"It all felt a bit like running a street gang": The story of Stalker, and the Stalker 2 that never was

In the mid noughties, a Ukrainian living in Kyiv could enjoy the luxury of boredom. In the wake of the anti-corruption Orange Revolution - "good times of hope, when we felt like we were the masters of our own fate" - Andrii Verpakhovskyi was tired of zipping around town as a system administrator, helping out local companies with their computer infrastructure: "I faced the unfortunate reality that I was running out of cool, new stuff to do." And so he started pestering his best friend, who was wo...