If anyone can say they have had challenges making a game, the team making S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: The Heart of Chornobyl can make that claim. And if it ships the game to consumers on November 20, that will be a victory in itself.
Yet the developers of GSC Game World in Kyiv, Ukraine want to ship this game to show that they never gave up on a project that has been going in full gear for nearly seven years and talked about even longer. They have not given up even though the team was disrupted when Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale war on February 24, 2022. Russia had attacked before in 2014, seizing a couple of territories. But this was a war for control of all of Ukraine, and the war continues to this day.
Developers had to leave to go to war. The electricity regularly went out and it still goes out in Kyiv, where the bulk of the team is. Missiles regularly rained down on the city and they still do, with anti-missile rockets intercepting the incoming missiles before they can do harm.
If and when they ship their game, they should be an inspiration for an industry that has had suffered through layoffs, declining sales, a pandemic, social media hate, and more in the past few years. If GSC Game World can get this done, then others can overcome their hurdles too, just like those Ukraine athletes who won the medals for their country in the Olympics.
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I spoke with Ievgen Grygorovych, CEO of GSC Game World, and Maria Grygorovych, creative director at Gamescom. They’re a husband-and-wife team, running one of Ukraine’s biggest and best known game companies with 460 employees. Yet they’re just an indie game studio. They spread out into new locations such as Poland and Prague and elsewhere, with some working remote.
Ievgen’s brother Sergiy started GSC Game World in 1995 as a company that localized games to the Russian market. It went on to create the Cossacks series of games, and it began developing and publishing its own as well as third-party games. Ievgen joined the company in 2001.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl came out in 2007 and it was a success as a first-person shooter. It combined ideas from the novel Roadside Picnic with the real-world disaster of the Chornobyl nuclear meltdown, positing that this created a Zone where hunters known as Stalkers could go to find anomalous treasures. But they ran the risk of running into enemies including monsters unleashed by the radioactive contamination.
Two more Stalker games came out in 2008 and 2009, but none was called Stalker 2. In fact, the prior CEO, who was Ievgen’s brother, asked him to make Stalker 2 and Ievgen said no because he didn’t think the team was ready to take on such a big project. The company announced Stalker 2 in 2012, but that team never finished and it was rebooted altogether later on.
Ievgen eventually relented. “It was a crazy business decision to start this project, but we were sure that we would do everything possible,” Ievgen Grygorovych said in our interview.
Abandoning earlier directions, they created a plan and built a new team. They worked on getting the script right from the start. After six rewrites, they finally started moving forward.
Even without these external challenges, the game was ambitious, even for developers who had been working on games for decades. The team started with new technology. They came up with a list of tasks and broke it down into hundreds of thousands of tasks, Ievgen Grygorovych said. By the end of the process, many of their family members lost loved ones in the war.
One Stalker 2 developer, Volodymyr Yezhov, was killed in the war with Russia. In December 2022, he died in a battle near Bakhmut, defending the city from Russian attackers. GSC Gameworld has made numerous donations to cause of Ukraine and it solicits funds from visitors to its website as well.
During all this time, they never considered shutting down the game. They felt like a responsibility toward their country to get it done, to put Ukraine on the map of the game development world. When they saw their countrymen and women win medals at the Summer Olympics, they were proud, and they want the country to be proud of their work on Stalker 2 — even to the point of using the Ukrainian version of the spelling of Chornobyl (instead of the Russian Chernobyl).
It’s been a hard road and the longest journey. With some pride, the Stalker 2 leaders joined a picture with the Xbox European game dev team in Cologne, Germany. What’s their ultimate lesson? In game development, you have to really love the process, Maria Grygorovych said.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview. Disclosure: Devcom paid my where to Cologne, where I moderated a couple of panels at the Devcom developer event.
GamesBeat: How do you stay resilient enough to do this for such a long time?
Ievgen Grygorovych: It’s a hard project for us. It’s huge. We started from scratch. We started with new technology. We started before the current generation of consoles appeared. We started with a mostly new team. We had a total lack of experience in the move to consoles. We were a PC-only game developer before. It was a crazy business decision to start this project, but we were sure that we would do everything possible. We had a lot of experience making games. I have about 24 years making games.
In the past we were asked at different times to make a Stalker 2. All the previous times I refused to start making it because it’s a very ambitious project. The player expectations would be very high. It would be a very long journey, a very hard journey. When you’re not very young and you understand what that’s going to be like, how you’d have to work and how stressful it would be, it’s hard to say, “Yes, I’m ready to do that.” When you’re young and experienced you don’t know what you’ll have to go through making this kind of game. You’re more likely to say yes.
The last time, we talked with Maria and we decided it was time to do it. We started from that point. It’s been a big part of our lifetime. From what I can see now, it’s going to be a very good game. We’re happy with what we could achieve. We didn’t expect that we would do it, but we did it. We’re still a bit nervous. You never know how players are going to take your game. But inside me I think that we’ve done everything possible in our situation.
We’re an independent developer. We have a lot of limitations that other developers might not have. We have all the situations connected to the war with Russia. With all these difficulties, we’ve still come to this point where we’re near the release. It’s been a long journey.
GamesBeat: How long have you worked on Stalker?
Maria Grygorovych: For me it’s been since 2017.
Ievgen Grygorovych: Yes, the same for me.
GamesBeat: The first set of games, the first three games, did you work on those?
Ievgen Grygorovych: I was working with the company, but on different games at that point. I hadn’t been working on Stalker. But we sat just nearby. I was in the RTS development department, leading the RTS line. I’ve been with GSC since 2001. I had worked there part-time before, but 2001 is when I joined up as a full-time job.
Maria Grygorovych: I worked in cinema and TV before I joined GSC. In 2016 they asked me to help out for a couple of days. It’s been eight years since. I was a producer on some projects at first.
Ievgen Grygorovych: She had experience that could help us with games that were approaching release.
GamesBeat: When you think about how long it’s been, do you think of it as certain stages? Changing directions or working on different things. How do you explain the time involved?
Ievgen Grygorovych: There is a certain degree of uncertainty here. When we started, we didn’t have a blueprint for developing these kinds of games. We started by writing a new plot and story. At first we had to gather the team that would do this project. The first big find was a story writer. We found someone with a lot of experience in the development industry in Ukraine. He has much more experience than I do. We got started working on the story, and when we looked at the first concept, we said, “No, this isn’t Stalker 2.” We moved away from that and started again.
In the end it was fully rewritten about six times. These are long stories. He’s a professional. He wasn’t afraid to drop it all and start again. After those six times, we had the story we wanted to tell with our game. We were happy with it. It was very detailed. The whole history of this world, starting from 1960 until the game begins. That was where we could start.
