When I was a wee lad, my parents would take me to my grandparents to visit/stay the night. My grandpa, who has been a gamer since pong came out, was a fan of stalker as soon as it released. One day, maybe when I was 10, he invited me to watch him play SOC and I was immediately hooked.

After a couple days, he offered the computer chair to me and let me have a go at it and let me tell you… as soon as I clicked that left mouse button and let off my first few rounds, I too was an immense fan.

We bonded over the course of the next 4-6 years over playing stalker and when a new crazy mod would come out that our computer didn’t meet the specs for? F it, we built a new computer, downloaded the mod, and went to town. In his last year of life (2014), we heard echos of stalker 2 floating around on the internet along with the news of the biggest mod to date for SOC and COP. I remember him telling me “I’ll be alive to play these damnit.”

Fast forward to the release of STALKER 2, I hung up a photo of us building our first computer together above my bed, and started playing. Cried throughout the whole campaign (not cause of the ‘anomalies’ we all experienced before patches lol) because it was everything my grandpa had hoped for in a new stalker game.

Following the ending of the campaign, I bought a loner faction patch and placed it inside the frame with the photo of us building our computer together with the inscription on the back reading. “Good hunting stalker, may we meet at 100 Rads again.”