"It all felt a bit like running a street gang": The story of Stalker, and the Stalker 2 that never was
In the mid noughties, a Ukrainian living in Kyiv could enjoy the luxury of boredom. In the wake of the anti-corruption Orange Revolution - "good times of hope, when we felt like we were the masters of our own fate" - Andrii Verpakhovskyi was tired of zipping around town as a system administrator, helping out local companies with their computer infrastructure: "I faced the unfortunate reality that I was running out of cool, new stuff to do." And so he started pestering his best friend, who was working at GSC Game World, for potential openings. The studio was working on an ambitious new shooter named Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl for the Californian publisher THQ, and Verpakhovskyi wanted in. Read more
In the mid noughties, a Ukrainian living in Kyiv could enjoy the luxury of boredom. In the wake of the anti-corruption Orange Revolution - "good times of hope, when we felt like we were the masters of our own fate" - Andrii Verpakhovskyi was tired of zipping around town as a system administrator, helping out local companies with their computer infrastructure: "I faced the unfortunate reality that I was running out of cool, new stuff to do." And so he started pestering his best friend, who was working at GSC Game World, for potential openings. The studio was working on an ambitious new shooter named Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl for the Californian publisher THQ, and Verpakhovskyi wanted in.
.png?width=1920&height=1920&fit=bounds&quality=80&format=jpg&auto=webp#)
