The Mutants of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro: Chernobyl, the Zone and Roadside Picnic

The Zone was invented before there was a Chernobyl. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, published in 1972, imagines that aliens visited Earth briefly, thirteen years before the story, at six sites, and left, and that the Zones they left behind are full of things that make no sense: patches of altered gravity, a jelly that dissolves bone, spheres that produce endless energy, and death for anyone who steps wrong. The title is a scientist's theory that the visitors never noticed us at all, that humanity is the ants crawling over a roadside where a car stopped for lunch and drove on. Stalkers are the men who sneak into the Zone for artifacts to sell, and Red Schuhart, the novel's stalker, ends it at the wish-granting golden sphere unable to think of a wish that is not somebody else's.

Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) kept the guide, the Zone and the room where wishes come true and dropped the aliens, filming in an abandoned Estonian power plant whose chemical runoff, some of its crew believed, later killed them. In 1986 reactor four at Chernobyl exploded and a real zone of thirty kilometres was evacuated; by the 2000s its empty city, Pripyat, had become the most photographed ruin in Europe, and the Ukrainian studio GSC Game World put the Strugatskys' word on it. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007) and its two sequels sent stalkers into a Zone that was both the real exclusion zone and the novel's, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 (2024), completed by a team displaced by the invasion of their country, did it again.

The games' Zone breeds monsters because a second explosion did. In their fiction a secret research program in the ruins, the C-Consciousness, caused a blast in 2006 that spread anomalies and mutants across the exclusion zone, and the mutants are the region's animals and people rewritten: blind dogs and pseudodogs, wild boar swollen with tumours, fleshes that were pigs, snorks that were soldiers in gas masks, now running on all fours. The bloodsucker is the one players remember, a tall humanoid with tentacles for a mouth that can turn invisible and drains its prey; the controller is a hydrocephalic psychic that seizes the player's mind; the pseudogiant is a house-sized mass of muscle on two arms; the chimera, in the later games, is a two-headed cat that hunts at night. The Zone's worst inhabitants are human, the bandits and factions who fight over its artifacts.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, released in November 2024 by a studio that had moved from Kyiv to Prague during its development, kept the bestiary and rebuilt the Zone at a scale that put the real plant, the cooling towers and the Duga radar array in one map. The mutants are drawn, like the games' landscape, from an inheritance: Soviet science fiction's conviction that the strangest thing in the universe would be found in a field outside a small town, and that the state would fence it off and lie about it.

Dmitry Glukhovsky wrote Metro 2033 on a website. Posted chapter by chapter from 2002 and published as a book in 2005, it imagines Moscow twenty years after a nuclear war, with the survivors living in the Metro's stations as separate city-states, Communists and fascists and traders a few tunnels apart, and the surface a frozen ruin of mutated life. Artyom, a young man from a northern station, is sent to the centre to warn of a new threat, the Dark Ones, who have been found at his station's edge; 4A Games, a Ukrainian studio, adapted the novel in 2010 and continued it in Last Light (2013) and Exodus (2019), the last of which leaves the Metro for a train across Russia.

The Metro's mutants are the surface's new fauna. Nosalises are blind, hairless, rat-like pack hunters that swarm the tunnels; lurkers crawl in pipes; demons are winged predators that hunt the ruins of the city by day; watchmen guard the surface in packs; the librarians of the Lenin Library are gorilla-sized, half-intelligent, and can be held off, the games' folklore says, by staring them down. The Dark Ones are the exception that the story is about. Tall, dark, silent and telepathic, they are the next humans, born of the war, and their attempts at contact drive men mad; Artyom ends the novel by calling in a missile strike on their nest and understanding, as it lands, what they had been saying. The game offers a second ending in which he does not, and Last Light is built around the one Dark One child who survived.

The real Zone is full of ordinary animals. The thirty-kilometre exclusion area around the Chernobyl plant, evacuated in 1986 and mostly empty of people since, has regrown into forest and wetland where wolves, lynx, moose, deer, boar, beavers and a herd of Przewalski's horses released in 1998 live at densities higher than in the surrounding farmland; studies have found genetic damage, smaller brains in birds, cataracts and shorter lives, and a wolf population with a possible adaptation to the exposure, and nothing with tentacles. The 2019 television series and the tourism that followed it found the same thing the games' developers found on their research trips: an abandoned city with trees in the streets and no monsters, which is why the games had to import theirs from a novel.

The novel's aliens are the interesting ones. Roadside Picnic's visitors never appear, never communicate and, on the book's own theory, never noticed there was anyone to communicate with, which makes the book a story about the Fermi paradox in which the answer is indifference: the galaxy's travellers pass through, and the traces they leave are the only contact a species like ours will get. It is the zoo hypothesis without the zookeeper, and it sits on the alien science fiction reading list as the most influential contact story never to show a contact. The alien video games article follows what the two game series took from it, which was everything except the aliens.