STALKER developer GSC Gameworld re-opens

The Ukrainian studio behind cult PC shooter STALKER has re-opened.

The developer hit hard times in 2010 and was eventually closed completely the following year. It now emerges that the company was half way through the development of STALKER 2 when business was halted, Valentine Yeltyshev has told Games Industry.

"It’s a combination of issues, not just a financial one, and it was also a personal decision by our CEO,” she said of the decision to close GSC’s doors. Actually, STALKER 2 was in the middle of development, but we started to realise that we weren’t ready to complete the game at the level of quality that we thought it should be.

"By the time it was ready, it was definitely going to be out of date. It was a difficult decision, because the team was working towards a full-scale game, but they and our CEO understood that the game just wouldn’t be at the level we wanted from STALKER 2.

Yeltyshev although discussed rival studio West Games, which itself re-emerged last week with another attempt to fund its own supposed STALKER sequel.

These guys were basically promoting themselves as being the STALKER team, that they were working on STALKER, but that’s not true. When we were working on STALKER 2, we were also planning on releasing a browser game based on STALKER so we could keep the audience engaged until released,” Yeltyshev added.

"That project was never finished. There were mistakes. But the guys at West Games, that was the STALKER project they were working on – a flash game. So when they promoted themselves as having worked on STALKER, I was quite surprised.”

GSC will not be taking any legal action, however.

We would definitely win the legal action against them, but we won’t start it,” Yeltyshev insisted. They used a lot of the ideas from STALKER… I don’t know what they were thinking, starting that. I haven’t heard from them for quite a while."