Chris Remo over at Shacknews brings us word of an impending slice of drama that has made me giggle like a school girl with a vibrator for the last couple minutes. It seems that the just-released S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:Shadow of Chernobyl might just contain some in-game assets originally created by id and Valve for Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, respectively. To quote Mr. Remo;

One of the first threads to be made regarding the matter was posted to the MapCore forums; the thread creator, user michi.be, posted screen captures allegedly comparing the light image folders from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to those of Doom 3 (all screen captures locally mirrored). Tellingly, though some of the images had been modified in various ways, such as having hue or saturation adjustments, the original filenames from the Doom 3 folders remained the same--for example, a file with the Doom-esque name "lights_impflash.dds," referring to one of the game's enemies, was visually modified in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. folder but retained the filename.

Later in the same thread, user Johnny posted an image allegedly comparing a water texture from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to a water texture from Half-Life 2. As in the Doom 3 case, the images were nearly identical and the filename was unchanged with the exception of its extension.

If you click on the links in that blurb, you'll be taken through one of the nearest Intertubes to some pretty damning evidence. I've looked through all of it myself, and the conclusion I've come to is that the world of game development is almost exactly like high school. You have the successful jocks (id, Valve), the geeks (KOEI), the chick from the drama club who would be kinda do-able if she wasn't so crazy (Square-Enix), the popular, prude girl with a fantastic rack (Nintendo), and then you have the smelly Russian exchange student (GSC Game World, the devs behind S.T.A.L.K.E.R.). The exchange student doesn't know any better so he ends up copying off of the jock's test, and gets them both thrown in Saturday School. Of course, this means that the jock is honor bound to punch the smelly foreign kid until he stops moving, or stops babbling incoherently in his thick Muscovite accent (whichever comes first).

Oh, and then, maybe, they'll sit around in a circle and talk about how hard their lives are, and Claire will see through Bender's rough exterior to the sensitive, scared soul underneath it all.