'Subconsciously, we were all ready to die': Stalker 2 developers secretly prepared for Russia's invasion

(Image credit: GSC Game World)

There aren't many games with a story like Stalker 2's, whose development at Ukrainian studio GSC Game World was interrupted by Russia's invasion of the country on February 24, 2022. Kyiv was bombed, devs and their families were evacuated while others enlisted in the Ukrainian military, and the studio as a whole had to be effectively rebuilt from the ground-up in Prague.

"Subconsciously, we were all ready to die," says a GSC dev named Alina in a new documentary, called War Game, put out to mark the game's tumultuous path to release on November 20 this year. In a section detailing devs' experiences of the day Russian troops rolled over Ukraine's border, we see shots of Ukrainians flooding into basements as missiles rained down from overhead. "I remember the alarm we heard in Kyiv," recalls another dev, "It was quite a scary feeling. The creepiest thing was knowing that your life would depend on this sound."

But the doc also details the myriad ways in which the invasion impacted GSC even before it happened. As early as December 2021, certain company execs were thinking about plans for evacuation, mapping out routes into the west of the country and out of Kyiv in the event that Russia actually followed through on its apparent ambition to conquer Ukraine.

"I thought that Putin wouldn't want to start a war with NATO," says GSC's Mariia Grygorovych. "Which meant there shouldn't be missiles [landing] within 50km of a NATO border." Secretly, so as not to panic staff, Grygorovych and other high-ranking GSC staff began formulating plans to move everyone to Uzhhorod—right on the Ukraine-Slovakian border—in the event war broke out. "We booked buses back in January that were parked outside the offices 24/7," recalls Grygorovych. "Initially, we didn't tell the team about these buses. Because we didn't want to scare people."

The studio eventually made use of those buses on February 20, just days before the invasion began, moving over 180 devs (though over a hundred refused to leave Kyiv regardless of the risk of war) westwards. Four days later, Russian troops rolled in, kicking off a long process of rebuilding for GSC in Prague, also detailed in the doc.

"We had to rearrange everything from scratch," says Grygorovych, including recasting actors who had gone to fight the invasion. "The game, for us, is now an element of resistance."

You can find the full documentary on the Xbox and GSC YouTube channels.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.