The player, sitting at his computer, sees through the eyes of the protagonist, aiming his gun with movements of the mouse, and walking, jumping, or otherwise interacting with the world by using the keyboard.įPSes usually aim for a kind of restrictive, frenetic immersion in the video game’s action: the player is guided through a series of ever more elaborate battles, and witnesses the events of the story directly through the eyes of the protagonist (or protagonists) rather than from reading a text narration or watching periodic “cut scenes” that try to imitate movies. games are “first-person shooters” ( FPSes)-perhaps the dominant computer game genre for the past decade.
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Bringing the cycle of adaptation full circle, a series of novels based on the game were released in Russia. Released in North America between 20, the games have been extremely successful Shadow of Chernobyl alone sold several million copies around the world. games are detailed and recognizable though thoroughly fictionalized-there’s been a mysterious second disaster, filling the Zone with mutants and strange technological “artifacts.” On the screen we see computer recreations of the military cordon, the labs, and Pripyat, the abandoned city built to house Chernobyl workers.
The different “levels” or settings in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The video games move the Zone to the real-life Chernobyl zone of alienation. The Zone of his film is more abstract and mysterious, its origin addressed only in the opening titles: “What was it? A meteorite that fell to earth? Or a visitation from outer space? Whatever it was, there appeared in our land a miracle of miracles: the Zone.” In adapting the novel, Tarkovsky stripped out almost all its science-fiction elements (leading one collaborator to wonder if he’d picked the wrong novel). In Roadside Picnic, the Zone is the result of a visit to Earth by extraterrestrials: the area seems magical because it is filled with discarded alien technology beyond human understanding. To many this was eerily similar to the Zone of the film, and it is this parallel that inspired a Ukrainian video game developer named GSC Game World to create a series of video game adaptations of the film called, respectively, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat. Originally adapted from the popular Russian science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic (1971) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Stalker depicts three men (“Writer,” “Professor,” and “Stalker,” their guide and the film’s protagonist) journeying into the deadly “Zone,” with its mysterious “Room.” This fraught, high-stakes quest consists mainly of the three men walking a couple hundred yards in a grassy, abandoned landscape and talking (with a break for a nap) the film ends after 163 minutes without anyone entering the Room and with no wishes apparently made or granted.īut one aspect of Stalker’s enduring fascination has been the way it seems to prefigure the Chernobyl disaster that occurred seven years after its release: the nuclear meltdown created an abandoned “zone of alienation,” as it was widely called, over a thousand square miles considered too radioactive to enter, though tourists began to be allowed in starting in 2002. It may at first seem improbable that a decades-old art film in which very little happens could be embellished with firefights and mutant psychics and converted into violent video games.
In the deluge of commentary on the book and the film, perhaps the most inventive, and most popular, part of the film’s afterlife has gone entirely unremarked: the video game version. And yet, after reading Dyer’s book, I was left feeling that something was missing. In an account that combines summary, memoir, meditation, tribute, and citation, Dyer sets out to convey the hypnotic effect Stalker has had on decades of viewers, and on himself. Zona, Geoff Dyer’s recent book about the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, has been much discussed for its almost comically thorough dissection of the stately 1979 film in which three men venture into a mysterious, dangerous “Zone,” which supposedly contains a “Room” in which wishes can be granted. Nikolai Grinko as ‘Professor,’ Alexander Kaidanovsky as ‘Stalker,’ and Anatoli Solonitsyn as ‘Writer’ in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, 1979 Mary Evans/MOSFILM/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection
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