GSC Game World in Chernobyl. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. dev’s notes, 2002

Twenty-two years ago, 29 March 2002, a team of young devs from Ukrainian company GSC Game World made the trip into the Exclusion Zone of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Very soon, all the world will hear about them. Because of them, Chernobyl will acquire an iconic status. They will make a game of their dreams despite all the difficulties. But it was the trip which changed everything about the development of the Oblivion Lost project that will receive a new main title: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Go back to 2002 thanks to notes by Alexey Sytyanov about this trip.

This is our second trip to Chernobyl, the first one failed, as we were not permitted to cross the zone of “Dytiatky” post and had to come back home empty-handed. This was only after two weeks that we got in touch with the administration and procured the right contact to request Chernobyl Zone pass. Now we’ve got a pass and guide. The four brave hearts to have ventured for this trip are:

• Sergiy Karmalsky (Karma)
  
• Sergiy Grygorovych (GSC)
  
• Andriy Prokhorov (Prof)
  
• Alexey Sytyanov (Koan)
  
• Rimma Kyselytsia, our guide
  
• Nikolay Tkach, driver

09:58 We are approaching “Dytiatky” post. Nobody seems to be waiting for us. It’s a bright sunny morning today, and it’s hot.

10:00 This is the time fixed for the appointment, still nobody is seen around. We see “Kamaz” trucks loaded with metal waste leaving the Zone. A soldier at the post checks the trucks with a dosimeter.

10:12 A woman in her late thirties approaches us, clad in khaki uniform. This turns out to be our guide, we greet each other, she’s called Rimma. When passing the post a problem occurred — I left my documents at home and risked not being allowed in, but thanks to our Lady Stalker who arranged it with the administration, I proceeded through the post.

10:30 We left our car at the post and got into the “PAZ” minibus. As our driver told us, when a car accumulates a certain amount of microroentgens, it is discarded and gets sent to the vehicle cemetery. Evidently, our minibus is rather old and it will not be a long before it ends up wasted.

10:45 We approach an abandoned village. Along the road there lie rotten electric line pillars. We are surrounded by weedy semi-rotten huts. We go out of the car to take some snapshots and hear the guide's warning that there’s no go from the asphalt road until we put on overalls and boots, unless we want to catch some “dirt” from grass or plants. When saying “dirt” locals mean radioactive hotbeds, and when they say “a dirty car”, they mean it is heavily rayed. We take the shots and get back to the car. One of the photos shows a totally grassed asphalt road, there’s no going there ;)
The village makes a depressing impression on us. You involuntarily remember the documentary chronicles of citizen evacuation. We would like to return here in overalls now, but Rimma says we'll be driving another road on the way back.
When we drive out, a roe deer crosses the road. Rimma tells about intensity wild animals have bred at in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. You can come across a deer, hare, boar or wolf. By the way, boars are very good at enduring radiation and bear healthy progeny, though their meat is very “dirty”. Recently there came a foreign boar research group to the Zone, but they had not succeeded in gaining quick results and were called back.

11:10 The sun is hot. We drive along the road in a tight corridor of dense woods. Rimma tells how straight after the disaster the rayed “red” forest nearby the nuclear plant was chopped. In a fuss, the fallen trees were buried in the ground, and that turned out a way worse than if the trees would have been left standing. The buried “dirty” trees appeared too close to underground waters and radiation could make its way into potable water.
Now we also know the symptoms to show you are rayed. If you feel a bitter metallic taste in the mouth, it's a sign to urgently leave the rayed territory. The next stages will be headache and nausea. By the way, some workers are said to now and then shoot down roe deer, hare or boar and give it a good deal of roasting, eat it. As time passes, the feeling of danger disappears and you get used to “dirty” neglected surroundings, you can even eat some big juicy berries which are abundant in the area. Of course this will be harmful to your health, but the temptation is high, and the time dulls the apprehensibility.

11:30 We are passing the vehicle cemetery. We decided to make a quick stop, taking some photos here. We climb on our car roof and take shots of the cemetery. It is immense and you can see long rows of “dirty” vehicles. Armored troop carriers, trucks, ambulance cars, fire-engines, busses, excavators, robot bulldozers and even cargo helicopters (the most powerful in the world — their carrying capacity is 50 tons).
Andriy and I climb a 20-metre tower to take scaled shots of the cemetery, while the guide talks to the guards to convince them to let us into the territory of the cemetery, provided we stick to the pathway and do not touch any vehicles. From the top of the tower a large panorama of the cemetery opens up. Wind blows and the tower starts swaying significantly. We go down, Rimma arranges it with the guys and we enter the cemetery. Each of us tries to stick to the center of the pathway, meticulously checking for the metallic taste in the mouth.
Vehicles are really unkempt, some of them have only the frame left. Rimma says that vehicles that were too “dirty” were buried on spot deep underground. We go along rows of vehicles and imagine how rescue brigades, firemen and soldiers got into those vehicles and drove to the burning reactor that night. We stop at the most interesting vehicles and take shots. The sunshine is too bright, so we have to cover the camera lens with our free hand to create a shadow.
Rimma tells us of robots, of Japanese robots convulsing vehemently and falling down the roof, as if committing suicide. I remember well the robot bulldozers, which were used to throw lumps of radioactive graphite into the open reactor. That graphite was thrown out of the reactor on the roof at the moment of explosion. We passed the buses citizens of Pripyat were evacuated with, there were ambulance cars on the opposite side, fire-engines nearby. The sun is searing, too many impressions.

12:30 We drive further. Approaching the city of Chernobyl, 18 kilometers from the nuclear plant. There are people living and working in the city, but there are not many. We enter the administrative building to go through checks and make the trip arrangements.

12:45 For now we are clean (hope to remain the same). We drive along the road and passing near a river make a stop to take a couple of neglected barge shots. On the bank we find some slightly mutant pines, their differently-sized needles are curled in different directions.
13:00 Finally we reached the contamination control post. Here we’ll go through another check and get the overalls. It is designed not to let any “dirty” particles into the skin. Now we will be permitted into the 10-kilometre zone.
13:10 We are on the way to the nuclear plant. Huge empty plains around, they are cordoned with fences, warnings of radioactive danger everywhere. Rimma tells that to the right of us on the hilly plain there was a village, which was completely buried under the ground and hills are places where huts stood. By the way, the huts were not demolished, but buried as they are.

13:30 We approach the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. To the right of us is the water channel from the cooling pond of the power plant. We make a stop to take shots on the bank, a huge pipe of the cooling block on the other bank. This channel has fish, which reach immense sizes. If you throw a loaf of bread into the water, a three-metre catfish may rise up to the surface. The fish is radioactive and nobody touches it, in such conditions it reaches gigantic size. Unfortunately we don’t have a loaf of bread at hand, so we proceed further.
13:50 We take shots on approach to the plant.
14:10 We are 300 metres away from the sarcophagus!!! We are told of sarcophagus construction and disaster details. In the photo with the plant model you can see a semi-closed door, which is a way to the sarcophagus balcony. There we take several shots trying not to stay long. The balcony radioactive background is 1000 microroentgen per hour.
We are off to the city of Pripyat, the most interesting spot in our Chernobyl trip.

15:10 Pripyat, the city of stalkers. Population before the evacuation — 50000 people, and now it’s empty, with only rare researchers taking a stop here for several days to shoot material. After the evacuation it was for several months that non-evacuated residents were looked for and taken away (many of them didn't want to go). After that the city got lifeless, but it had to be cleared of “dirt”. All the “dirty” things were buried at special cemeteries, more or less clean stuff was given out to workers in the Zone, to create acceptable existence conditions. After that a thorough cleansing was undertaken in the city, walls, ceilings were cleaned, floors opened.
When entering the city there stands a guarded post (in order to fight with marauders). We are let in to find ourselves amid a totally empty and silent city. It’s a complete silence, the only sound to spread around the city is that of the car we drive. Taking a look at the city you instantly realize what’s to be done. We’ll try to fully reproduce the atmosphere of Pripyat. When you tune your ear, you can’t notice birds chirping. There are several packs of wolves and boars living in the city. Some boars are one and a half metre long. Rimma tells that once in winter during an excursion with a foreign photographer she entered a building, and faced two gigantic 1.5-metre boars. Fortunately, they decided to leave the building without a trace of aggressiveness. When fear faded, she noticed the driver and foreigner hiding behind her back.
Passing along the weedy streets we observe the images of a placid (nuclear) spring advancing at the empty city. The first building we head for is the house of amenity services (local supermarket analogue). Grass and trees pierced through the pavement, wide windows of the ground floor are broken. A dilapidated skeleton of a building, broken glass around, trash, wrecked furniture. We enter the building and straight away notice an old price list of rental agencies, it is nearly the same as 16 years ago and you can see a mark of pre-evacuation life. We go upstairs to the first floor to find the remnants of hairdresser’s, mirror splinters, tubes, hair curlers on the floor. In one of the premises we find a footwear dump, it is hard to imagine what was here (in one of the piles there lies a plastic flipper). When on the following day after the disaster (Sunday, April 27) the evacuation was to be carried out, parents with children enjoyed ice cream in an amenity house cafe.
We get inside the car — the next stop is the local stadium. There we see a tree-covered pitch. The stadium had just been constructed when the disaster occurred. The wooden benches have dried out and blackened. On one of the benches there lies a dolly without arms, evidently, photographers willing to show the tragedy of an abandoned city deprived of them. Moss has covered the stairs all over. We’d better be careful — moss accumulates radiation.
Nearby is a sports complex and “Lazúrny” swimming pool, where we find a basketball hall and an empty pool. The swimming pool exceeds all the expectations, it is stunning — an immense empty area, sun rays falling down on its bottom through broken window panes. There is even a jumping tower, but stairs were removed, so nobody falls down. In the dressing room there is an overthrown sofa and a cracked heating radiator. The time is running out and we must hurry.
A children’s playground. Rimma warned that we should not touch the small electric-driven entertainment cars — they are too “dirty”. We take a snapshot against the Ferris wheel. Everybody is tired and hungry. My head starts splitting with ache, either of radiation or of fatigue.
The next stop is the palace of culture, and a library. We enter a building with a high ceiling, vast paintings of victorious science and triumph of humankind, rolls of unreeled tape on the floor, books scattered around — fiction, politics, textbooks — a mess of it all. Some books are opened on interesting pages, but we proceed further. We went out on the balcony to view the panorama of the square and “Polissya” hotel.
Our final stop was a “Meat Fish Vegetables” shop. A neglected empty building, no counter, a bent ventilator on the ceiling, strange runs on the floor. The inner area is much more interesting. There we find small basins, grates for vegetable storage, tables, wooden stumps for meat dressing. All the paint has chipped, a dark ill-lit building it is.
We leave it through the back exit and decide to enter a block of flats. Before the entrance we see a tree growing in the very sewerage grating. We go inside and notice an electricity control board with a table of names of house residents on it. Additionally, we can read which street we are at now, it is 12 Lenin Avenue.
We get back. Take some final shots of the desolate city and get inside the car.
Returned home without troubles and “clean”.

P.S. by SlavaR Blog: Originally, the republication of this article was planned to be the 20th anniversary since the trip for GSC Game World fan community on VK social network. But after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, I had to quit these plans (also my activities on VK). Now, two years later, this article is here to you, on Steam Community, and available to read in several languages.

The editor thanks Maeda K. and Kaitlyn Keller for help with English editing.

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