Andrew Stephan is the director of War Game: The Making of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, a documentary from Microsoft about the ordeal of the game developers at GSC Game World, the Ukraine game studio that had to make S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: The Heart of Chornobyl, a triple-A game, in the middle of a war zone.
The film depicts the lives of the game team — perhaps the biggest in all of Ukraine with 460 people — as they figured out how to get the game done in the midst of the Russian invasion. On and off in the works for a decade, the game is scheduled to ship on the PC and consoles on November 20, 2024.
It’s emotional story that centers on a husband-and-wife team, Ievgen Grygorovych and Mariia Grygorovych, the leaders of the game studio, and the decisions they had to make in saving the game, the studio and the lives of their employees. It offers lessons around making decisions under pressure.
I wondered how the filmmakers captured the footage of the company and its game developers as they worked through the crisis of the Russian invasion in February 2022. The video shows the making of the game from its earliest days through the onset of war and its aftermath. Stephan told me that his film teams were not able to go to the country during the time of war. Rather, the GSC Game World team themselves chose to record their experiences in the documentary. It’s remarkable that most of the history captured in the raw footage was due to the foresight of the team itself.
It’s a compelling video and story, and I encourage everyone to watch it for inspiration. It’s shows the limits of human visibility during war and the determination of a team to adapt and finish a game under the most trying circumstances.
The team’s resilience in the face of war and other obstacles showed through in the emotional film, which is a kind of microcosm for the toil thousands of people working in games in Ukraine or in the Ukrainian diaspora — under the shadow of war where all of the odds are against them.
“There’s not a single person at that company that we interviewed, or that we didn’t, who hasn’t lost someone. Who hasn’t lost friends or family,” Stephan said in his interview with me.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: What has the reception been like so far? Have you heard some good things about how it’s being viewed?
Andrew Stephan: I’m not in tune with the numbers myself. That was never my MO. I would defer to Microsoft on what the viewership is like. I know that for me, the number one response, positive response I was hoping to get, and the audience I was most curious about, was the team at GSC. I had the fortune of getting to fly out to Prague last week to screen it with them for the first time. Most of the team had not seen the film. It was a powerful opportunity to watch it with more than 100 of the people on the team, and get to meet several of them that I’d never had a chance to meet before. To a person, they were all deeply touched and grateful to Xbox, to the production team for doing their story justice, for taking the time to be deliberate with the story. That’s been great.
Everywhere I’ve seen a comment, or I’ve seen someone weighing in with an opinion, it seems to be overwhelmingly positive. That’s been my early experience.
GamesBeat: What was some of the initial impetus for you? Why focus on Ukraine, and why this particular team?
Stephan: I can’t chalk it up to anything more than luck and timing. I knew Tina Summerford, who appeared in Power On, from my time at G4 TV way back when, in the early 2000s. She’s the one who brought me on to do Power On for the 20th anniversary of Xbox. What was supposed to be a stand-alone feature documentary, maybe 45 minutes or an hour, ended up becoming six episodes, a couple of years in the making, and helped the team at Xbox land a couple of Emmy nominations and their first win. That was an extremely positive experience. I had a great time making it. The brand was very happy with the outcome, with the reception.
We stayed in touch, and she first alerted me to GSC’s story in the summer of 2022, when it was first put on her radar. She kept tracking their progress. She earned the studio’s trust. She and Glenn at Microsoft, the two of them earned the studio’s trust and got them comfortable with the idea of documenting their journey. She re-approached me in the spring of 2023 about throwing my hat in the ring to try and direct a film, to make a pitch to Microsoft. I leapt at the opportunity. They bought into my pitch and the rest was history.
GamesBeat: If you think about all the footage that turned out to be so on the ground there–were they deciding to film themselves? Or were you actually having your team go there and capture everything with them all the time?
Stephan: All credit goes to them for having the prescience to document their own journey. At the very beginning, as we started, they had–I forget his name. Nick was his first name. But they had an in-house photographer and bibliographer who had documented a ton of meetings and just the process of making the game. They were documenting stuff before the war started. Even before the imminent threat of war. They were filming all through 2021 and 2022. At the very beginning, they handed us a giant pile of material that we had to comb through. They weren’t shooting with the intent of having this footage used in a documentary like this. But we were able to cherry-pick.
Any of these films, what really brings it to life is the archival. Being able to establish a sense of place and time, creating a more intimate connection with your subjects. Because of the highly charged and challenging nature of the subject matter, it’s not like we could have boots on the ground in Kyiv. We had to rely on them exclusively to give us some of that footage. But that’s a process for them. Remember, beyond that initial dump, this team is heads down, just cranking every day to get a game out the door. They’re repeatedly dealing with requests from me and my team about trying to get footage. I think it worked out well. All the way down, close to the last weeks of edit, they were still sending footage over when we were looking for specific moments of coverage.
GamesBeat: I hope you didn’t have to go into Chernobyl, into the radiation zone there.
Stephan: I think I would have–my instinct as a filmmaker, I would have loved to have gone. But from a family perspective and a Microsoft perspective, and from an insurance perspective–it’s a complicated thing. We’re very fortunate that we were able to make the film we made at the distance we were at. Fortunately I was able to go to Prague several times to film the interviews there with the team, capturing them in the office and shooting some B-roll, a day in the life. We made a few trips out there.
Something that’s interesting is how many people don’t actually know that Chernobyl was in Ukraine. I was surprised to find out–I don’t even think I knew how close it was to Kyiv before this all started. That was a fascinating element to all of this. Multiple people have said to me, “I had no idea.” For them, wanting their story told is part of it. It’s a chance to learn more about their culture, what’s inspired them, what’s driven them to create the way that they do, create the things that they create.
GamesBeat: What’s a good way to describe what you captured?
Stephan: I was always intrigued by the power of expression and creating art during a time of war. The importance of creating, I was always intrigued by the importance of creating. Drawn to the power of creating art during a time of war, and the need to creatively express yourself as an outlet. I spoke at length with some of the team members about whether the game felt like a distraction or salvation. Is it your job? Is it a silly distraction? Or does it give you meaning at a time when you desperately need to have something to hold onto? I think both sides of the coin, Kyiv and Prague, they all saw the latter as the value in the game. It was a big source of meaning for them in a difficult time.
It somewhat literally says that in the film. This is how we approached it. We saw the game as an act of resistance, an act of defiance, an act of creative expression during this insanely intense period. Someone in the film says it. “The game, for us, is now an act of resistance.” We had that thought in mind well before we’d ever captured that piece of sound. It was almost in some way validating. That’s what I hope the message of the film conveys, that it’s seen as exactly that.
GamesBeat: There was a line, something like, “We have a gun in one hand and a computer mouse in the other.”
Stephan: That’s right. “We make the game with one hand and load our weapons with the other.” Literally and metaphorically, it turns out. That’s the other thing, just being drawn to the fact that–how surreal it is to have these employees that not only stayed behind, but felt the sense of duty to country to go serve on the front lines. And still stay connected. They talk about the team returning to the game at some point, but in the meantime those team members still check in. That’s interesting. They’ll jump on a call every once in a while. Their day to day is not what it was, but I think that’s impressive.
GamesBeat: I do wonder if you then extracted–are there lessons for developers everywhere, given that everyone is having their own tough times? Not as extreme as this, but still, morale is being challenged.
Stephan: I don’t know if I extracted a lesson personally. I’m not in their shoes. I wouldn’t pretend to understand the impact. I will say that as a creative, for any creative–this held true here, hearing their stories. The thing you’re making, the art you’re making, can be a life preserver. Not an escape, but there’s nothing wrong with it if you want to call it an escape. But something that you can sink yourself into, put your heart and soul into, and it’ll provide you some form of respite from the madness going on around you.
I will say, a lot of people have been very supportive. The Xbox team has been incredibly supportive. People in the gaming community, from day one, have been very supportive. I think a team like GSC feeds off that. It’s helped keep them driven. It’s a contributing factor in helping keep them driven, that support. They’ve stayed focused, and I think they’re going to make something pretty special. There’s a level of–if there’s a takeaway, it’s perseverance, personal and professional.
GamesBeat: In some ways it feels like all of Ukraine acted this way. They understood that if they stopped working, stopped their economy, they’d lose the war that way.
Stephan: What’s remarkable about what GSC did, though, that maybe differentiates them–from the little I dug, I didn’t see anyone else that was doing this. But when they left, they offered that opportunity to everyone and their families. Employees past and present. They offered a chance at sanctuary, to get out. If people stayed, GSC kept them employed. Keeping people employed during a time like this was maybe more the exception than the rule. It’s pretty fantastic that they had this thing to rally around and keep them going, keep people gainfully employed and provided for, and in turn further the team’s efforts to push back across the board, through their game and through the day to day of the war.
GamesBeat: It was life-saving to have the company care for its employees.
Stephan: It was life-saving on many levels, in my opinion. I’d say it was life-saving and soul-saving.
GamesBeat: It’s an honest and raw look at everything. I did wonder about a couple of issues where maybe you had to decide how much to include in it. There were a couple of soldiers from GSC who were killed, who had either worked on the first game or done voice acting. Was there a choice you had to make about how much of that subject to reference or include?
Stephan: No, I think it sorted itself out. I didn’t want to sensationalize anything. It felt out of place to tell the story of a developer who didn’t have a day to day hand in the making of the sequel. He was on the original team, so it felt appropriate to post-script the film in memory of him. The other individual wasn’t even brought to my attention until deep into the post production process, his passing. I’m not sure that it would have changed anything.
Our choice wasn’t to make this–I think those two people are more representative–if you think about it, there’s not a single person at that company that we interviewed, or that we didn’t, who hasn’t lost someone. Who hasn’t lost friends or family. At some point those two names that appear in the postscript at the end of the film, and to all our fallen friends and comrades–I can’t remember the exact language right now. But it was in memory of all of them. We didn’t choose or care to single out anyone as the primary form of the narrative. The narrative was about the team. We wanted to focus on the people. To your point, even if that had happened to some of the contemporary team members, I’m not sure that’s a road we would have gone down. We wanted to focus on the achievement that this team had accomplished.
GamesBeat: Is there some good that you hope may come from telling this story?
Stephan: Certainly I hope that anything my team and I make–we’re not salacious filmmakers. You look for deeply human stories and you look to amplify those stories, to familiarize people with maybe lesser-known stories that are about people. It’s about people first, to create a sense of empathy for the team by making people understand that there is a team of humans on the other end of the game. It’s the same thing with Xbox and Power On. It’s not just a console. These are the people who made it. This is what they suffered through. There were feelings on the line. In this film there are lives on the line.
The good, you hope, is that people who–again, for me, this was one of the goals of the story, to be able to tell a story where–it was part of the director’s statement. I wrote something to the effect of always having been sympathetic to game developers, who face intense criticism and weighty expectations from really passionate fanbases. For understandable reasons. But they’re under intense pressure. So many fans are driven by their intense love for these franchises, and they sometimes lose touch with the fact that real human beings exist behind these fictional games they love so much.
As I started to immerse myself in the story a year and a half ago, seeing the comments from the people who were impatient about the delays and the attacks on the studio, for me it was a rare opportunity to humanize a team in this world. I’d wanted to do this for a while. The idea of developers just in general, artists in general, and the pressures on them to create art. Commerce and art don’t always go hand in hand very gently. That was important to me, to humanize the process of game development, both for the people in this intense situation, but also–hopefully people will step back and think about developers in general, who face an uphill battle just to make a game, much less a special game. Just to complete something is an achievement.
That was important to me, and obviously to shed light on their story, the GSC team’s story, the war in general and their place in all this. I hope what comes out of that is that people see it and those two things resonate. To go back to your earliest question, about the response, tons of comments are along the lines of, “I get access to this game on Game Pass, but I’m going to buy it anyway because I want to support this team.” There’s been a ton of support for the team. People are starting to see–even you. You led this off by saying, “I had no idea.” If it’s not on your radar this way, you wouldn’t be able to appreciate it the same way you can now. I hope that’s the universal reaction.
GamesBeat: What did you think of Ievgen and Maria as sort of the principle people, the main characters of this story, so to speak?
Stephan: They were wonderful people. I don’t know when you figured it out, but I didn’t know they were husband and wife for quite some time, because in their opinion it’s irrelevant to the story. As a filmmaker it clearly became very relevant at some point, but they don’t lead with that. They were both similar spirits. Kind. They function as perfect complements, business and strategic and creative.
They were apprehensive at first, like almost every subject of any film has been. You don’t know who you’re really letting into the house. But over time I think, as is usually the case, we earned that trust. They could see we were coming from a good place. You try to remain objective as a filmmaker, but you feel an immense sense of pressure to get it right and do the story justice. Over the course of a year and a half the relationship continued to strengthen. We reached a point where they had the requisite level of faith that we were going to do right by the story. That’s why it was incredibly gratifying to get to watch it with them on the big screen and see how moved they were.