In the mid noughties, a Ukrainian living in Kyiv could enjoy the luxury of boredom. In the wake of the anti-corruption Orange Revolution – “good times of hope, when we felt like we were the masters of our own fate” – Andrii Verpakhovskyi was tired of zipping around town as a system administrator, helping out local companies with their computer infrastructure: “I faced the unfortunate reality that I was running out of cool, new stuff to do.” And so he started pestering his best friend, who was working at GSC Game World, for potential openings. The studio was working on an ambitious new shooter named Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl for the Californian publisher THQ, and Verpakhovskyi wanted in.
He got his wish under strange circumstances. A seismic shift occurred at GSC when the vast majority of its core team upped sticks to found 4A Games, the rival Ukrainian developer that would go on to make the Metro games. A gaping hollow had opened up in the middle of Stalker’s development, and Verpakhovskyi was one of the newcomers pulled in to fill it.
Stalker: Legends of the Zone Trilogy – Official Nintendo Switch Release Date Trailer Watch on YouTube
“GSC brought in a bunch of people, basically from the street, including me and my friends,” he says. “There wasn’t much of an interview or anything: ‘Those guys play games and they’re smart’. 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.”