Air raid sirens ring sporadically throughout the gleaming, irradiated landscape of the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, a brutal open-world adventure littered with the landmarks of the nuclear power plant’s real exclusion zone.
For employees at the Ukrainian studio GSC Game World who have been creating the game while Russia invades their country, the piercing noise is grimly familiar.
“It is the sound of war, the sound of death,” Yaroslav Kravchenko, the game’s story director, said days after Ukraine’s energy grid was shelled by Russia in June, causing lengthy blackouts. “When you’re testing the game and you hear the alarm, it triggers you in milliseconds.”
Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, about 200 GSC Game World employees and their families moved hundreds of miles away to Prague, a city with a thriving, welcoming video game industry. Kravchenko and 130 colleagues chose to stay in Kyiv.
Some did so because relocating their entire families would have been too stressful. Others decided to join the military frontline, where a few colleagues have been killed. Those who remain hear the air raid siren almost daily.
Alongside the logistics of development, the long, bloody war has also posed creative challenges for GSC Game World, which invites allegorical and metaphorical interpretations of its science fiction game but wishes to avoid direct commentary on the conflict.
The New York Times