Stalker noise of the zone movie#
Stalker noise of the zone driver#

The developers' reaction to Sharpe was as frozen as the wilderness surrounding them. 'I remember going to the bathroom and looking out the window and thinking it literally looked like a scene from Stalker.' It was just desk, monitor, desk, monitor, desk, monitor. 'No posters, no swag from shows or anything like that.

Stalker noise of the zone movie#

Sharpe was used to game companies looking like LucasArts, like movie sets, overflowing with colour and character, with people firing foam Nerf pellets around. Not the beautiful buildings in downtown Kiev around Khreshchatyk Street, which are the sort of thing you see on a postcard, but the slab of Soviet concrete in the middle of nowhere where the game was being made. The architecture did nothing to settle his nerves. Sharpe didn't speak a word of Russian and they didn't speak a word of English.

Stalker noise of the zone driver#

'I was just in California - I didn't even have a real jacket!' Nor did Sharpe have a driver to meet him at the airport, and the hotel he thought he had a reservation at had no recollection of one. Had I the balls to do it,' he says, 'I would have turned around the second I walked out the airport - walked back in and got on a plane and never gone back, ever. 'Before I knew it I was in Kiev, middle of winter and it was miserable. Sharpe was about to get the culture shock of his life. Maybe not standing on the beach in California, where tanned, long-blonde-haired vest-wearing surfers are a dime a dozen, but in dour Eastern Europe he stands out. There's something you should know about Dean Sharpe before he lands in Ukraine: he stands out. :: Best gaming keyboards 2019: Digital Foundry's picks 'You've got to be kidding me!' He was on a plane the next week. By the end of our third bottle of wine we had agreed I was going to go check it out.' It wasn't until THQ asked for his passport details the next morning the penny dropped. '90 per cent of what Jack and I say to one another is sarcasm - so I just went along with it. Keep in mind I've known Jack for a very long time,' Sharpe says. 'It was, without a doubt, two of the worst weeks of my life.' But Stalker was overdue, long overdue, and Sorensen needed someone on the ground out there to finish it - someone in Ukraine to be THQ personified, day in day out, doing whatever it took to get the game done. It was part shooter, part role-playing game, part eerie open-world sandbox adventure. The game was dark and massive, set around the twisted disaster zone of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Sorensen outlined his problem: THQ had a team making a fascinating game in Ukraine called Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl.

'Wow Ukraine,' he thought to himself, 'that sounds interesting.' 'It was somewhere during the second bottle of wine he mentioned he had this crazy thing in Ukraine,' Dean Sharpe tells me over Skype now (he never did get fully back on the radar and he's a hard man to find). He had closed his own studio Big Ape Productions a couple of years earlier, dropped off the radar and taken a break, and now he was ready for something new. But the other man, Dean Sharpe, didn't seem interested. One of the men, Jack Sorensen, was reeling-off job opportunities he knew of - he being executive vice president of worldwide studios at games publisher THQ. They weren't there to talk business but they did because video games were their bread and butter. They remembered how they'd met at LucasArts in the 90s. In a restaurant somewhere in sunny Los Angeles County, 13 years ago, two old friends were having lunch.