"Is there anyone else after these treasures?"
"Yes."
"You probably mean stalkers!"
"I don't know what they are."
"That's what we in Harmont call the thieves
who risk their lives in the Zone to grab
everything they can lay their hands on.
It's become a whole new profession."
"Roadside Picnic", Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Stalker characters were regularly used into
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, a first-person shooter computer game from the Ukrainian developer
GSC Game World (game has been published in 2007).
In that game
Stalkers are trespassing in a restricted ecological disaster zone and will be shot on sight by the Military due to armed encounters in the past. Unofficially, they are the most reliable workhorses for any individual who wants something retrieved in the
Zone of Alienation as they are the most experienced people who can be enlisted. Indeed, without
Stalkers, curiosities like
Artifacts would be a rarity outside the
Zone and the experiments of the
Ecologists would be stalled for a considerate amount of time as the military is hardly able to assist them, due to their slipping control and lack of sufficient manpower. So, the general term "
Stalker" is used mainly for any illegally-residing human in the
Zone. Supposedly, it stands for "Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers, Robbers". And, list of
Stalker factions are:
 |
Military stalker in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game |
- Loners,
- Duty,
- Freedom,
- Bandits,
- Clear Sky,
- Monolith,
- Mercenaries,
- Renegades,
- Military Stalkers,
- Random naming.
From another hand, the background and some terminology of this game was originally borrowed from the popular science fiction novel
Roadside Picnic (read
Roadside Picnic parallel both in Russian and English) by
Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Soviet Russian science fiction authors. Stalker in that fiction novel was risked to illegally recover alien artifacts (called swag) from within the
Zone for large profit.
So, how about us, war stalkers of
Syrtis, clan members of
Syrtis War Stalkers clan? What is our strategic mission? Our main goal is to become the trained mobile solid team that can solve problems both independently (hunting for selected enemies' groups or individuals, to do stalking and venturing into both
Alsius and
Ignis realms, invading and capturing separate forts and castles, etc) and in close collaboration with other clans, solving the main problem: competent intrusion into the enemies realms and successfully with unscathed bring out their gems to
Syrtis Gem Portal.