukraine," says Bolshakov. "Forgotten productions, catacombs, neglected military facilities and so on... Our office is located at an ex-military factory."
So why use Chernobyl itself? "To me it's living history. Ruins of old Soviet industrial complexes, blocks of flats, military and civil facilities, vehicles and so on are still plentiful around ex-USSR. However, those traces of old empire can hardly be felt as keenly and strikingly as in the Chernobyl zone.
"When walking around such areas you can't but think how the time froze at this place of man-made catastrophe," says Bolshakov. "Logically, it struck us as a cool game setting to explore". Next thing, the Soviet system was sealed, many facts were kept secret, so even the most harmless objects or events generated unbelievable rumours and legends...
Poring over the history of GSC Game World's first-person shooter
The former Soviet Union is a place where mankind's legacy of pollution has reached a mythological status. Areas of contamination and environmental distortion litter the former states of the Communist superpower.
The idea that the Soviet Union's greatest legacy would be one of cursed earth penetrated both the Soviet consciousness of the time, and that of the new societies that followed. It is this legacy that made one of this year's most interesting games possible.
Stalker, the game that we so enjoy, and that its developers, the Ukrainian GSC Gameworld, are so proud of, comes from a heavy, nebulous theme that hangs across swathes of the old republic: The Zone of Alienation.
These are the facts: in 1908 something exploded over Siberia with the impact of over a 1,000 nuclear bombs. No one knows what caused the explosion, but the impact felled over 80 million trees across 2,000 square kilometres. The event came to be know as The Tunguska Explosion.
Then came the pollution. The Soviet Union's rapid industrialisation placed huge demands on its infrastructure. Factories, chemical plants and power stations expanded voraciously, unchecked, spewing contaminants onto the land.
In 1957 an explosion at the Mayak nuclear reprocessing plant near Chelyabinsk spread radiation across hundreds of square miles, leaving vast tracts of farmland uninhabitable, and a huge amount of the Motherland off-limits to travellers.
Then, in 1986, an explosion within a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant spread radiation across Europe. Over 30,000 people were resettled and a 30 kilometre exclusion zone created.
This is the fiction: in 1971 a science fiction novella was written by two Russia authors, the Strugatsky brothers. The story was called 'Roadside Picnic' and it was the first work to make explicit mention of The Zone.
In the story something strikes the Earth from space - rather like the circumstances of the Tunguska event. This event creates alien zones that are hostile to life, in a manner analogous with human contamination of natural terrain in the Soviet Union. Fact and fiction begin to intermingle.
In 1979 came the movie 'Stalker', by Andrei Tarkovsky. This masterpiece of Russian cinema was very loosely based on the Strugatskys' book and it detailed the activities of a rather philosophical man (the titular Stalker) whose trade is in taking tourists into a forbidden zone to visit a room in which "your wishes will be granted".
Tarkovsky's Zone was created by an unexplained event, but the film seems to suggest that man had a role in its existence. It has also been suggested that the film prophesied the Chernobyl disaster, and perhaps it did. Certainly the production itself was blighted by the horrors of Soviet environmental pollution - but more on that in a moment.
In 2007 came Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. This game made The Zone explicit, contemporary, and interactive. Shadow of Chernobyl radically merges the fact of the Ukrainian disaster with the fiction of Soviet-era film and literature, delivering it in a first-person videogame of peerless ambition.
While a few ghost-seeking tourists are making their way through the real world Zone of Chernobyl, tens of thousands of us are exploring the nexus of fact and fiction in a videogame made by people for whom the disaster is very real, and The Zone close at hand.
If Thomas Edison was correct in his observation that genius is "ninety-nine percent perspiration", then that vital spark, the one percent inspiration, becomes all the more significant. It was that fragment of vision, of fact and fiction coming together to define The Zone, that made Shadow of Chernobyl happen.
Our exploration as gamers of the exclusion zone around the blighted reactor would not be possible without this unique set of circumstances and personal visions.
SPLINTERS OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE
The Stalker story starts not with Chernobyl, but another piece of Ukrainian history: the conquests of the warring steppe people of Eurasia, the Cossacks. GSC, who had formed as a small group of gamers in Kiev in 1995, started their career in games by producing their own historical wargame, Cossacks: European Wars, based on the Napoleonic era wars of the Russian nations.
That game has, to date, sold an astounding four million copies and was the title which put GSC on the international map.
Although not historically accurate (or even strategically accurate) the theme clearly had resonance for players across Europe, and the theme of rampaging Cossack armies in the time of Waterloo was one that GSC clearly relished. This success set the precedent for GSC as a company that used their own cultural materials.
The team clearly knew how to use Ukrainian history, and they learned how to integrate these ideas into an accessible game design. Few debut titles have been as popular.
Anton Bolshakov is a senior developer at GSC - he's a member of the team that willed Stalker into existence, and he has plenty to say about the origin and impact of his game. In 2000, the same year that Cossacks was released, Bolshakov and his associates began to brood over a science fiction concept they called 'Oblivion Lost'. It would be a first-person shooter of bold ambition.
"The game was to be the best in everything," he recalls. "We targeted creating the best engine, attaining realistic graphics, developing innovative concepts and delivering innovations to the genre."
Their design was, at first, based around the most successful shooter they'd played. "Until 2002 the initial concept was oriented on 15 linear levels, similarly to classic adventure shooters," Bolshakov explains. "An anomalous Half-Life, if you like. In spring 2002 the concept drastically changed, with Chernobyl made to be the centre of the game. We decided to implement a huge world of the 30 square kilometre zone around the power plant."
The team began to map the real Zone, the one just a short drive from their homes. "Splinters of Soviet Empire are plentiful in Ukraine," says Bolshakov. "Forgotten productions, catacombs, neglected military facilities and so on... Our office is located at an ex-military factory."
So why use Chernobyl itself? "To me it's living history. Ruins of old Soviet industrial complexes, blocks of flats, military and civil facilities, vehicles and so on are still plentiful around ex-USSR. However, those traces of old empire can hardly be felt as keenly and strikingly as in the Chernobyl zone.
"When walking around such areas you can't but think how the time froze at this place of man-made catastrophe," says Bolshakov. "Logically, it struck us as a cool game setting to explore". Next thing, the Soviet system was sealed, many facts were kept secret, so even the most harmless objects or events generated unbelievable rumours and legends...
Last edited:
Juice
New member
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - the myth and reality - Part 2
For example, it is still not determined what exactly caused the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl Power Plant. The official version claims the regular testing went out of control, however some say CNPP served as a battery for secret laboratories, so what happened is an overload during one of the experiments being held.
Another example is an existing gigantic antenna located within the Chernobyl exclusion zone. On some of our photos taken during the trip to Chernobyl, the body of the antenna is seen on the horizon spanning several hundred meters across. As some unofficial sources claim, the waves emitted by the antenna were psycho-active. The antenna was directed onto Western Europe and preoccupied with a long-lasting military experiment on psychotropic influence onto human psyche.
It was around this sort of experiment and theories that the Stalker story was evolving. We've got room for both conspiracy theory and the opposition of special services. Our game sort of expands into what could have happened in reality."
It was this antenna that acted as one of the central fictions of the game, as veterans of the game will recognise.
Furthermore, as Ukrainian developers, GSC feel the need to highlight a uniquely Ukrainian problem. "The accident in Chernobyl of 1986 is one of the black pages in the history of Ukraine. When it happened, the entire world was alarmed of the radioactive contamination danger. Unfortunately, many facts about the accident and its consequences were concealed by the USSR government.
As time passes, people start forgetting about the accident and the related problems that Ukraine has to cope with now virtually independently. So, for several reasons Chernobyl has been a very unique and an amazing game concept: global public awareness of the setting, mysteriousness of the place, radioactivity dangers, talk about mutations - all combines into a solid concept of a horror-filled atmospheric shooter. The motif behind Stalker was to create a game to remind people of the Chernobyl accident and at the same time warn mankind against any possible fatal mistakes in the future."
However, the root of Stalker and the Zone of Alienation had found its inception even earlier than this.
THE ONE PERCENT
The novella 'Roadside Picnic' by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is an instance of a tradition of 'hard' science fiction written in the Soviet Union. Such stories posit scientifically plausible scenarios and play them out to the best-understood science of the time. Roadside Picnic's scenario is of a mysterious event where something strikes the Earth from space.
As I've already suggested, this idea is rather like the actual events in Siberia in 1908, where an explosion flattened vast tracts of (thankfully uninhabited) forest. The book's alien collision leaves various contaminated zones across the world, with the focus of the book being one in Canada.
These contaminated zones are filled with unusual dangers such as gravity traps and illusions, but are valuable because they also produce artefacts with unusual properties. These objects are retrieved by certain brave and foolish individuals, known as the Stalkers. These artifacts are among numerous motifs from the book that have managed to make their way into the game - the anomalies, the bolts thrown to set off the anomalies, and even the dress code followed by the stalkers themselves.
Roadside Picnic's title is based on a metaphor by the character Dr. Valentin Pilman. This character likens the alien contamination to the waste left behind by an everyday roadside picnic. After the people have departed from their picnic area out in the countryside, the doctor suggests, local animals encounter the human leftovers that litter the area.
The things these animals discover are alien and often dangerous for them. Things such as sweet wrappers and motor oil are not of their animal world and the animals have no precedent for dealing with them. With the event of the space impacts, humankind faces the same situation as those animals: something incomprehensible has visited the Earth and its presence has left behind zones of danger that we can't hope to understand.
It's not hard to see how this could have been construed as an allegory about pollution - a problem that was to become of particular significance to the ex-Soviet states. The problems of pollution are often well beyond our capacity to understand or deal with them, even though we created them in the first place. There were already numerous 'zones' in the Soviet Union by 1971, dating from environmental mishaps and nuclear experiments in the '50s.
The 1979 film 'Stalker', by Andrei Tarkovsky, became one of the greatest works of Russian cinema. It was a film about growth, weakness, obsession and ecological disaster. The film follows three men who travel into an apocalyptic (yet biologically lush) landscape called The Zone. The leader of this trio has been there before, and he is the Stalker.
This young man lives for these excursions into the excluded region, but has paid a price for his obsession, as we see later on. In Stalker there is a legend of a room that will allow anyone who enters it to fulfil their dreams and desires. The story details the journey to the room through a ruined industrial landscape. The production itself was blighted and polluted. The landscape scenes had to be filmed twice after the first draft of outdoor sequences for the film were lost entirely due to some corrupted film stock. The second filming took place at a disused hydroelectric dam in Estonia.
The dam was downstream from a chemical plant that had been pumping toxic chemicals into the river. The chemical waste produced some spectacular visuals for the film, but a number of the crew, including Tarkovsky himself, died from various cancers just a few years later.
The genesis of the film was reportedly influenced by the Mayak nuclear accident near Chelyabinsk in 1957, in which a huge stretch of Russia was polluted and subsequently abandoned. At the time there was no official explanation of the exclusion zone, giving way to mystery and conspiracy. The writer Stas Tyrkin has suggested that the prophetic film also foretold the disaster at Chernobyl, seven years later. Life often seems to imitate art, and the resonance of these events with fiction is remarkably powerful.
The influence of the film on the game that we now play is undeniable, even if the tone of the two couldn't be more different (the film is full of on unfulfilled foreboding - there's very little action to speak of). Both the film and the game raise the theme of pollution and the Zone, and both do so with an degree of artistic sensibility that frames urban decay as a thing of interest, and beauty.
That reality, however, was never more stark than during the events of 1986, when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine exploded, releasing large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere and polluting much of Europe. Soon after the accident, the Soviet authorities set up an exclusion zone around the reactor, cordoning it off and evacuating the 14,000 people in the nearby town of Pripyat...
For example, it is still not determined what exactly caused the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl Power Plant. The official version claims the regular testing went out of control, however some say CNPP served as a battery for secret laboratories, so what happened is an overload during one of the experiments being held.
Another example is an existing gigantic antenna located within the Chernobyl exclusion zone. On some of our photos taken during the trip to Chernobyl, the body of the antenna is seen on the horizon spanning several hundred meters across. As some unofficial sources claim, the waves emitted by the antenna were psycho-active. The antenna was directed onto Western Europe and preoccupied with a long-lasting military experiment on psychotropic influence onto human psyche.
It was around this sort of experiment and theories that the Stalker story was evolving. We've got room for both conspiracy theory and the opposition of special services. Our game sort of expands into what could have happened in reality."
It was this antenna that acted as one of the central fictions of the game, as veterans of the game will recognise.
Furthermore, as Ukrainian developers, GSC feel the need to highlight a uniquely Ukrainian problem. "The accident in Chernobyl of 1986 is one of the black pages in the history of Ukraine. When it happened, the entire world was alarmed of the radioactive contamination danger. Unfortunately, many facts about the accident and its consequences were concealed by the USSR government.
As time passes, people start forgetting about the accident and the related problems that Ukraine has to cope with now virtually independently. So, for several reasons Chernobyl has been a very unique and an amazing game concept: global public awareness of the setting, mysteriousness of the place, radioactivity dangers, talk about mutations - all combines into a solid concept of a horror-filled atmospheric shooter. The motif behind Stalker was to create a game to remind people of the Chernobyl accident and at the same time warn mankind against any possible fatal mistakes in the future."
However, the root of Stalker and the Zone of Alienation had found its inception even earlier than this.
THE ONE PERCENT
The novella 'Roadside Picnic' by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is an instance of a tradition of 'hard' science fiction written in the Soviet Union. Such stories posit scientifically plausible scenarios and play them out to the best-understood science of the time. Roadside Picnic's scenario is of a mysterious event where something strikes the Earth from space.
As I've already suggested, this idea is rather like the actual events in Siberia in 1908, where an explosion flattened vast tracts of (thankfully uninhabited) forest. The book's alien collision leaves various contaminated zones across the world, with the focus of the book being one in Canada.
These contaminated zones are filled with unusual dangers such as gravity traps and illusions, but are valuable because they also produce artefacts with unusual properties. These objects are retrieved by certain brave and foolish individuals, known as the Stalkers. These artifacts are among numerous motifs from the book that have managed to make their way into the game - the anomalies, the bolts thrown to set off the anomalies, and even the dress code followed by the stalkers themselves.
Roadside Picnic's title is based on a metaphor by the character Dr. Valentin Pilman. This character likens the alien contamination to the waste left behind by an everyday roadside picnic. After the people have departed from their picnic area out in the countryside, the doctor suggests, local animals encounter the human leftovers that litter the area.
The things these animals discover are alien and often dangerous for them. Things such as sweet wrappers and motor oil are not of their animal world and the animals have no precedent for dealing with them. With the event of the space impacts, humankind faces the same situation as those animals: something incomprehensible has visited the Earth and its presence has left behind zones of danger that we can't hope to understand.
It's not hard to see how this could have been construed as an allegory about pollution - a problem that was to become of particular significance to the ex-Soviet states. The problems of pollution are often well beyond our capacity to understand or deal with them, even though we created them in the first place. There were already numerous 'zones' in the Soviet Union by 1971, dating from environmental mishaps and nuclear experiments in the '50s.
The 1979 film 'Stalker', by Andrei Tarkovsky, became one of the greatest works of Russian cinema. It was a film about growth, weakness, obsession and ecological disaster. The film follows three men who travel into an apocalyptic (yet biologically lush) landscape called The Zone. The leader of this trio has been there before, and he is the Stalker.
This young man lives for these excursions into the excluded region, but has paid a price for his obsession, as we see later on. In Stalker there is a legend of a room that will allow anyone who enters it to fulfil their dreams and desires. The story details the journey to the room through a ruined industrial landscape. The production itself was blighted and polluted. The landscape scenes had to be filmed twice after the first draft of outdoor sequences for the film were lost entirely due to some corrupted film stock. The second filming took place at a disused hydroelectric dam in Estonia.
The dam was downstream from a chemical plant that had been pumping toxic chemicals into the river. The chemical waste produced some spectacular visuals for the film, but a number of the crew, including Tarkovsky himself, died from various cancers just a few years later.
The genesis of the film was reportedly influenced by the Mayak nuclear accident near Chelyabinsk in 1957, in which a huge stretch of Russia was polluted and subsequently abandoned. At the time there was no official explanation of the exclusion zone, giving way to mystery and conspiracy. The writer Stas Tyrkin has suggested that the prophetic film also foretold the disaster at Chernobyl, seven years later. Life often seems to imitate art, and the resonance of these events with fiction is remarkably powerful.
The influence of the film on the game that we now play is undeniable, even if the tone of the two couldn't be more different (the film is full of on unfulfilled foreboding - there's very little action to speak of). Both the film and the game raise the theme of pollution and the Zone, and both do so with an degree of artistic sensibility that frames urban decay as a thing of interest, and beauty.
That reality, however, was never more stark than during the events of 1986, when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine exploded, releasing large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere and polluting much of Europe. Soon after the accident, the Soviet authorities set up an exclusion zone around the reactor, cordoning it off and evacuating the 14,000 people in the nearby town of Pripyat...
Juice
New member
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - the myth and reality - Part 3
The Chernobyl disaster has been a major factor in the Ukrainian consciousness of the last 30 years, and so it was only logical that GSC would be inspired to use materials from the abandoned area in their own work. Much of what you see in Stalker is landscape from around the zone, including the abandoned town where the workers from the plant lived with their families.
Many people have returned to the zone to live, including some of the former residents who are resigned to the damage the radiation will cause to their health, some criminal elements who use the 'off-grid' nature of the place to hide, and some refugees from wars in nearby Soviet republics.
An even smaller number of people now work here guiding people around the zone. One of these guides, Alexander Naumov, even describes himself as a "stalker". Naumov has said that to guide people around the zone for money is "blasphemous" and he told the Ukrainian writer Yanina Sokolovskaya, "A stalker risks his life, but does a useful job - makes people sense the Zone and understand how it lives."
There might not be a secret at the heart of the zone, or mutants, or bio-suited killers, but The Zone, the real zone, nevertheless has a meaning and poignancy that is as real and as undeniable as anything else on this Earth. It's not hard to see why it inspired the GSC team to their finest work. The Zone, it seems, is a message, a warning, an allegory, as well as a grim reality.
GHOSTS OF THE FUTURE
The Zone is the perfect concept for a game. A closed-off realm that still has a powerful connection with the real world. It's a place where normal rules are suspended. A place where the conspiracies and realities collide. In some ways it is analogous to the position games find themselves in: pockets of reality that differ from our general everyday world in a few fundamental ways. Stalker might be set in the space of the real world, but it nevertheless remains utterly unlike any world we might know.
And it's not simply our urban decay fetish manifesting itself that makes Stalker's zone so appealing (although that's undoubtedly a part of it), it's the fact that it connects the dots between these rich Russian fictions and the most immediate form of gaming: first-person exploration. GSC's greatest achievement is probably in taking that most American of gaming forms, and managing to turn it into something that's distinctly Ukrainian, distinctly Chernobylian.
The fact is that videogames rely on American culture for the majority of the ideas. Indeed, many of the forms of games, their structures, are American. The FPS and the RTS both come from American studios. But there's more to it than that. Whatever the fiction, you can bet that there's something American about it. The noble space federation will be populated by actors with American accents and be vaguely analogous to the US in its foreign policy.
The wargame will feature America against a traditional enemy. Games are set in American cities, dominated by American music and populated by American myths and legends. You might argue that Tolkien inspired the fantasy genres, but it was Dungeons & Dragons that Americanised and therefore popularised the current conception of trad fantasy.
More significant than this is the way in which local development studios around
the world produce Americanised content. Battlefield has an American faction, but no Scandinavian influence, despite being produced in Stockholm. Grand Theft Auto hasn't seemed British since GTA III. It's so American, in fact, that most gamers assume that Rockstar are American.
We're in danger of becoming like the comics industry, where every comic is a superhero comic, and where every other superhero comic is just another continuation of the American myths: Superman, Spiderman, Hulk...
That games concentrate on American culture means that all aspects of other cultures remain undeveloped, unused, perhaps (if we're feeling capitalistic) under-exploited. There's a kind of international loss of ideas, where other cultures give way to the American way of doing things for the sake of a globalised games market, for the sake of an American market.
It's telling that Japanese games are often deemed 'weird', when all that really means is that they're not delivering the usual American standards. They're not covering the same subjects as Hollywood or American TV. They're taking ideas from their native culture and their native environment.
The same is true of GSC's Stalker. This is a game which doesn't attempt to fill its game with American archetypes. Everyone in the game has an Eastern European accent, most of the dialogue is Russian, the place is a ruin of the old Ukraine, the politics, geography and mythology that inspired it are all Russian. This is a game that farms its own fertile (and polluted) soil to grow something unique. This is a game that's faithful to the world it was conceived to illustrate, and our world - the world of games at large - is far richer for it.
This is, in some way, the significance of science fiction as a genre, or as a theme. Science fiction allows a cross-pollination of ideas - from different cultures, from places that are separated by space and time. In 1971 British science fiction author Brian Aldiss called science fiction "the sub-literature of change". What he meant by that was this is not a genre that's defined by spaceships, or rayguns, or aliens, but rather by the fact that things never stay the same.
Science fiction suggests what the world might be like if it was changed in some way, be it subtle, or radical. American cultural critic Steven Shaviro suggests that science fiction's purpose is to create "ghosts of the future", ideas of what might come, or what might have been, or what might never be, which haunts us here in the present.
If ever an instance of science fiction could be said to be a ghost of the future, then it is Stalker, with its vision of what a modern civilisation looks like when it's abandoned, ruined, and distorted. Indeed, we can see the changes that we wrought in the world in Stalker.
You might be looking down on a digital world, but at the same time it is, as Shaviro suggests, a prosthetic world. A game like this enables you to walk around and examine the toxic ruins of the Chernobyl zone in a way that you will never be able to in real life. Games are an extension of our experience, and this one extends into the constant, oppressive illustration of what environmental damage could do to the world around us.
We mutter and grumble about global warming, but the possibilities - the changes we can and do inflict - can be far worse. Let's hope most of them remain contained in our games, and in our fictions.
Thanks http://www.computerandvideogames.com/
The Chernobyl disaster has been a major factor in the Ukrainian consciousness of the last 30 years, and so it was only logical that GSC would be inspired to use materials from the abandoned area in their own work. Much of what you see in Stalker is landscape from around the zone, including the abandoned town where the workers from the plant lived with their families.
Many people have returned to the zone to live, including some of the former residents who are resigned to the damage the radiation will cause to their health, some criminal elements who use the 'off-grid' nature of the place to hide, and some refugees from wars in nearby Soviet republics.
An even smaller number of people now work here guiding people around the zone. One of these guides, Alexander Naumov, even describes himself as a "stalker". Naumov has said that to guide people around the zone for money is "blasphemous" and he told the Ukrainian writer Yanina Sokolovskaya, "A stalker risks his life, but does a useful job - makes people sense the Zone and understand how it lives."
There might not be a secret at the heart of the zone, or mutants, or bio-suited killers, but The Zone, the real zone, nevertheless has a meaning and poignancy that is as real and as undeniable as anything else on this Earth. It's not hard to see why it inspired the GSC team to their finest work. The Zone, it seems, is a message, a warning, an allegory, as well as a grim reality.
GHOSTS OF THE FUTURE
The Zone is the perfect concept for a game. A closed-off realm that still has a powerful connection with the real world. It's a place where normal rules are suspended. A place where the conspiracies and realities collide. In some ways it is analogous to the position games find themselves in: pockets of reality that differ from our general everyday world in a few fundamental ways. Stalker might be set in the space of the real world, but it nevertheless remains utterly unlike any world we might know.
And it's not simply our urban decay fetish manifesting itself that makes Stalker's zone so appealing (although that's undoubtedly a part of it), it's the fact that it connects the dots between these rich Russian fictions and the most immediate form of gaming: first-person exploration. GSC's greatest achievement is probably in taking that most American of gaming forms, and managing to turn it into something that's distinctly Ukrainian, distinctly Chernobylian.
The fact is that videogames rely on American culture for the majority of the ideas. Indeed, many of the forms of games, their structures, are American. The FPS and the RTS both come from American studios. But there's more to it than that. Whatever the fiction, you can bet that there's something American about it. The noble space federation will be populated by actors with American accents and be vaguely analogous to the US in its foreign policy.
The wargame will feature America against a traditional enemy. Games are set in American cities, dominated by American music and populated by American myths and legends. You might argue that Tolkien inspired the fantasy genres, but it was Dungeons & Dragons that Americanised and therefore popularised the current conception of trad fantasy.
More significant than this is the way in which local development studios around
the world produce Americanised content. Battlefield has an American faction, but no Scandinavian influence, despite being produced in Stockholm. Grand Theft Auto hasn't seemed British since GTA III. It's so American, in fact, that most gamers assume that Rockstar are American.
We're in danger of becoming like the comics industry, where every comic is a superhero comic, and where every other superhero comic is just another continuation of the American myths: Superman, Spiderman, Hulk...
That games concentrate on American culture means that all aspects of other cultures remain undeveloped, unused, perhaps (if we're feeling capitalistic) under-exploited. There's a kind of international loss of ideas, where other cultures give way to the American way of doing things for the sake of a globalised games market, for the sake of an American market.
It's telling that Japanese games are often deemed 'weird', when all that really means is that they're not delivering the usual American standards. They're not covering the same subjects as Hollywood or American TV. They're taking ideas from their native culture and their native environment.
The same is true of GSC's Stalker. This is a game which doesn't attempt to fill its game with American archetypes. Everyone in the game has an Eastern European accent, most of the dialogue is Russian, the place is a ruin of the old Ukraine, the politics, geography and mythology that inspired it are all Russian. This is a game that farms its own fertile (and polluted) soil to grow something unique. This is a game that's faithful to the world it was conceived to illustrate, and our world - the world of games at large - is far richer for it.
This is, in some way, the significance of science fiction as a genre, or as a theme. Science fiction allows a cross-pollination of ideas - from different cultures, from places that are separated by space and time. In 1971 British science fiction author Brian Aldiss called science fiction "the sub-literature of change". What he meant by that was this is not a genre that's defined by spaceships, or rayguns, or aliens, but rather by the fact that things never stay the same.
Science fiction suggests what the world might be like if it was changed in some way, be it subtle, or radical. American cultural critic Steven Shaviro suggests that science fiction's purpose is to create "ghosts of the future", ideas of what might come, or what might have been, or what might never be, which haunts us here in the present.
If ever an instance of science fiction could be said to be a ghost of the future, then it is Stalker, with its vision of what a modern civilisation looks like when it's abandoned, ruined, and distorted. Indeed, we can see the changes that we wrought in the world in Stalker.
You might be looking down on a digital world, but at the same time it is, as Shaviro suggests, a prosthetic world. A game like this enables you to walk around and examine the toxic ruins of the Chernobyl zone in a way that you will never be able to in real life. Games are an extension of our experience, and this one extends into the constant, oppressive illustration of what environmental damage could do to the world around us.
We mutter and grumble about global warming, but the possibilities - the changes we can and do inflict - can be far worse. Let's hope most of them remain contained in our games, and in our fictions.
Thanks http://www.computerandvideogames.com/
Juice
New member
axon1988
New member
Here's 25 years of satelite imagery over the exclusion zone! really interesting to see: http://www.spotimage.com/FlipBook/Tchernobyl/ENG/index.html
And some more interesting footage: http://gerdludwig.com/recent-work/chernobyl-cleanup-no-end-in-sight/#num=content-15&id=album-9
And some more interesting footage: http://gerdludwig.com/recent-work/chernobyl-cleanup-no-end-in-sight/#num=content-15&id=album-9
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Juice
New member
Thanks axon, that was rather beautiful.
Gerd Ludwig's photography is splendid.
Looks like the area is being overrun by tourists though:
http://gerdludwig.com/recent-work/chernobyl-a-new-hotspot-for-tourism/#id=album-10&num=content-19
Last edited by Juice; 19-03-1927 at 11:44 AM.
Gerd Ludwig's photography is splendid.
Looks like the area is being overrun by tourists though:
http://gerdludwig.com/recent-work/chernobyl-a-new-hotspot-for-tourism/#id=album-10&num=content-19
Last edited by Juice; 19-03-1927 at 11:44 AM.
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Juice
New member
There's a number of tour operators who take people to the Chernobyl area on almost a daily basis. They mostly offer group packages, but some are willing to take you in solo.
It has been rumoured that some of the minibuses have airconditioning.
Snork attacks are a distinct possible.
It has been rumoured that some of the minibuses have airconditioning.
Snork attacks are a distinct possible.
Tsar
The thing that should not be
I would love to go there one day.
Did you see the cosplayers doing a weekend pretending to be in the zone.
Did you see the cosplayers doing a weekend pretending to be in the zone.
http://kotaku.com/390649/stalker-cosplay-earns-a-standing-ovation
axon1988
New member
SO last night I installed Shadow of Chernobyl again. I just could not resist to play it again. I installed the complete mod and added some extras into it and voila I was back in the zone!
Playing the game a bit differently this time, trying to do things in a different way and using other weapons. At the moment I'm in agroprom in the underground tunnels about to come face to face with the first bloodsucker scene in the game. So I'm really looking forward to that.
Some interesting notes though, I always played the game with the mind set of a sniper you could say, staying at a distance at taking pot shots at the guys. With the built in bullet physics of the xray engine this made it loads of fun as I could watch the bullet drop as gravity pulls it down. But on this playthrough I'm playing it in the completely opposite way. Running around with a shotgun and flanking the enemy, coming face to face with them and then shooting. Which is showing me some loopholes in the AI of complete. I can run circles around them and not get hurt once. But I'm hoping this changes on higher levels.
Anyone else tried playing it again recently?
Playing the game a bit differently this time, trying to do things in a different way and using other weapons. At the moment I'm in agroprom in the underground tunnels about to come face to face with the first bloodsucker scene in the game. So I'm really looking forward to that.
Some interesting notes though, I always played the game with the mind set of a sniper you could say, staying at a distance at taking pot shots at the guys. With the built in bullet physics of the xray engine this made it loads of fun as I could watch the bullet drop as gravity pulls it down. But on this playthrough I'm playing it in the completely opposite way. Running around with a shotgun and flanking the enemy, coming face to face with them and then shooting. Which is showing me some loopholes in the AI of complete. I can run circles around them and not get hurt once. But I'm hoping this changes on higher levels.
Anyone else tried playing it again recently?
bradbear117
New member
Oh yes, Im going back to zone tonight!
axon1988
New member
@bradbear117
How about we do a collab on our adventures in the zone? Such as any unique experiences, with the a life system always doing it's own thing I'm sure we'd stumble upon some interesting things. Are you going to install any mods?
Also here's something interesting, I read somewhere that they are considering using some of these locations in S.t.a.l.k.e.r 2, some of them are already included in previous games and will be in the sequel also.
http://www.abandoned.ru/
How about we do a collab on our adventures in the zone? Such as any unique experiences, with the a life system always doing it's own thing I'm sure we'd stumble upon some interesting things. Are you going to install any mods?
Also here's something interesting, I read somewhere that they are considering using some of these locations in S.t.a.l.k.e.r 2, some of them are already included in previous games and will be in the sequel also.
http://www.abandoned.ru/
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Juice
New member
I'm usually also inclined to take the sniper approach, but on one of my Chernobyl adventures, I had oodles of fun utilizing the huge supply of grenades I had accumulated in my inventory. They are surprisingly powerful and satisfyingly loud.
Still busy with my third Call of Pripyat playthrough, this time using the Complete mod. After that I might also revisit Chernobyl and Clear Sky; haven't been able to get the Clear Sky Complete mod up and running though.
Thanks for the site axon; care to tell us where you read about these photos being used as inspiration for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 locations?
Also check out this internet location:
http://lplaces.com/en/reports/104-zone
Tons of beautiful photos of various abandoned areas; you might spot a few familiar zones.
Still busy with my third Call of Pripyat playthrough, this time using the Complete mod. After that I might also revisit Chernobyl and Clear Sky; haven't been able to get the Clear Sky Complete mod up and running though.
Thanks for the site axon; care to tell us where you read about these photos being used as inspiration for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 locations?
Also check out this internet location:
http://lplaces.com/en/reports/104-zone
Tons of beautiful photos of various abandoned areas; you might spot a few familiar zones.
axon1988
New member
I can't remember where I read it. I went looking for it yesterday and couldn't find it. Let's hope I do find something today. It's interesting to note that a lot of those photos have already played inspiration in certain areas in all 3 games. Especially Call of Prypiat. Have you guys seen some of the real photos of some of the locations they've used? Such as the Yanov station, in real life it's litterly in the middle of a small forest now.
Last night I went into the tunnels under Agroprom and tried getting that bloodsucker to come after me, but after runing around for like 6 minutes with no sign of it I went after the military patrol in the tunnels. After killing a couple it went quiet, I turned into the tunnel where Strelok's stach is hidden and there's the bloodsucker, just running up and down the tunnel, shot at it and it didn't even notice me. After a while it went after the rest of the military patrol and killed a couple before I killed it. When I got out of the tunnels and back into the agroprom agricultural base I found out that grenades are really fun to play with also. Killing those snipers in the towers were easy enough.
Last night I went into the tunnels under Agroprom and tried getting that bloodsucker to come after me, but after runing around for like 6 minutes with no sign of it I went after the military patrol in the tunnels. After killing a couple it went quiet, I turned into the tunnel where Strelok's stach is hidden and there's the bloodsucker, just running up and down the tunnel, shot at it and it didn't even notice me. After a while it went after the rest of the military patrol and killed a couple before I killed it. When I got out of the tunnels and back into the agroprom agricultural base I found out that grenades are really fun to play with also. Killing those snipers in the towers were easy enough.
Juice
New member
That's the zone for you. It has the quality of being awesome.
axon1988
New member
My adventures in the zone continued:
So last night I went to the 100rads bar and after getting the mission to go to Dark Valley sold almost everything I had. And bought a new set of armor and a AN-94 rifle. Knowing that you get a scope when helping out the duty guy in Dark Valley. Just outside Rostok on my way to the Garbage gate I saw our friend Wolf (from the rookie village in Cordon) walking towards bar. Which has happened to me a couple of times before but this time was unique as I just gave him a really nice ak-74 with a scope that he was lugging around. I never saw him use it though. Moved on to Dark Valley and helped the duty guy out. Invaded the cement factory quickly just to get the RPG-7 that's on the top floor. On my way back a pack of pseudodog's seem to have taken over the lower floors. I was amazed at how many of them there were... 12 to be exact. Which has never happened before.
After killing hte bunch and getting some tails from them (they sell for a nice price in Yantar) I went to Kill our friend Borov. Got that unique AN-94 from him. This rifle belongs to the duty guy you find in the 100rads bar. But it's such a nice rifle, it's hard ot give it back. But I did the right thing! I kept it for myself. After picking up all those weapons and hidden packages and the hundreds of artifacts lying around in Dark Valley I had to go back to the bar to sell it and restock on items. So upon entering Garbage I found the duty guy that I saved in the bandit camp. I gave him a mp5 smg earlier so he was just strolling when a group of bandits appeared. They were on their way to Dark Valley. After the killed the duty guy I had to have revenge!
So I killed them, and the group of dogs that always spawn close to the one dam in garbage. Then I went to the hangar and killed the bandits there. After my little killing spree I went back to the 100rads bar to get rich.
Tomorrow I'll enter the lab in dark valley, and maybe go have some fun in wilderness, which his one of my favorite maps.
So last night I went to the 100rads bar and after getting the mission to go to Dark Valley sold almost everything I had. And bought a new set of armor and a AN-94 rifle. Knowing that you get a scope when helping out the duty guy in Dark Valley. Just outside Rostok on my way to the Garbage gate I saw our friend Wolf (from the rookie village in Cordon) walking towards bar. Which has happened to me a couple of times before but this time was unique as I just gave him a really nice ak-74 with a scope that he was lugging around. I never saw him use it though. Moved on to Dark Valley and helped the duty guy out. Invaded the cement factory quickly just to get the RPG-7 that's on the top floor. On my way back a pack of pseudodog's seem to have taken over the lower floors. I was amazed at how many of them there were... 12 to be exact. Which has never happened before.
After killing hte bunch and getting some tails from them (they sell for a nice price in Yantar) I went to Kill our friend Borov. Got that unique AN-94 from him. This rifle belongs to the duty guy you find in the 100rads bar. But it's such a nice rifle, it's hard ot give it back. But I did the right thing! I kept it for myself. After picking up all those weapons and hidden packages and the hundreds of artifacts lying around in Dark Valley I had to go back to the bar to sell it and restock on items. So upon entering Garbage I found the duty guy that I saved in the bandit camp. I gave him a mp5 smg earlier so he was just strolling when a group of bandits appeared. They were on their way to Dark Valley. After the killed the duty guy I had to have revenge!
So I killed them, and the group of dogs that always spawn close to the one dam in garbage. Then I went to the hangar and killed the bandits there. After my little killing spree I went back to the 100rads bar to get rich.
Tomorrow I'll enter the lab in dark valley, and maybe go have some fun in wilderness, which his one of my favorite maps.