"Every once in a while, that idea began to come to my mind again. Then increasingly it seemed to me that from that novel one could make a film with a unity of place, of time, and of action. These classic Aristotelian unities, it seemed to me, allow one to arrive at authentic cinema, which for me is not the so-called action cinema, exterior cinema, outwardly dynamic cinema. I believed that the subject which the screenplay would be based on permitted one to express in a very concentrated manner the philosophy, so to speak, of the contemporary intellectual. Or rather, his condition. Although I must say that the screenplay of Stalker has only two words, two names, in common with the Strugatskys' novel Roadside Picnic: Stalker and Zone." (Andrej Tarkovskij)



"The very setting of the game is a murky post-apocalyptic zone of Chernobyl. In order to reproduce the atmosphere of the zone, we undertook two trips into the real zone of the Chernobyl catastrophe. About 50-60 percent of the game architecture will be from the real area. This world is made of woodlands, anomalous greenery, black marshes, semi-ruined structures, derelict test grounds for new technologies, forgotten military bases, destroyed factories, underground laboratories and so on. … Stalker groupings, underground clubs and pubs, zone rumours, news and much more will await you in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. singleplayer." (Alexei Sytyanov)