Gamers Play Fallout — In the Real World

By Lauren Davis, 8:30 AM on Mon Sep 21 2009, 14,072 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

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A group of over 200 Russian role players enacted their own Fallout-style video game, offering a taste of how the nuclear apocalypse might look. Check out the gallery of their gameplay, complete with military encampments, radiation suits, and atomic zombies.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is a Ukrainian video game in a similar vein to the Fallout franchise. Borrowing material from the novella Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and Andre Tarkovsky's film Stalker, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. takes place in the Zone of Alienation after a fictional second Chernobyl Disaster, which killed or mutated many of Chernobyl's residents.

This past August, over 200 players got together to organize a real-life version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., with the Russian town of Vyborg standing in for Chernobyl, and latex masks representing nuclear mutations. Their photos provide a veritable storyboard for military response to a mutant apocalypse.

Stalker: Inhabitants of core 2009 [LiveJournal — Thanks, John Struan!]