I won't welcome to the first installment of our

Stocktober Podcasts in which we'll be looking both at the stalker series of video games,

but also the works that inspired and shaped it. Today we're starting off with

Boris and Arcadeys Drogatsky's Roadside Picknick, the 1971 novella, which loosely inspired Tarkovsky's

movie stalker and which perhaps had a more direct influence on GSC Gameworld's 2007 shooter.

I'm your host Rob Zachney, today I'm joined by Patrick Laptopick. Hello! Natalie Watson.

Howdy. And our producer Ricardo Contreras. Oh, the stalker greeting. Howdy stalkers.

That iconic stalker greeting that we all know and love from the video game. Howdy stalkers.

Well that's what you mean when you press the H button. It's just howdy. It's dedicated.

Stalkers famously start square dancing around the campfire in those games. We all love that feature.

It's iconic. Well hey, that trailer for the NewsDocker game had a vibe that if they started

Howdy-Ying and doing a dance round the fire, I don't know that it would have been totally out of place.

That trailer was great. Let's just rewatch that trailer.

So we haven't done much with books before on this podcast. I'm not sure

we don't read. Yeah, we're one other time, right? When we did that,

another novella. The Victor Lovecraft thing. The anti-lovecraft.

Yeah, the sort of re-rack on Lovecraft conceptually. Yeah. The ballad of Black Tom.

There you go. That was a fun one. It was. So I think in this case, I don't think going beat-by-beat

in the fashion or movie pod is going to give us the most interesting look or interesting

conversation. So I'm going to just start with a nice and easy and uncomplicated top level question.

How'd you all like Roadside picnic? How did you finish it? You were the closest to the

I'm very close. I'm like 20 pages away. I thought I said I would have enough time this morning.

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