A half-hour cab ride in Kiev costs about 40 Ukrainian grivna, or about $5. But 30 minutes is all it takes to travel from Vostok Games to the only other triple-A developer headquartered in Ukraine.

The offices of 4A Games are set behind an eight-foot concrete wall glazed with Cyrillic graffiti. An old man sits near a weathered gatehouse behind the entrance to the complex, and inside that wall he is surrounded by industrial debris and rusted chunks of Soviet-era trucks. Stray cats stalk the lot.

Amid the clutter, huddled inside a small gazebo perched atop cinder blocks, a few casually dressed smokers kill time after lunch. Beyond them an unmarked door leads into offices, where the men and women of 4A build a grim but popular series of first-person shooters. This is the home of the Metro series, including Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light.

Like at Vostok, nearly everyone at 4A is a refugee from GSC. The company was founded in 2006, after the first Stalker game was finished but before it was published in the West.

The owner of the studio is a short, powerful man named Andrew Prokhorov. The son of Ukrainian artists, he graduated university with a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering. His boyhood dream was to one day design and sell beautiful aircraft based on his parents' paintings, but when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the 1980s his plans changed.

From 1991 to 1995, during his graduate work, he was employed by one government research center after another, earning a salary of less than $100 a month. He became interested in playing games, and began to teach himself computer graphics as a way to make money on the side. Soon after he discovered GSC Game World was hiring he said goodbye to aeronautics forever.

When Prokhorov came to GSC in 1996 it was only a loosely affiliated group of 15 people in a two-room apartment. The 26-year old Ph.D. was interviewed by their leader, a then-16-year-old Grigorovich.

"It was like a crazy house," Prokhorov says, but the work was intoxicating and the pay was marginally better than what he was receiving from the government.

Throughout the early 2000s, as GSC grew larger on the sales of Cossacks games, Prokhorov and others began to resent how the company's earnings all seemed to go to Grigorovich. Their CEO had stated many times that Cossacks earned the company more than $100 million, but Prokhorov says the wages of average employees remained comically low.

In 2005, six years into the development of the first Stalker, GSC employed 140 people. Prokhorov says that in the parking lot there were only four cars. Three of them belonged to Grigorovich: a BMW X5, a Porshe Cayenne and a Ferarri F430 with plates that read "Stalker."

"We decided to make a firm where the first priority will not be money, but people. We pride ourselves on having created a good team."

The fourth car was a second-hand beater owned by one of GSC's programmers. One hundred forty people worked for Grigorovich, with only one car among them. There is anger, disgust even, in Prokhorov's voice as he tells the story.

Eventually, after a falling out with Grigorovich over wages in 2006, Prokhorov and two lead programmers left the company to found 4A. After the first Stalker was published in 2007, Prokhorov says that Grigorovich fired the entire art department at GSC. Nearly all of them came to work for 4A.

"We decided to make [4A] a firm where the first priority will not be money, but people," Prokhorov tells Polygon. "We pride ourselves on having created a good team. Because if you have a good team, sooner or later you'll earn the money. ... Most of our people own a car." On the day Polygon visited there were perhaps a dozen cars in 4A's main lot, a black luxury BMW among them. The average level of games industry experience at 4A is 10 years. Prokhorov puffs out his chest as he talks about his team, proud of its expertise, its perseverance and how far it's come since leaving GSC seven years ago en masse. Last Light survived the bankruptcy of its publisher, THQ, and has gone on to sell more than the original Metro title.

The only challenge left to Prokhorov is finding enough people to help his studio grow. He says his darkest moments come during those rare instances when employees leave, because there is no one in Kiev with enough experience or the right skillset to replace them.