Huw Beynon

2002. A novel. Put online for free by its author, for anyone who cared to read it. Twenty four years later it has been round the world in print and it is on its fourth video game, with a million people already waiting for its February 2027 release (a fifth one exists, Metro Awakening, which serves as the official narrative prequel to the cult game Metro 2033, released in 2024 by Vertigo Games, built exclusively for virtual reality and written in collaboration with Glukhovsky). That novel was called Metro 2033. Dmitry Glukhovsky imagined a nuclear war in 2013 and a few thousand survivors taking refuge in the tunnels under Moscow, then he put the whole thing on his own website where anybody could read it without paying a rouble. It took three years before a publisher decided to charge money for it. Turning it into a game fell to a studio nobody had heard of, @4AGames, set up in Kyiv in 2005 by veterans of the industry who wrote their own engine from scratch. Their very first game would come out in March 2010: that book. They would later move their headquarters to Malta while keeping offices in both countries. And what they built deserves to be told properly. You are Artyom, born in the last days before the fire and raised underground without once setting foot past the city limits, in stations that have become city states with their own rulers and their own borders, fighting each other at least as hard as they fight the mutants waiting above. Nothing anybody carries down there was manufactured, every weapon being welded together out of salvage and going up to the surface means a gasmask whose filters run down, the watch on your wrist being there to tell you how much air you have left. Ranger Mode strips the display away: nothing left on screen, deadlier fighting, counted resources and ammunition you have to check by hand in the middle of it. Hollywood turned up two years later, once the game had already worked. MGM bought the film rights in September 2012, with Mark Johnson producing, whose name is on the Narnia pictures. The studio wanted the story lifted out of the Moscow underground and dropped into the Washington subway, which Glukhovsky refused. The project died in 2018, the rights went back to him and he said afterwards of their version that they had turned it into a very generic thing. So the novel had found its screen before any film studio came near it and that screen was never a cinema one. The game had kept Moscow, kept the Russian names and kept the author in the room. On the game's store page as it stands today, the publisher ends its plot summary on a question: what if the real threat comes from within? Last Light answered it and that game turns two things at once. The studio stopped adapting, judging that the tone of the second novel, Metro 2034 published in 2009, had nothing to do with the first one and it wrote its own sequel instead, set in that same year 2034 without telling that same story. Glukhovsky stayed on and he is there in the credits as a writer, on a story that is no longer his own. The books and the games have run side by side ever since without meeting, the author going on to publish a third novel, Metro 2035, in 2015. In that second game the mutants have stopped being the point. Station cities are tearing each other apart over D6, a doomsday device sitting in a military vault, in a civil war that could finish the job the bombs left unfinished. The threat is no longer a creature waiting above but the man in the station across the way. On August 27, 2014 the two of them came back as Metro 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux. The studio took care to say this was no mere HD port: Metro 2033 had been rebuilt inside Last Light's engine and the older game inherited the newer one's artificial intelligence, its controls, its animation and its weapon handling. They did it because Metro 2033 had only ever existed on PC and Xbox 360 and had never appeared on a PlayStation at all while the new consoles had landed the year before with nothing from this series on them. Six years later, on February 28, 2020, 4A ported both games to Switch themselves, with everything on the cartridge and not a line to download. Nintendo Life gave it nine out of ten and put it alongside Alien: Isolation among the best ports the machine has ever seen. Then Exodus did the thing nobody saw coming. It left. Artyom takes a handful of Spartan Rangers, climbs aboard a heavily modified steam locomotive called the Aurora and drives east across ruined Russia looking for somewhere to live. That story runs a full year, spring then summer then autumn then straight down into nuclear winter, across huge open levels with real weather and a real day and night, where guns get built in the field out of whatever was scavenged along the way and where your companions do not all survive, depending on what you decide. Five years to the day after release, 4A announced ten million copies sold. And people never stopped playing them: those first two games still hold two hundred and twenty thousand Steam reviews at over ninety percent, with sixteen hundred people Steam still counted down there this morning. Which brings us to February 2027 and that is the part that gets us. METRO 2039 goes back down. It comes from no book at all: 4A wrote this story with Glukhovsky himself, inside the world his novels built. Twenty five years after the bombs the tunnels are finally united behind one man, which is precisely the problem. He is a fanatic called Hunter, whose regime holds the population through propaganda and fear while sending it off to fight a new war to retake the surface, against a dark and terrifying enemy. There is no Ranger to play this time but a recluse they call the Stranger, dragged out of exile by his own nightmares. That million on Steam was reached within weeks of the reveal and @MetroVideoGame showed a second gameplay trailer at gamescom on Monday. The collector's edition is built around a replica of the Stranger's battered helmet, moulded from the model used inside the game itself. Almost every series opens up with time, widening the map and handing out more freedom. This one has just gone the other way. After sending Artyom across a continent, from spring through to nuclear winter, it is walking back down on purpose, to the one place where there is no sky and where the air is counted in minutes.. See you in February. Jac for KPTUR #Metro2039 #KPTUR