A subreddit to discuss the Chernobyl Disaster that happened on the night of April 26, 1986, and the Exclusion Zone that isolates the city of Pripyat from the rest of the world.
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I am asking because it's been years since I have played the games, but I find it interesting that the Chernobyl disaster could have possibly created such things. Is it ever explained how they came up with the idea for the games?
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From the book Roadside picnic by Strugatsky brothers.
AFAIK the term and profession of stalker as well as the anomalies come from novel Roadside Picnic from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and on it based movie Stalker. The anomalies are disposed garbage from alien visitors. The game also takes a lot of plot points from the novel.
There are different ways you could answer it. u/meltingeyes is right about the book. Beyond that, I haven't seen much documentation of where the Strugatsky brothers got their inspiration from. The wiki on them mentions Stanislaw Lem and Ivan Yefremov as inspirations but I don't know either of their work well enough to see a clear throughline to the particular idea of the anomalies.
The wiki's reference on Lem's and Yefremov's influence is here: https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1973-2/strugatsky-brothers/ which in spite of the university domain doesn't appear to be historically sourced. So we'd be speculating. That essay's take on the meaninglessness expressed in the book seems to track to other sources I've read on what Soviet life tended to feel like. Going with that, I could imagine the anomalies representing something about the arbitrariness of Soviet justice towards its own citizens, but there are other aspects of the anomalies that don't seem to fit that analysis.
The stalkers go into a dangerous unknown hoping to find valuable things to bring back. That unknown is both dangerous and valuable precisely because it's been visited by unknowable alien entities. That seems like classic weird fiction or cosmic horror dating back to Lovecraft. The most contemporary and obvious reference that would fit that though, without knowing whether the Strugatskys knew anything about Lovecraft, is nuclear power itself: the USSR is powerful in the Strugatskys' time in large part because it's a nuclear power, and yet that's at least as dangerous as it is empowering. But whether there was ever any formal acknowledgment on their part that this was the intended read or source of inspiration, I don't know. It may well not have been possible in their lifetimes for them to speak openly on that without putting themselves at risk as dissidents. You or I would have to do more academic digging to see whether there's any historically established take on that.
EDIT: when looking for Lovecraft references, I found this post which goes back through some of the story of the book: https://masteringmodernity.wordpress.com/tag/the-strugatsky-brothers/. There were details in there I had forgotten about like people back from the dead and a "golden sphere" that grants wishes, similar to the movie. Contrary to the Lovecraft connection, that actually sounds a lot like the Arthurian search for the grail, even down to the idea that what you find is a reflection of your intentions. Who knows though.
tl;dr maybe Lovecraft, maybe nuclear power, maybe social criticism. Hard to know for sure.
Right from this video!! Glowing Orb