Most of Rubin's text focused on the working conditions at 4A. Some of the more extreme anecdotes from the story, especially those featuring Georgian mobsters and smuggling computer equipment through customs, rubbed just about everyone Polygon spoke with in Kiev the wrong way. In May 2013 former THQ executive Jason Rubin wrote an editorial detailing what it's like making games in Ukraine. Ukraine formally declared independence in December of 1991 It was part of the building's facade before remodeling. Yavorsky beside the bust of Lenin behind Vostok's headquarters. " Unable to come to an agreement over the intellectual property rights, the former staff of GSC resigned themselves to starting over from scratch, to building a new game world on their own. seemed to want to continue with the license. "We went to Moscow to talk to people in Russia about potential funding, but ultimately we found problems because. "We went to local investors," Yavorsky says. It was their first experience trying to find capital, something in short supply in the former Soviet country. With time working against them, they began to look for venture funding. GSC's remaining leaders worked as quickly as they could to contact publishers in Europe and North America, but because of the holidays no one would talk to them. "In the end," Yavorsky says, "we decided to stick together." They could each go in separate directions, or they could band together and try to find another way, a way without Grigorovich and without GSC. It was like a child that we were slowly raising, watching it grow up."Īfter the presentation, not far from the cold pile of untouched pizza, Yavorsky and the rest of the middle management stood before their staff to discuss the two paths that lay before them.
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"We were involved with it for two years, and the Stalker series well before that, since 2001.
"We were all so passionate about Stalker 2," Yavorsky says. It was a bittersweet moment for the staff, who sat viewing a partial trailer that they knew would likely never see the light of day. After the Christmas break they would all be officially unemployed.Īfter Grigorovich left the building, Yavorsky went ahead with the presentation of Stalker 2 anyway. Their last paychecks would arrive in February. It was like a child that we were slowly raising, watching it grow up." "We were all so passionate about Stalker 2. The game had been in development for two years by that time, and layoffs and attrition had shrunk the staff from a high of nearly 200 to a core group of less than 50. Yavorsky had even helped plan a small party, with pizza and drinks, intended to boost morale.
It was supposed to be the first chance for the entire staff to learn about the Stalker 2 storyline. The cruel irony is that the team had been looking forward to that Friday for weeks. People went back to their desks and stared dumbly at their monitors. "He said, 'I have decided to stop Stalker 2 development. " just gathered us all up in the presentation hall," Yavorsky remembers. More than 11 years later, the soft-spoken public relations manager was there for the end.
Oleg Yavorsky started working at GSC in 2000, just a year before the first Stalker game entered development. From the largest triple-A developers to the smallest indie team, these are the people of the late GSC Game World and the games they're making after Stalker. Polygon went to Kiev to map the fallout from the implosion of Ukraine's most famous game studio. While the games media flailed for answers, Ukrainian news site Ukranews posted the simple headline, "Kiev company. He gave no explanation to the staff beyond "personal reasons." He was the first member of Ukraine's booming IT industry to earn the honor. In February of 2011, while Grigorovich and his team were busy working on the fourth game in the series, called Stalker 2, Ernst & Young, a multinational financial services firm, named Grigorovich Ukraine's entrepreneur of the year. It received outstanding reviews, both for its gameplay and its narrative, and became a hit throughout Europe and North America. An ambitious blend of first-person gunplay and role-playing, it featured elements of survival horror as well as an open world that reacted to the player based on their reputation. Its first game, subtitled Shadow of Chernobyl, was nearly eight years in development when it was released in 2007.
Popular throughout Eastern Europe, the series made Grigorovich a millionaire before he was 25 years old. The first was Cossacks, a set of real-time strategy games known best for its scale, pitting upwards of 60,000 units against each other at one time. He and his company were famous for two game series.
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