Are The Stalker Games Based On The Movie?

When it comes to the post-apocalypse genre, there are many games to choose from, each with its own tale of survival and hardship. One that has slowly been growing from a cult classic to a modern favorite is the Stalker series.

It’s not like most other post-apocalypse games, though. In fact, the world really hasn’t ended, except for one place, known only as The Zone. Fans of the series have been drawn to the odd twist on the genre, compelling stories, and horrible monsters. But where did this fictional reality come from, and what is the story of these stalkers based on?

What Is Stalker Based On?

There are really two main answers to this question. Both of these tie directly in as source material for both the overarching themes of the Stalker games and the semi-post-apocalyptic setting they take place in.

• Stalker, the 1979 film
• Roadside Picnic, a sci-fi novel by the Strugatsky brothers

What Is The Stalker Movie?

The first answer is that they’re all based on the 1979 Stalker movie by Andrei Tarkovsky. The story follows a group of three men. Two of them, a writer and a professor, want to enter a place known as The Zone to find a room in the center of the dangerous place that is said to grant wishes.

The third is the man known as a stalker, someone who makes a living going into the dangerous and government-sealed Zone. The movie takes place mostly in said Zone but also in various tenements in an impoverished city bordering The Zone in the former USSR.

The Stalker movie never officially says where in the USSR The Zone is located, but the games have switched the setting to the modern-day Ukraine, centering The Zone around the former Chornobyl nuclear power plant in the city of Pripyat.

The Zone itself is depicted as a dangerous and often dreamlike place, to which the stalker has some sort of ubiquitous connection to, a theme that is also paralleled in some of the Stalker games.

The game and the movie both show the various anomalies that permeate The Zone, but the ones in the movie are more psychological and mind-bending, whereas the ones in the games are often more physical and instantly deadly.

The term stalker actually entered the lexicon of many Soviet countries due to this movie, and it caused a rise in urban exploration across the globe after its release.

What Is Roadside Picnic?

Roadside Picnic is a 1972 science-fiction novel written by brothers and co-authors Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. It is the basis for the Stalker movie, albeit roughly.The games take from it both directly and in the roundabout way of taking ideas from the movie as well.

It was one of the best-selling sci-fi novels to come out of the former Soviet Union, being translated and sold all over the world, something that was difficult to do at the time due to global tensions.

The book takes place in an alternate history of the 70s in an unspecified country. Here, aliens have landed in six places (known as Zones) around the world. Having came and went, no one is sure what the visitors wanted, but the places they landed are marked with peculiar anomalies and energies.

There was also a Roadside Picnic TV series that ran a pilot in 2016 with the hopes of getting picked up by AMC, but no further work was ever done on the project.

The book follows a stalker named Red who regularly enters the Zone he lives near to steal various artifacts while trying to slip under government surveillance. While being more focused on extraterrestrials, the book does reference various mutations and odd substances that the Stalker games pull from.