Thread by @WalkThePines

How did a mid-00s Ukrainian video game come to have an outsized effect on modern gun culture?

And what's the deal with that "stalker" thing that old /k/ommandos talk about anyway?

A thread - my first real one since my return.

I'll keep the history part brief because it's the nerdiest and least interesting. In 2007, a Ukrainian company called GSC Game World, previously known for the RTS series "Cossacks", released a first person shooter called "S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl".

Eastern Europe wasn't really known for game development, and it played into this cultural zeitgeist of people who'd grown up in or just after the fall of the USSR, especially because the entire thing is centered around, well, Chernobyl.

I could go on and on about the cultural impact etc, but I'm American so I'm going to talk about America, you can get the bigger perspective from youtube video essays. Besides, you want the urbex stuff, don't you?

(yes that's a bloodstain)

The game was buggy but had decent reviews, but it found staying power in an unlikely place - 4chan. See lots of 4chan users lurk and post on multiple boards, and the difficulty-loving contrarians of /v/, the video game board, loved S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Sure it's janky and buggy, but it's atmospheric. It's different. There's nothing quite like it. It's "realistic", if you don't know too much about guns. There's even a term for that type of game, "eurojank".

Naturally there was some crossover between /v/ and /k/, the weapons board. Back then, if you wanted to get into guns one of the cheaper ways was to buy a Mosin Nagant or SKS, and AKs were still cheap so there was a fixation already there on eastern euro guns.

Zoomers may scoff at this, but my beat-to-shit sino-soviet SKS (pictured) was $230 in 2013 and you could still find a Mosin for $120 and a crate of corrosive ammo for another $80 back then. The golden age of slavshit was great because we were all poor college kids.

It was around this time that dumb college kids with guns and poor judgement started to do what they do best: get themselves in trouble. No, not with the law - by doing exactly what they were memed into.

GRAB SKS GO INNAWOODS

See everyone figured there would be some sort of impending collapse (nobody figured it would be as fake and ghey as COVID) so you gotta be prepared to bug out. Millennials naturally discovered the survivalist/prepper thing running through our boomer progenitors from the start.

So there was this general recognition that while having a gun was good, having a gun and having innawoods skills was better. What is innawoods? It's all in the name, tardo.

A lot of /k/ommandos were military or backpackers or just weird guys into survivalism in general, really.

There was tons of weird cultural mixing, crossovers, etc. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. played a huge role, long before Boris kicked off his youtube channel we were joking about CHEEKI BREEKI and GET OUT OF HERE STALKER, memes directly from the game.

The hobo-style ammo-scrounging mode of early game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. held some appeal for dudes who had to wait for Christmas to buy another spam can of steel case ammo, y'know?

And then there were these dudes from /k/ who set up their own milsurp store and started selling flecktarn parkas and shit, and sometimes these neat East German backpacks.

They called themselves Nugget Enterprises, but now you may know them as @kommandostore

Cheap camo for those of us who don't live near a surplus store? Fucking sick, man. And it's a cool pattern too! It looks great on your dweeb ass.

Oh hey, that's close to the same pattern that the Freedom faction in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. uses...

So /vg/'s S.T.A.L.K.E.R. general had these in-game challenges you could do in-game, crazy hard ways to beat it, stuff like only using a Makarov or picking up guns and never reloading.

And /k/ had these summer challenges that were kinda cool, designed to get people outdoors...

...well shit, what if you merged the two concepts?

And that's how pic related came to be.

I don't even remember how we organized, maybe it was a Steam group (these were pre-Discord days) or maybe I just openly posted the google doc link, but among a handful of anons arguing and collaborating someone made that. I thought it was ok, but was never satisfied.

Meanwhile, people latched onto the general concept harder and the spoopy stories started to come out.

Everyone who's spent a lot of time innawoods knows. Sometimes things just get weird. Those make for great stories, and there's no greater storytelling format.

I would be lying if I said this wasn't what I was vaguely aiming for. We just ran with it. I don't know who worked with me on the original version, we're all anons, nobody has names.

But it was fun.

Nowadays, this is called "LARPing". It's a diminutive term.

If you're only roleplaying, why are you in genuinely dangerous places?

If you only care about "live action", milsim and whatnot, why are you NOT in genuinely dangerous places?

Anyway it was fucking sick and it took off. As an author I was always a believer in the concept but when I was living in Texas, I drove some hours to a superfund site that I'd checked out on google maps and spent two days spooked to my core and exploring some wild shit.

There's this concept in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. of the Guide, who takes outsiders to the Zone of Alienation, and I embraced that. I took friends to the place in Texas. I take friends to the places I know where I live now.

If you read the original book, Roadside Picnic, the Stalker IS the guide. That's the original meaning of the term - "pathfinder". To "stalk" was to "track" something.

There are safe paths to these places - and there are paths that will get you fukt up.

Yes those are IV bags.

Gotta make a run to the liquor store before it closes so I'll brb. Thread will continue, but if you like it, share it.

Too many zoomers don't know their own cultural history

In due time, I returned to my northeastern homeland, but that didn't stop me. Turns out that the parts of the US closest to Europe are great for abandoned Cold War infrastructure.

Naturally my autism drove me to keep making better versions of the challenge, but did it matter? There's two types of people doing this, those who stick with the rules of the challenge and those who don't give a fuck and just send it, exploring whatever.

Both are great.

The next few posts are just pictures from other stalkers. Guys just like me. Guys just like you, if you had the balls to send it. You're gonna send it, right anon?

you could unironically set up a gofundme and get 10 jizzilion Karens donating to you with #FreeUkraine hashtags honestly, and that might be necessary with how ammo prices are

I could make some grandiose statement about "and this, this is the TRVE STVLKVR" or something, but fuck that noise.

This entire meme was designed to make you go innawoods and eat shitty food and go into places that man was not meant to go into, right?

So what's to stop you from doing exactly that? GRAB SKS GO INNAWOODS is only irrelevant because an SKS costs more than a WASR now.

That shouldn't stop you from exercising your skills.

It doesn't matter if you think that ayys are going to invade or if you think we're going to get nuked or ZOG is going to do a final takeover or whatever.

just uhhhhhhhhh go explore somewhere you're not supposed to.

the elites don't want you to know this, but "no trespassing" signs are actually just free targets put up by the NWO. if there are no game cams they can't do shit anyway; if there are game cams you should be able to figure out how to ensure that there are no game cams.

I mean, what the fuck else can I say? You want me to delve into an autistic essay on how "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Strengthened Ukrainian Forces Through The Power Of Memes In the Putinistan War"?

idk just go outdoors and shoot guns lmao. Get drunk and go wild. Steal top secret documents.

'M-MUH SEKRIT DOCUMENTS"

lmaoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Seriously it's fun stuff, just send it. Embrace your sense of adventure. Break into crackhead shacks, kick down the doors of long forgotten government facilities, go explore, whatever. Just GO OUTSIDE.

And also don't get caught, that's why I'm big on NODs.

Be one of those guys who seeks out some sort of abstract leaderboard place in the OFFICIAL RULES GAISE that I wrote, or just send it and take some cool pics. The former gives you the right to flex, both give you legitimacy.

See I kinda figured some people would embrace the official ruleset thing and go for points, and some would go FUCK YOU IMMA DO MY OWN THING but they're both actually doing the same shit and that's what I wanted all along, if they're keeping score or not.

Your third option, dear reader, and yes I'm addressing this to YOU - is to not do neither and look at cool pics on twatter. You'll grow fat and old and boring and you will never be as happy as this man.

You really want that for yourself?

Of course you don't, so embrace the wisdom of your forefathers and GRAB SKS GO INNAWOODS. You might have an AR-15 instead of an SKS, that's fine! It's a great rifle. You might not have all the weird kit, but just send it and try not to die. Don't step in open holes.

Frankly I'm running out of ways to say "grab SKS go innawoods" and as much as I like posting urbex porn, the former was the entire point of this thread.

I try to talk about the cultural meaning of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on imageboards? Well, there you have it. Go innawoods. NOW.

I'm not even joking I spent a month homeless and crashed in an abandoned naval base that's now one of my favorite spots for stalkan and my fren Mauzer showed up and we shot and ate a rabbit and it was cool as fuck and I didn't even get irradiated

I will remake my thread on that period of my life some other time.

Meanwhile, walk like a ghost and step like a stalker. Know your path. Also you should probably buy those NODs you saw online, they really are worth it unless they're gen 2s.

Good night and good luck.