“Thugs and madmen.”
In the mid noughties, a Ukrainian living in Kyiv could enjoy the luxury of boredom.
And so he started pestering his best friend, who was working atGSC Game World, for potential openings.
He got his wish under strange circumstances.
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.”
“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.
A lot of super smart, self-motivated and self-taught people.”
“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.”
“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.
“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.”
IfHalf-Life 2’s City 17 hadopened 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.
“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.
“We reached the point when the marsh was just beautiful.
Everything was so cool.”
“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.
In the ensuing rush, GSC tried their best, and got the game out on time.
“He’s a very finance-oriented guy,” Verpakhovskyi says.
“Early in the development ofStalker: Call of Pripyat, he rushed in absolutely happy.”
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.
That was the path we took, and I think in many aspects, we succeeded.”
By that time, Verpakhovskyi was lead designer, and he had big plans.
“So basically we took the entirety of our quality control department and made them designers.
“Everything that we imagined in our mind palace,” Verpakhovskyi says.
That documentation was distributed among the team, so that less experienced designers could follow instructions to the letter.
Yet a big chunk of Verpakhovskyi’s colleagues on the design team left game development permanently afterwards.
“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?”
“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.
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.
One year, Ubisoft sent him to Gamescom, the enormous trade fair in Cologne.
“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?'”
“They were the exact reflection of the original team,” Verpakhovskyi says.
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 just like the original, it’s going to be buggy as hell.'”
