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Imagine the following scenario: you, the player, are tasked with stealing top-secret documents from a former research institute-turned-military complex swarming with enemies. You manage to slip into the main building undetected, narrowly avoiding the eyesight of your adversaries – but just as you reach the target, you are spotted, and the alarm goes off. Undeterred, you reload your previous save with the intention of making the alert go away – only to be confronted with the same relentless wailing. You load the next save in your list – and once again, the haunting sound is still there. It’s as if the ghost of your previous, inept incarnation has polluted your world with its spectral presence – and there’s nothing you can do about it.
This scene epitomizes the often baffling, yet thoroughly fascinating series of first person shooter survival horror games developed by GSC Game World, Stalker. Stalker is not a series of finished products, but rather, a work-in-progress, a palimpsest whose texture inscribes the history of its troubled development. All the hardships, discarded ideas, and unrealistic ambitions that dogged the games’ development haunt them in the form of innumerable bugs and frustrating design flaws. And yet, despite – or perhaps even because of these faults, the series managed to attract a sizeable cult following, spawning an abundance of mods, fanfiction, novels, as well as films, and even inspire courageous fans to enact their fantasies in the game’s real life setting: the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The story of the Stalker series illustrates that sometimes, success is only possible if it straddles the border of disaster.
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