S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - the myth and reality #2

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Below is part two of a three-part feature on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Part one can be read here if you missed it.

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...

The myth and reality of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., part three, coming soon.

Jim Rossignol