The STALKER 2 documentary is worth your time, even if you haven’t played STALKER 2

I expected War Game: The Making of STALKER 2 Documentary — a video published by developer GSC Game World in October 2024, about a month before STALKER 2’s release — to feel like a 90-minute commercial that touted the game’s designs and features while bragging about hyped-up accomplishments. Instead, War Game is an emotional gut punch of a history lesson and a genuinely touching documentary.

The first STALKER game — a survival horror game created by Ukrainian studio GSC Game World — was released in 2007 to vaguely positive reviews, launching a series of prequels and not-quite-sequels that have gone on to sell more than 15 million copies. Eleven years later, in 2018, the official sequel was announced, expected in 2021. Then it was delayed to December 2022. Then, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, that date became impossible to meet.

The documentary details how GSC Game World navigated its new reality, in which Kyiv was nearly surrounded, electricity and heat was uncertain, and the bombings were near constant.  

The film captures a moment about eight months after the initial attack, when GSC Game World announced that it would not sell its game in Russia and would not support Russian localization. The stance garnered a lot of heat from fans who prefer to keep “games out of politics,” as one tweet shown in the documentary reads. 

“Keep politics out of fill-in-the-blank” is and has always been a privileged position that fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of art and storytelling. But it also wildly misunderstands STALKER and GSC’s decision because the story of (the making of) STALKER 2 is about more than just the game. It’s about the setting and the time the game was created in. The milieu, if you will.

You can’t talk about the STALKER games without talking about Ukrainian identity and the Chernobyl disaster. And you can’t talk about either of those without talking about the Soviet Union. To GSC, it’s not “politics,” as the tweets suggest. It’s life. It’s history.

The War Game documentary spends a lot of time establishing this history. Some of the featured GSC employees were directly impacted by the Chernobyl disaster; 1986 was less than 40 years ago, remember. There are people who lived and worked less than 100 miles from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Some of them grew up under Soviet rule, when the Ukrainian language and cultural identity was actively suppressed.

And then, while making STALKER 2, their home country was attacked by Russia.

How do you continue to make a game when your country is being actively invaded by a foreign power? By putting the people first, Executive Producer and Creative Director Mariia Grygorovych says in the documentary. With charter buses, an evacuation route, and a plan to move as close to a NATO country as possible — and then later a full relocation to the Czech Republic.

Just over half of the company — along with their families — left Kyiv. Others stayed and several joined the military (and, notably, were kept on GSC Games World’s payroll during their service). There’s a clip in the documentary of a dev working from home in Kyiv and opening their window to the sound of air raid sirens. The GSC studios doubled as bomb shelters.

STALKER 2 is out now, and it isn’t perfect (though, in my experience, it plays infinitely better on console than on PC). Still, that it even exists is a celebration in and of itself — a celebration of identity, culture, history, and, yes, even the “politics” that led to it. War Game is a documentary about making STALKER 2, but it’s just as much a 90-minute refutation of the idea that keeping politics out of games is worthwhile or even possible. It’s not a commercial, but it is a symbolic middle finger to everything — namely, a global pandemic and a war — that tried to keep these developers from making this game. It’s a history documentary that details that history’s impact on events happening right now. And it’s well worth taking the time to watch War Game as a fan of video games and gaming culture in general, regardless of whether you plan on playing STALKER 2 or not.