Sink Warship, Win Rolls Royce, Says ‘STALKER’ Game Studio Founder

Serhiy Hryhorovych, founder of Ukrainian gaming studio GSC Game World behind the “STALKER” franchise, is offering his personal Rolls Royce to anyone who destroys the Russian frigate “Admiral Grigorovich” of the Black Sea Fleet.

Hryhorovych, whose name in Russified spelling is the same as the vessel, said the offer arose because the latter “[disgraces his] family name.”

“There is a frigate in Russia called ‘Admiral Grigorovich.’ I talked to the guys who are in this thread and promised a good sum for the fact that they would drown him. Only for the simple reason that he puts my last name to shame.”

“Therefore, I advise all sailors, who may be very innocent in their lives, to provide themselves with watercraft in case the frigate sinks. If they really drown ‘Admiral Grigoryovych,’ so that he does not disgrace my family name, my children, my parents, I am ready to give the Rolls Royce,” Hryhorovych said in an interview with Ukrainian YouTuber Volodymyr Zolkin in early November.

Hryhorovych said the car normally costs $300,000 – $500,000 if put up for auction. He added that he is ready to transfer the car in Germany, under a German vanity plate with “Bakyraktar” as its number, before adding that he can also drive it back to Ukraine if needed.

He did not specify the model of his Rolls Royce.

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Hryhorovych also shared a mockup of a precision bomb equipped with machine vision developed by the gaming studio’s engineers during his interview with Zolkin, as per a report by Ukrainian tech outlet dev.ua.

The “STALKER” series is a gaming franchise developed by the Ukrainian game studio GSC Game World and initially released in the 2000s. The original trilogy consists of games “Shadow of Chernobyl,” “Clear Sky,” and “Call of Pripyat,” all set in a fictional alternative reality version of the Chornobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine.

The franchise consists of a series of first-person shooter (FPS) games with survival horror and role-playing game (RPG) elements.

The original “STALKER” gaming trilogy was released on Nintendo Switch on Oct. 31, and the latest entry in the franchise, “STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl,” is available for pre-order. The official release is slated for Nov. 20 after the original planned release in April 2022 was pushed back by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two months prior.

“I would say that maybe half of our studio is currently working under the constant threat of being killed,” the game’s technical producer Evgeniy Kulik told BBC in a recent interview.