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.
He got his wish under strange circumstances. A seismic shift occurred at GSC when the vast majority of its core team upped sticks to found 4A Games, the rival Ukrainian developer that would go on to make the Metro games. A gaping hollow had opened up in the middle of Stalker’s development, and Verpakhovskyi was one of the newcomers pulled in to fill it.
“GSC brought in a bunch of people, basically from the street, including me and my friends,” he says. “There wasn’t much of an interview or anything: ‘Those guys play games and they’re smart’. We were basically hired on the spot.” The refreshed Stalker team was tasked with getting the game ready for launch in six months. “So we had to learn fast, learn how to fix bugs,” Verpakhovskyi says. “[We also] introduced a bunch of new ones, I’m absolutely sure of that. And that was my first experience with the industry.”
GSC’s studio culture of the time was, in Verpakhovskyi’s view, reflective of Ukrainian society at large. “The majority of the people at the studio were not professional game developers,” he says. “There were not a lot of opportunities to try their hand in something like that. A lot of us had no formal higher education at all. It was this idea of, ‘Let’s build something in a garage, just scaled up a little bit’. A lot of super smart, self-motivated and self-taught people.”
The team called each other by nicknames, and often wouldn’t know the real names of their colleagues, even after working side by side for half a decade. “It all felt a bit like running a street gang,” Verpakhovskyi says. “Everything was goal-oriented, with a solid dash of craziness. We were basically trying to have as much fun as possible with the game we were building. It was way, way before the notion of being able to design the game for your audience. Our audience was us.”
Verpakhovskyi was assigned to A-Life, the legendary AI system which governed Stalker’s computer characters, and which GSC had already spent years bigging up to the world’s press. He plays down his own contribution – “We were just basically closers when we came in,” – but heaps praise on lead AI programmer Dmitry Yasenev.
“He was absolutely thriving building AI agents that were smarter than an average human,” Verpakhovskyi says. So much so that their intelligence ultimately had to be tuned down. Relying on the same sensory tools as the player, computer-controlled characters were consistently coming out on top – not only in combat, but when it came to solving quests too.
“As I was told later, people had a really hard time persuading Dmitry that while the AI was absolutely beautiful, we should carve out some space for the player to have fun too,” Verpakhovskyi says. “The paradigm of Stalker at the time was that we don’t really care about the player. We have this living world. It would be doing just fine without them.”
It’s this barely-compromising character that has come to define Stalker in the public imagination since – as well as a setting unlike anything in the western first-person shooter genre. If Half-Life 2‘s City 17 had opened the door to post-Soviet brutalism, Stalker kicked it down.
“The western games at the time reflected their own reality,” Verpakhovskyi says. “They were Hollywood-esque, either about something green and lush or the shiny big city. And Stalker was basically the first game that took this oppressive, broken, dirty reality of the post-Soviet times, and just put it into the game.”
Enough of GSC’s garage ambition came through in the final game to win over FPS players outside Ukraine, and two more Stalker games followed that decade. The first was Clear Sky, for which head of design Ruslan Didenko had the idea of introducing a strategy layer. Verpakhovskyi, Didenko and another designer named Peter Dushinsky sat down to figure out how factions could vie for resources on the map – each drawn to different spots according to their unique priorities. “Then we would let the AI agents into the map, and they would try to get to the points of their interest,” Verpakhovskyi says. “Fighting between each other along the way, and just breathing life into that world.”
You’ll have seen the best of Clear Sky if you played its opening area, the Great Swamps. The art team would lie prone on the floor to photograph marsh reeds against a blue background, so that the plants could be imported into the Zone. “It was so much fun trying to bring something authentic into the game this way,” Verpakhovskyi says. “We reached the point when the marsh was just beautiful. Everything was so cool.”
But remember: many of GSC’s most experienced developers had left for 4A Games, and this was the new team’s first experience of building a game from scratch. “We realised that we’d spent six months building that level,” Verpakhovskyi says. “We had six more months to go, and 11 more levels to build. Uh oh.”
In the ensuing rush, GSC tried their best, and got the game out on time. “But it definitely feels like the majority of the design love went into the first level of the game – with the rest being functional, but I’m not especially proud of it,” Verpakhovskyi says. “In this sense, I think we the designers did a huge disfavour to the artists, who really stepped up their game.”
Few western gamers know anything about Sergiy Grygorovych, the man whose initials are in the name GSC, and who founded the company back in the 90s as a teenager. “He’s a very finance-oriented guy,” Verpakhovskyi says. “Early in the development of Stalker: Call of Pripyat, he rushed in absolutely happy.”
Grygorovych declared, in front of the entire GSC design department, that he had signed an agreement with the German publisher bitComposer to fund the entirety of the third Stalker game’s development upfront. As far as he was concerned, the team could proceed without oversight.
“We were basically on the crossroads,” Verpakhovskyi says. “We could have done nothing. We could have just toyed around with the game, and our careers were not on the line. Or we could just try to make the best Stalker we could, knowing that there is no pressure on us in terms of being successful in the end. That was the path we took, and I think in many aspects, we succeeded.”
“That was a beautiful bunch of thugs and madmen, the true reflection of the street life of an industrial neighbourhood in Kyiv at the time.”
By that time, Verpakhovskyi was lead designer, and he had big plans. “We knew that we never had enough firepower in terms of design to accomplish our ambitions for the game,” he says. “So basically we took the entirety of our quality control department and made them designers. That was a beautiful bunch of thugs and madmen, the true reflection of the street life of an industrial neighbourhood in Kyiv at the time.”
Knowing they didn’t have time to properly mentor the newcomers, and mindful of the fact that they’d run out of time on Clear Sky, GSC’s senior designers sat down and documented the whole game on paper. “Everything that we imagined in our mind palace,” Verpakhovskyi says. “All the characters, dialogue, quests – everything down to the names of the variables to be used in scripts to connect the quests together.”
That documentation was distributed among the team, so that less experienced designers could follow instructions to the letter. Incredibly, Call of Pripyat was made without a single hour of overtime – “an absolutely mind-bogglingly cool thing back in the day”. Yet a big chunk of Verpakhovskyi’s colleagues on the design team left game development permanently afterwards.
“People don’t join our industry to be told what to do and just execute on someone else’s ideas,” he says. “They were burnt out hard, and that is something that I vowed to never repeat in my career. Which is why, when I work with people now, I’m very particular about giving them full ownership of features and rolling with their ideas.”
As far as the public is concerned, the Stalker series ended there, until its revival with last year’s Stalker 2. Yet Verpakhovskyi also worked on the original Stalker 2, a doomed project that saw GSC close down for over a decade. It began with a decision – a “common mistake,” as Verpakhovskyi characterises it – to rebuild Stalker’s tech from the ground up.
While that was happening, GSC’s designers reimagined the game as a true open world – not fractured into separate maps, and more closely mirroring the actual geography of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. “There were a lot of people in our audience who were very vocal about how they wanted things to be more real,” Verpakhovskyi says. “And we wanted to finally get deeper into the mystery of the origin of the zone. Was it the noosphere? Was it some kind of experiment?” GSC drew from the books written about Stalker’s world, as well as the live-action RPGs played by the community. “There was a lot of inspiration to draw from,” Verpakhovskyi says. “But the pieces of the puzzle never really fell together to form a coherent picture.”
The issue, as Verpakhovskyi sees it, was internalised pressure. “There was this desire on the team for the new game to be as genre-defining for open-world shooters as the original Stalker was, and we just couldn’t hit the mark,” he says. “We would redo the world and the quests and the characters, and we would take a look at what we had, and it just wasn’t it. We were basically trying to hit the Pixar level of quality, and we were not even close to that level of awesomeness.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, after three games back to back, the team was tired of the world of Stalker, and simply no longer had the spark to come up with something “cool and beautiful”. One morning, Verpakhovskyi woke up and realised he hated going to work. He jumped ship for 4A Games, and six months later, GSC was gone.
Verpakhovskyi’s street gang education put him in good stead. In the years that followed, he moved to Malta with 4A, then on to Canada, where he has contributed to Halo Infinite, as well as the Stalker-indebted open-world design of Far Cry 6. One year, Ubisoft sent him to Gamescom, the enormous trade fair in Cologne. As Verpakhovskyi walked the packed floors between the booths where game developers showed their wares, he heard voices speaking in Ukrainian. “I was like, ‘Hey guys, who might you be?’ And they were like, ‘We are the people working on Stalker 2.'”
It transpired that the newly revived GSC had shipped its entire team to Germany for the event. “I was like, ‘Hey, I’m the grognard,'” Verpakhovskyi says. “‘The voice from the past. Do you guys want to hang out and get a couple of beers?'”
The Stalker veteran sat with his replacements on the steps of Cologne Cathedral, where they talked their tongues off about old times and new. “They were the exact reflection of the original team,” Verpakhovskyi says. “There were some people with a bunch of experience, and a lot of people super new to the industry. And they had that spark that we lacked by the time we first tried to build Stalker 2. They were super stoked, and it was super fun for them. And I thought to myself, ‘They’re going to make a beautiful game, absolutely in the spirit of the original Stalker. And just like the original, it’s going to be buggy as hell.'”
