Stalker call of pripyat real places. Who are stalkers? Who are stalkers in Chernobyl

Stalker in translation from English stalker - hunter, catcher, pursuer. This is a person who enters dangerous areas and objects that pose a risk to life or health, for example, radioactive, and studies them.

Thus, environmental scientist Alexander Naumov is one of the most famous stalkers who studied the Chernobyl exclusion zone. His face was used to create the character popular game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Stalker in a broad sense

By now, the word has managed to acquire a lot different meanings... For example, in Castaneda's self-improvement techniques, this is a person who consciously performs unusual actions or everyday actions in an unusual way and at the same time observes himself; someone who is always able to find the best way out of any situation.

Also, stalkers are called lovers of tourism for little studied or ignored for any reason objects, or lovers of industrial tourism associated with illegal entry into any territory or object.

The books and games of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series are very popular, where the inhabitants of the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are called stalkers, exploring it, protecting it from destruction and looking for valuable artifacts there.

Stalkers are described in various works of art, for example, in the book "Roadside Picnic" by the writers of the Strugatsky brothers (1972), the film by Andrei Tarkovsky "Stalker" (1979), etc.

Why become stalkers

There are also real communities of people calling themselves stalkers and making trips to the territory of Pripyat, exploring and photographing abandoned places. Photos are posted on certain Internet sites. They have a number of rules - do not break anything, do not endure, do not leave traces behind.

Stalkers find it thrilling to travel through the wilderness where humans used to live. Many buildings and premises remain the same as a quarter of a century ago, before the disaster, and allow you to recreate in the imagination the way of life of the Soviet era.

Those who call themselves stalkers are attracted by the idea of ​​testing themselves and their abilities to survive alone in an unknown area, while someone is looking for adrenaline, illegally entering the territories prohibited for visitors.

Someone wants to finally feel dependent only on themselves - in a place where there are no other people. Also, many are interested in how the wild nature recaptures the places that were once occupied by the city.

The term "stalker" came from where its meaning is hunter, hunter. V last years associated with this word the new kind industrial tourism, a feature of which is the penetration into closed areas.

How to become a stalker in real life?

Before you learn how to become a stalker, you need to understand who this person is. Most often, a stalker is understood as an individual engaged in the study of dangerous or closed areas, in particular, the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

To become a stalker in real life, you need to acquire some useful skills, for example, mountaineering. The next step is to collect the equipment that will be required to explore the abandoned factory and other industrial structure. Particular attention should be paid to insurance and protective equipment (helmets, safety cables, respirators).

There is also a broader meaning of the word stalker - a person who, even in ordinary life, seeks to do everything unconventionally. To become just such a stalker, you need to learn to look at any situation outside the standard framework. This skill, by the way, can generate income. Such specialists as, for example, headhunter, are among the highest paid, and their job is to find creative solutions for, in particular, they are recruiting the most competent and in-demand personnel.

Who are the stalkers in Chernobyl?

A special category of stalkers is people traveling to Pripyat and the neighborhood of an abandoned city. This area is contaminated with radiation, so the Chernobyl stalkers prepare their equipment for the campaign more thoroughly than everyone else. These people are attracted by risk and danger, they test their body and psyche, being in dangerous territory alone.

After their campaigns, stalkers from Chernobyl usually publish interesting photo reports, but they do not always bring artifacts from the infected area, because all items from Pripyat are hazardous to health. Another important nuance is that real Chernobyl stalkers try not to break anything in an abandoned city so that it remains as long as possible the way it became immediately after the disaster at the nuclear power plant.

Thoughts about such an article have arisen for a long time. Every now and then on the Internet, on profile stalker sites, you can find erroneous assumptions about which people in real life became the prototypes of characters game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Some people take Sergei Grigorovich, the general director of GSC Game World, for Strelka, while others claim in all seriousness that Professor Kalanch was made from the creator of A-Life Dmitry Yasenev (taken from the Russian Stalker-Wiki, by the way!). Still others are sure that the trader Boroda at Skadovsk is none other than science fiction writer Roman Glushkov himself. Naturally, such a volume of false information circulating in the web space is pushing more and more to get to the bottom of the truth. And that, as you know, is somewhere nearby. You just need to take a shovel of the right size and dig in the right direction.

This is what I decided to come to grips with. The time has come. Before you, dear readers, a unique material of its kind, which has no analogues in the "stalker" community today. This publication is intended to put all the dots on the "i" in the history of the unique characters of the post-apocalyptic epic from GSC.

We'll start in order. Yes, I would like to warn you in advance: if it seems to you that some facts look too obvious and well-known, you should not blame the author of these lines for trying to "make money". Even such things may be outside the scope of a fairly wide layer of stalker fans. So the reviews are a la "Thank you, Cap!" you can keep it with you.

After a short explanation, we return to our topic of conversation. I would like to start, of course, with the central personality of the entire S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Speech, as you might guess, is about Strelka aka Marked. Only the blind did not notice that the game model of the protagonist in "Shadow of Chernobyl" and his appearance in the animated story clips are fundamentally different from each other. The answer is simple. Australian studio Plastic Wax worked on the CG video for the game. While working on the videos, they needed a person who would serve as a prototype for the Shooter - apparently, the in-game character model did not meet the necessary requirements. There was no need to go far - the guys from Plastic Wax invited their compatriot, actor Vincent Stone, to their place. Subsequently, it was with his face that the Strelok began to flaunt in the plot video inserts, and it was this look that stuck with the character: we see him in the finale of "Clear Sky", as well as in "Call of Pripyat", where he finally fixed himself on game model hero. Vincent Stone (real name Vincent McManus) primarily appears in low-budget Australian films. But he can be seen, for example, in a cameo in Brian Singer's "Superman Returns". He is also the creative director of Short Black Films and songwriter for his own band STONE.

In the Army Warehouses, where the Freedom faction is based, you can find a merchant nicknamed the Curmudgeon. Few people know, but it has a real prototype. This is the creator of the famous weapons site World.Guns.ru Maxim Popenker. It seems that the developers used information from the resource, and thus decided to mark its author.

In general, there are no more characters in "Shadow of Chernobyl" with the faces of real people. Other characters- collective images: Sidorovich, and the Barman, and the Doctor, and the Ghost, and others. They have no prototypes. Nevertheless, in the presence of several characters with individual appearance, the cloned population in the Zone could not be avoided - the same type of NPCs, made from a carbon copy, turned out to be too much, which somewhat spoiled the impression. When developing the next project, GSC tried to take this into account, and in "Clear Sky" a timid, small, but still step forward was made in this area.

As everyone knows, the realism of the picture in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was achieved through the use of photo textures. The GSC Game World artists decided to apply photorealism to the characters as well. Ilya Tolmachev, who previously worked at GSC as an art director, in an interview for our website, explained how the "transfer" of a person's face into the game took place:
“To reproduce a human face in a game, we need seven photographs from seven different angles. We need to shoot under the most uniform lighting with a minimum of shadows and at the highest possible magnification so as to reduce perspective distortion. Based on the photographs, we build a low-poly face model with a special mesh topology for working in the 3D sculpting program and make a detailed face model based on this mesh. - suitable for game engine... After that, we project those photos onto the resulting model, sketch out the seams at the joints of the projections and get a photorealistic texture. "

Let's see what special characters can be found in "Clear Sky".

In the prequel to original game We play as a hired stalker Scar, whose task is to stop another Shooter's campaign in the center of the Zone in order to prevent an unprecedented cataclysm. When creating the concept of the protagonist, Alexander Kaidanovsky, famous for his main role in the film "Stalker" by Andrei Tarkovsky, was taken as a basis. A kind of tribute, one might say.

The first person to be seen by the Scar who miraculously escaped during the ejection after awakening is the leader of the "Clear Sky" group, Lebedev. The developers tried to take on this role as a security guard of the GSC office, and they did not fail - it turned out interesting and colorful. By the way, the security guard did not even know what the hero of the game would be made of him - he naively considered the process of photographing as the need to create photographs for documents.
.
Professor Kalancha, upon meeting with Scar, will talk about everything that happened to the mercenary during the super-release. This character in the image and likeness corresponds to the physics programmer of the entire series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Konstantin Slipchenko.

Cold runs the bar at the location of the "Clear Sky". The animator Yevgeniy Yablonya was involved as a prototype for it. It is worth mentioning that Kholod is not the only character with Eugene's appearance: the good-natured stalker Vano in Call of Pripyat is also him, but with changed facial features. Yablon currently holds the position of Lead Animator at Vostok Games.

There is also a technician on the basis of the grouping, who will "fix everything with blue duct tape." His name is Novikov, and his prototype bears the same surname. This is Alexander Novikov, deputy technical director for nuclear safety at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and a longtime friend of the Stalker developers. Traveling across the expanses of the Yanov station in the "Call of Pripyat", we will find him again, this time in the bunker of scientists engaged in the research of the Zone. Incidentally, it was planned to introduce Novikov in Shadow of Chernobyl, but he was mercilessly removed from the game by Dean Sharp, a producer at THQ.

We are not lucky to see other unique characters in "Clear Sky", everything is limited only to the aforementioned heroes. However, after this experiment, the developers were convinced of the urgent need to implement a sufficient number of individual NPCs, not made for a carbon copy. This was done in the second addon for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - "Call of Pripyat".

The new protagonist in the next project was SBU Major Alexander Degtyarev, once a seasoned stalker, and at the time of the game's actions - a special services officer sent to the Zone to investigate the reasons for the failure of Operation Fairway, organized immediately after the Shooter shut down the Brain Burner. Outwardly, Degtyarev is identical to Alexander Poshtaruk (a year ago he told us about his participation in a photo session for "Call of Pripyat").

After arriving on the Skadovsk dry cargo ship, which is forever frozen in the open spaces of the Zaton, the major begins to get acquainted with the inhabitants of the "swamp icebreaker". The local bartender is called the Beard here, we get our first quest in the game from him. One of the organizers of the airsoft role-playing game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. presented this character with his appearance. RealPlayer, master of the monster, a big fan of "Stalker", and part-time hegumen Valerian Golovchenko, also known under the nickname oVal. By the way, Father Valerian is not the only airsoft player who was honored to be immortalized in the form of the hero S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but we will definitely indicate this later.

Let's look around and see who else can be found at Skadovsk, in addition to ordinary stalkers and bandits.

On the opposite side of the Beard's counter, the Sultan, the leader of the bandits, settled down at ease, establishing a fragile neutrality with stalkers on a rusty vessel. The prototype for the authoritative chieftain was Konstantin Kryuchkov, an airsoft player and a regular participant in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. RealPlayer

The order in the stalker camp is kept vigilantly by Beard's friend, Capercaillie, a former investigator. Later, together with him, the major will investigate the reasons for the disappearance of stalkers on the Zaton and at the same time liquidate a whole lair of bloodsuckers ... The person who became the visual prototype for Capercaillie is the 3D-modeler "Call of Pripyat" Alexander Kachanyuk.

One of the stalkers will ask Degtyarev for help in finding a traitor with the nickname Magpie. And in the future, Gonta - that is his name - will offer to hunt for a chimera. In real life, "Gonta" is called Kirill Koval, he worked on " Clear sky"as a tester, then as a game designer for Call of Pripyat. Currently, he is a game designer at 4A Games.

Perhaps the most colorful character on Skadovsk is the talented technician Cardan. Unfortunately, he is a big fan of kissed the bottle, so before a certain moment the major finds him drunk. However, unlike his play incarnation, Konstantin Stupivtsev is not even an alcoholic at all. The design of the Call of Pripyat interface, as well as the well-known box art for the cover, are his authorship. Now Konstantin works as an artist at Vostok Games.

Preview illustration: Iskandar Mirzoganiev

Others found on the Internet

A rare 2005 trailer showing some game aspects (ai, physics, lighting, interaction with vehicles, etc.)

That's all. Keep your tail with a pistol and remember

Creation belongs to comrade Pilate and is folk art PG himself.

For which special thanks to him.

Illustration: Iskandar Mirzoganiev

Thoughts about such an article have arisen for a long time. Every now and then on the Internet, on profile stalker sites, one can find erroneous assumptions about which people in real life became the prototypes of the characters in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series. Some people take Sergei Grigorovich, the general director of GSC Game World, for Strelka, while others claim in all seriousness that Professor Kalanch was made from the creator of A-Life Dmitry Yasenev (taken from the Russian Stalker-Wiki, by the way!). Still others are sure that the trader Boroda at Skadovsk is none other than science fiction writer Roman Glushkov himself. Naturally, such a volume of false information circulating in the web space is pushing more and more to get to the bottom of the truth. And that, as you know, is somewhere nearby. You just need to take a shovel of the right size and dig in the right direction.

This is exactly what I decided to come to grips with. The time has come. Before you, dear readers, a unique material of its kind, which has no analogues in the "stalker" community today. Only in this article, especially for GSC-Fan.Com, we will tell you in as much detail as possible about all, without exception, the heroes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., starting with "Shadow of Chernobyl" and ending with "Call of Pripyat". This publication is intended to put all the dots on the "i" in the history of the unique characters of the post-apocalyptic epic from GSC.

We'll start in order. Yes, I would like to warn you in advance: if it seems to you that some facts look too obvious and well-known, you should not blame the author of these lines for trying to "make money". Even such things may be outside the scope of a fairly wide layer of stalker fans. So the reviews are a la "Thank you, Cap!" you can keep it with you.

After a short explanation, we return to our topic of conversation. I would like to start, of course, with the central personality of the entire S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Speech, as you might guess, is about Strelka aka Marked. Only the blind did not notice that the game model of the protagonist in "Shadow of Chernobyl" and his appearance in the animated story clips are fundamentally different from each other. The answer is simple. Australian studio Plastic Wax worked on the CG video for the game. While working on the videos, they needed a person who would serve as a prototype for the Shooter - apparently, the in-game character model did not meet the necessary requirements. There was no need to go far - the guys from Plastic Wax invited their compatriot, actor Vincent Stone. Subsequently, it was with his face that the Strelok began to flaunt in the plot video inserts, and it was this look that stuck with the character: we see him in the finale of "Clear Sky", as well as in "Call of Pripyat", where he finally got a foothold on the game model of the hero. Vincent Stone (real name Vincent McManus) primarily appears in low-budget Australian films. But he can be seen, for example, in a cameo in Brian Singer's "Superman Returns". He is also the creative director of Short Black Films and songwriter for his own band STONE.

In the Army Warehouses, where the Freedom faction is based, you can find a merchant nicknamed the Curmudgeon. Few people know, but it has a real prototype. This is the creator of the famous weapons site World.Guns.ru Maxim Popenker. It seems that the developers used information from the resource, and thus decided to mark its author.

In general, there are no more characters in "Shadow of Chernobyl" with the faces of real people. All other characters are collective characters: Sidorovich, the Barman, the Doctor, the Ghost, and others. They have no prototypes. Nevertheless, in the presence of several characters with individual appearance, the cloned population in the Zone could not be avoided - the same type of NPCs, made from a carbon copy, turned out to be too much, which somewhat spoiled the impression. When developing the next project, GSC tried to take this into account, and in "Clear Sky" a timid, small, but still step forward was made in this area.

As everyone knows, the realism of the picture in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was achieved through the use of photo textures. The GSC Game World artists decided to apply photorealism to the characters as well. Ilya Tolmachev, who previously worked at GSC as an art director, in an interview for our website, explained how the "transfer" of a person's face into the game took place:

“To reproduce a human face in a game, we need seven photographs from seven different angles. We need to shoot under the most uniform lighting with a minimum of shadows and at the highest possible magnification so as to reduce perspective distortion. We use the photographs to build a low-poly face model with a special mesh topology for working in the 3D-sculpting program and make a detailed face model based on this mesh. From the resulting geometry we remove a normal map and again build a low-poly mesh, but with a completely different topology - suitable for the game engine. After that we project those photos onto the resulting model, sketch the seams at the joints of the projections and get a photorealistic texture. "

Let's see what special characters can be found in "Clear Sky".

In the prequel to the original game, we play as a hired stalker Scar, whose task is to stop the next Shooter's trip to the center of the Zone in order to prevent an unprecedented cataclysm. When creating the concept of the protagonist, Alexander Kaidanovsky, famous for his main role in the film "Stalker" by Andrei Tarkovsky, was taken as a basis. A kind of tribute, one might say.

The first person to be seen by the Scar who miraculously escaped during the ejection after awakening is the leader of the "Clear Sky" group, Lebedev. The developers tried to take on this role as a security guard of the GSC office, and they did not fail - it turned out interesting and colorful. By the way, the security guard did not even know what the hero of the game would be made of him - he naively considered the process of photographing as the need to create photographs for documents.

Professor Kalancha, upon meeting with Scar, will talk about everything that happened to the mercenary during the super-release. This character in the image and likeness corresponds to the physics programmer of the entire series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Konstantin Slipchenko.

Cold runs the bar at the location of the "Clear Sky". The animator Yevgeniy Yablonya was involved as a prototype for it. It is worth mentioning that Kholod is not the only character with Eugene's appearance: the good-natured stalker Vano in Call of Pripyat is also him, but with changed facial features. Yablon currently holds the position of Lead Animator at Vostok Games.

There is also a technician on the basis of the grouping, who will "fix everything with blue duct tape." His name is Novikov, and his prototype bears the same surname. This is Alexander Novikov, deputy technical director for nuclear safety at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and a longtime friend of the Stalker developers. Traveling across the expanses of the Yanov station in the "Call of Pripyat", we will find him again, this time in the bunker of scientists engaged in the research of the Zone. Incidentally, it was planned to introduce Novikov in Shadow of Chernobyl, but he was mercilessly removed from the game by Dean Sharp, a producer at THQ.

We are not lucky to see other unique characters in "Clear Sky", everything is limited only to the aforementioned heroes. However, after this experiment, the developers were convinced of the urgent need to implement a sufficient number of individual NPCs, not made for a carbon copy. This was done in the second addon for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - "Call of Pripyat".

The new protagonist in the next project was SBU Major Alexander Degtyarev, once a seasoned stalker, and at the time of the game's actions - a special services officer sent to the Zone to investigate the reasons for the failure of Operation Fairway, organized immediately after the Shooter shut down the Brain Burner. Outwardly, Degtyarev is identical to Alexander Poshtaruk (a year ago he told us about his participation in a photo session for "Call of Pripyat").

After arriving on the Skadovsk dry cargo ship, which is forever frozen in the open spaces of the Zaton, the major begins to get acquainted with the inhabitants of the "swamp icebreaker". The local bartender is called the Beard here, we get our first quest in the game from him. One of the organizers of the airsoft role-playing game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. presented this character with his appearance. RealPlayer, master of the monster, a big fan of "Stalker", and part-time hegumen Valerian Golovchenko, also known under the nickname oVal. By the way, Father Valerian is not the only airsoft player who was honored to be immortalized in the form of the hero S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but we will definitely indicate this later.

Let's look around and see who else can be found at Skadovsk, in addition to ordinary stalkers and bandits.

On the opposite side of the Beard's counter, the Sultan, the leader of the bandits, settled down at ease, establishing a fragile neutrality with stalkers on a rusty vessel. The prototype for the authoritative chieftain was Konstantin Kryuchkov, an airsoft player and a regular participant in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. RealPlayer.

The order in the stalker camp is kept vigilantly by Beard's friend, Capercaillie, a former investigator. Later, together with him, the major will investigate the reasons for the disappearance of stalkers on the Zaton and at the same time liquidate a whole lair of bloodsuckers ... The person who became the visual prototype for Capercaillie is the 3D-modeler "Call of Pripyat" Alexander Kachanyuk.

One of the stalkers will ask Degtyarev for help in finding a traitor with the nickname Magpie. And in the future, Gonta - that is his name - will offer to hunt for a chimera. In real life, "Gonta" is called Kirill Koval, he worked on "Clear Sky" as a tester, then as a game designer for "Call of Pripyat". Currently he is a game designer at 4A Games.

Perhaps the most colorful character on Skadovsk is the talented technician Cardan. Unfortunately, he is a big fan of kisses on the bottle, so up to a certain point the major finds him drunk. However, unlike his play incarnation, Konstantin Stupivtsev is not even an alcoholic at all. The design of the Call of Pripyat interface, as well as the well-known box art for the cover, are his authorship.

At this point I have to interrupt my story, but, I assure you, not for long. More to come in the next part interesting information about persons in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. So I ask all readers to be patient and wait a bit.

Information from the site gsc-fan.com