Metro

The novel was published free on a website first. Dmitry Glukhovsky posted Metro 2033 chapter by chapter from 2002, let readers argue with the plot, and only sold it as a book in 2005. The games that followed were made in Kyiv, and the war that reached both countries has since caught up with everyone involved.

A book written with its readers in the room

Glukhovsky was 22 when he started posting. The premise is narrow: after a nuclear exchange, the survivors of Moscow live in the metro system, one station per community, with the tunnels between them as the dangerous part.

Readers wrote to argue about details of the network, and some of those arguments changed the text. The finished novel appeared in 2005 and has been translated into more than thirty languages.

He then opened the setting to other writers. More than a hundred authorised novels by other hands have appeared since, set in the metro systems of other cities, from Saint Petersburg to Rome. The licence was open three years after the book reached print.

A Ukrainian studio adapts a Russian novel

Metro 2033 became a game in 2010, made by 4A Games in Kyiv, a studio founded by people who had left the makers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

The design keeps the book's constraint. Ammunition doubles as currency, so every shot is a purchase, and the gas mask cracks visibly as it takes damage. Metro: Last Light continued in 2013.

4A Games moved its headquarters to Malta in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine began.

Metro: Exodus leaves the tunnels, and Steam

Metro: Exodus opened the series out in 2019, moving above ground and across Russia by train. It is the best-reviewed entry and the one that broke the series' own premise on purpose.

Two weeks before release, the publisher pulled it from Steam for a one-year exclusivity deal with the Epic Games Store. Players who had preordered on Steam kept their copies; everyone else was redirected, and the review pages filled with complaints about distribution rather than the game.

It sold well anyway, and the episode became the reference case in every subsequent argument about storefront exclusivity on personal computers.

The fiction and the news converge

Glukhovsky opposed the invasion of Ukraine publicly in 2022. A Russian court sentenced him in absentia to eight years in 2023 for what the state calls discrediting the armed forces. He lives outside the country.

4A Games has continued working from Malta and Kyiv, on a series about Russians surviving underground, written by a man Russia has convicted.

Post-apocalyptic fiction usually keeps a comfortable distance from the present. This one has not been able to, and its author cannot enter the country his books are set in.