So, what happened to initiate the shut down of GSC four years ago? Was it a purely financial decision?

"Well it's a combination of issues, not just a financial one, and it was also a personal decision by our CEO. Actually, STALKER 2 was in the middle of development, but we started to realise that we weren't ready to complete the game at the level of quality that we thought it should be. That was connected to a lack of specific people in the team.

"Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat were both closer to add-ons than stand alone games, they were completely based on Shadow of Chernobyl. We realised that STALKER 2 was different. It was going to take too much time - by the time it was ready, it was definitely going to be out of date. We had the scenarios all written by the guy who did the original STALKER, but that's just a scenario, not a full game. We were closer to the beginning of development than the end.

"It was a difficult decision, because the team was working towards a full-scale game, but they and our CEO understood that the game just wouldn't be at the level we wanted from STALKER 2. There was also a problem getting interest, and the right money, from publishers. We were offered funding once we reached alpha. Actually we would have been able to fund the entire development ourselves, but we still weren't sure we'd be able to sell it once we'd got to alpha.

"So there were a lot of complex reasons that led to the decision to stop development. We were never closing down forever, but at the time we were aware of some pretty obvious obstacles that we weren't going to be able to overcome. Maybe we needed more team leaders. Still, we'd built some levels, areas of the zone, some characters, a new engine. A completely new engine, written from scratch, which was already a next-gen engine at the time.

"The X-Ray engine was quite ahead of its time, but only in 2007, not 2010. The new engines in CoD and Battlefield had started to arrive so we needed to get better. It was maybe 70 to 80 per cent ready. It was a huge step up from X-Ray. It was oriented on PC and Xbox 360, and there were plans for it to work on PlayStation eventually.

"Everything is stored! We have all the assets, materials and engine."

You've got a new, unannounced game in the works. The market is very different to what it was four years ago, have you been tempted to change with it and try free-to-play or mobile development?

"We're pretty sure about our fans. The market we're in is quite old fashioned, they're not 16 year olds, they're 25-40 years old. We don't think free-to-play is the right model for the game we want to make. So we're making an old-fashioned, full price game, we think our audience will be happy about that. We're expecting a lot of our old audience!"