As the 400 employees of GSC Game World, creators of the hit video game Stalker, filtered into their Kyiv office in January 2022, most didn’t even notice the strange buses parked around the corner. While tensions were growing with their neighbours across the border, the frost-coated shlep to the office felt almost normal. Routine. Or so they told themselves. As whispers of war spread throughout the country, regular reassurances from their business partners – and President Zelenskiy – made it seem foolish to worry. Life, they were told, would carry on as usual.

Weeks later, their fears no longer seemed so foolish. On 24 February 2022, at 4am local time, Russian forces crossed the border, invading Ukraine from the north, east and south, shelling more than a dozen cities and killing 40 Ukrainian soldiers in 24 hours. The bombs fell hard and fast, levelling buildings less than a mile from GSC’s office. Luckily, those ominous blacked-out buses had sprung into action a week prior, whisking more than 200 GSC employees and their families to Uzhgorod, a town on the Ukrainian border.

. . .

For the last 13 years, GSC has been diligently working on the globally anticipated direct sequel to its 4m-selling 2007 cult classic Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, an apocalyptic survival game depicting the aftermath of a second Chornobyl disaster in a war-ravaged Ukraine. It’s an alternate history, yet for Ukranians it has veered harrowingly close to reality. In March 2022, Russian forces captured the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, which they still hold today, prompting very real concerns about a combat-related nuclear disaster. GSC’s fiction had begun to blur with real life.

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