Stalking the Zone  

Totally true. Your first sentence is key. This game would be easy to discount or miss, but it's brilliant. It does atmosphere better than anything else. If it had shipped relatively bug free, it could have been huge. Here's to hoping the sequel is a smash success. We need more games like this.

A bit late on commenting -- noticed a comment on Gamasutra by you, and followed the link - but I wanted to toss my hat into the agreement ring on this one. Stalker is significantly better than the first hour suggests.

I rarely delve into mods, but some of them make the Stalker experience significantly more atmospheric; playing with a "darker night" mod, I actually found myself seeking shelter as the sun dipped down, listening for the sounds of enemies creeping around outside, and desperately waiting for daylight. The last game I remember evoking so much tension and loneliness was the original System Shock.

Hey, thanks for posting ellF. I haven't played with the mods much myself, but I have colleagues who swear by them.

Speaking of System Shock -- I only just managed to start playing System Shock 2 about 4 months ago. It was incredibly fun despite the dated graphics (I found myself not noticing after a while since the game is still so immersive), but I have to admit it ruined a bit of my appreciation for BioShock, once I realized how similar the games are (obviously I knew that Bioshock was inspired by and developed by Ken Levine who was also part of the SS2 team), but in many ways it feels like most of the innovative stuff done in Bioshock was done just as effectively 10 yrs ago.

Still a fantastic game, but yeah. I often wonder if we hit some kind of pinnacle in FPS design in the late 90s which we have yet to surpass to this day.

Stalker was, in fact, announced in 2002. I was able to play alpha build dated 2002 - and the visual quality was just astonishing for that time; if it were released in 2004, I think Stalker would win the FC/D3/HL2 competition.
Unfortunately, the game was ruined by not-so-experienced design team and too big expectations. GSC has great designers, of course - but they had no experience in FPS before that project. And they not only tried to move to FPS field, not only create the open-world experience (in which they succeeded), but create a real, dynamic world.
Unbelievable, but they had succeeded even in that area - by 2005 they had a build in which nearly all quests were dynamically created by various factions for their real goals in the game world (like, "Kill that powerful stalker", "Assault the base" and so on), and even the main quest could be completed by some other, computer-controlled stalker (in which case it was just a game-over for the player).
And that was the point were real problems began. You see, all of that was really interesting in theoretic design perspective - but for the actual player the possibility to loose the game just because someone else (not even real player!) had done better was real frustrating. The players didn't see all the system in its beauty. Instead of "breathing, living world" (which, in fact, it was) they saw copy-pasted quests given by various NPCs, appearing and disappearing for the reason unknown to player.
So, next 2 years were spent to build a story-driven FPS in that open-world, during which the team cut the open features and, at last, concentrated on the player experience.
If they had done it initially, Stalker would be, I believe, the best 2004 or 2005 FPS.

Thanks for posting that really thought-provoking information, GolerGkA. As a huge Stalker fan, I'm always interested to hear more about the history of the project's development. Sounds like the team took on some enormously ambitious technology and design goals, and succeeded in delivering on many of them, but as you point out, ultimately players reward entertainment and the player experience more than they reward experimentation. It's easy to get caught up in the beauty of well-architected systems, to the point that you forget what games are really about.

By the way, you may be interested in 4a games - another Kiev company, where many of former GSC employes that worked on Stalker went.
They are working on another post-apocalyptic FPS title, "Metro 2033" (based on a popular russian book series: nuclear apocalypsis survivors in Moscow subway system). Unfortunately, their site is down at the moment, and there haven't been any news about the development recently... I just hope they're still there :).

Speaking of book IPs - it is not widely known, but Stalker is inspired by one of the best 20 century russian SciFi books - Roadside Picnic. GSC didn't have the license, and, in fact, had a little confrontation with copyright owners, so they couldn't even put the source book as "inspiration" into credits - but for one that read the book the similarity is surprisingly obvious.
The book describes some zone left from the alien "visiting" (was it an invasion or something else - remains unknown), deserted by everyone and guarded by government from the lone stalkers that are trying to get some alien artifacts.
The are some strange creatures inside, strange dangerous zones and (theoretically, not appearing actually in the book) other stalkers, that could be even more dangerous. The book even introduced the word "stalker" to the russian language.
If you liked the game, I think you could like the book, or the Tarkovsky movie (which, on the other hand, concentrates on the philisophical story and not the SciFi elements of the book).

Interestingly, I did know about Roadside Picnic. When at Recoil, I worked with Ville Vuorela -- their in-house narrative designer at the time. He was a huge fan of this book and I believe managed to secure the IP rights for a pen-and-paper RPG (I think it was a PnP, may even have been a computer game).

In any event, I've not yet seen the Tarkovsky film (although I know about it) but will check it out on your recommendation.

Pen-and-paper RPG on Roadside Picnic would be great, thanks for the information. I googled his name and found this site:
http://www.burgergames.com/stalker/
seems like there really is a game, but google translate didn't help understand if it is available already or is it still in development.