Embracer Group's acquisition spree continues - it's now picked up Metro developer 4A Games for $80m.

Embracer Group, the parent company of THQ Nordic, said it bought 4A Games, which is home to over 150 people across two studios in Malta and Ukraine, via subsidiary Saber Interactive (World War Z).

Perhaps the acquisition shouldn't come as a surprise. 4A Games' Metro games are published by Deep Silver, which is owned by Embracer, so there's a long-running relationship. Embracer not only gets 4A Games, but the Metro IP and the developer's proprietary game engine, which will save costs for the company.

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Barren wastelands. Decrepit and abandoned towns. Desolate landscapes ravaged by time and trauma. Recognisable landmarks slowly but surely reclaimed by nature after our demise. Games have consistently embraced the post-apocalyptic setting. It invites excitement, apprehension and a deep curiosity, and plays on the thought-provoking hypothetical, the 'what if?'. And when these post-apocalyptic environments and landscapes are incredibly detailed, they can result in great efficacy and power.

Of course, all games use artistic license to a degree to ensure their pacing, setting and characters are primed for our experience and, as a result we give them a healthy amount of leeway when it comes to their landscapes. But just how much artistic license is an interesting area to investigate. Have the developers ruthlessly stuck to an accepted setting or set of circumstances? Or have they created their own unique setting from scratch? Or, have they landed somewhere in the middle? Overall, how 'accurate' is the representation of their chosen hypothetical landscape?

Games' post-apocalypses give us a window into what might happen should everything go down the tubes for humanity, but also the earth. There are people who are experts or who have written about such scenarios, and one of them is writer Alan Weisman. Some fans of The Last of Us may know his book, The World Without Us, which helped inspire Naughty Dog and its portrayal of a post-apocalyptic, or human-less, USA. His book details how the world would change immediately after a sudden disappearance or decrease in human intervention.

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In a restaurant somewhere in sunny Los Angeles County, 13 years ago, two old friends were having lunch. Wine and conversation were flowing. They remembered how they'd met at LucasArts in the 90s. They weren't there to talk business but they did because video games were their bread and butter. One of the men, Jack Sorensen, was reeling-off job opportunities he knew of - he being executive vice president of worldwide studios at games publisher THQ. "THQ Australia?" he enquired. But the other man, Dean Sharpe, didn't seem interested. He had closed his own studio Big Ape Productions a couple of years earlier, dropped off the radar and taken a break, and now he was ready for something new. But Sharpe wanted a challenge.

Sorensen dangled the bait. "It was somewhere during the second bottle of wine he mentioned he had this crazy thing in Ukraine," Dean Sharpe tells me over Skype now (he never did get fully back on the radar and he's a hard man to find). "Wow Ukraine," he thought to himself, "that sounds interesting."

Sorensen outlined his problem: THQ had a team making a fascinating game in Ukraine called Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. The game was dark and massive, set around the twisted disaster zone of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It was part shooter, part role-playing game, part eerie open-world sandbox adventure. But Stalker was overdue, long overdue, and Sorensen needed someone on the ground out there to finish it - someone in Ukraine to be THQ personified, day in day out, doing whatever it took to get the game done.

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