Shuttered S.T.A.L.K.E.R. studio GSC reopens for business

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series developer GSC Game World appears to be back in business after shutting down in 2011. Earlier this week the GSC Game World website was updated for the first time since 2012, and studio representative Valentine Yeltyshev confirmed that "we're making an old-fashioned, full price game" in an interview published today by Gamesindustry.biz. "We were never closing down forever, but at the time we were aware of some pretty obvious obstacles that we weren't going to be able to overcome," says Yeltyshev. In the years since GSC's closure a handful of smaller studios have sprung up to work on projects that are superficially similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R., including West Games, the Las Vegas-based studio which claims to count developers of the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series among its ranks -- a claim which Yeltyshev now says is "not true." "When we were working on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, we were also planning on releasing a browser game based on STALKER so we could keep the audience engaged until released," Yeltyshev told Gamesindustry.biz. "That project was never finished. There were mistakes. But the guys at West Games, that was the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. project they were working on - a flash game. So when they promoted themselves as having worked on S.T.A.L.K.E.R., I was quite surprised." They were promoting themselves in conjunction with a Kickstarter campaign for Areal, a project superficially similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R., that was launched this summer and summarily suspended by Kickstarter despite surpassing its funding goal. This month West Games launched another campaign to crowdfund (via the World Wide Funder platform) development of a game called STALKER Apocalypse, potentially inciting a trademark dispute with GSC that's likely to "end in tears" according to a recent blog post by video games and digital entertainment lawyer Jas Purewal. You can find Yeltyshev's full comments about the return of GSC Game World over on Gamesindustry.biz.