Stalker media is a name that I made up to categorise all media that use the word "stalker" to define a person who explores dangerous areas to find valuable materials to sell for profit.
Stalker media is almost always sci-fi and set in Eastern Europe, often with themes of nuclear radiation and war.
This is a not at all comprehensive list of media using the word "stalker" in this way, in chronological order. Those with a checkmark ✓ in the title, I have consumed.
Roadside Picnic (Пикник на обочине) is a philosophical sci-fi novel written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It is the first instance of the word stalker being used in this way, and is the original inspiration for most other stalker media.
The dangerous area in question, is an alien crashsite littered with extraterrestrial waste never seen on Earth before. The books title comes from an analogy used by a character in the book to describe the alien visitation zone, where it is likened to the remnants of a picnic.
Stalker (Сталкер) is a movie directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, with a screenplay written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. It is loosely based on Roadside Picnic, with an alien visitation zone and strange ocurrances.
Made by GSC Game World. The video game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is heavily influenced by Roadside Picnic and Stalker. The first game in the series, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, references many important plot points from the book, such as the wish granter and the unknown force blocking the path to the center of the zone. It also contains elements such as anomalies and artifacts that are similar to those described in the book, but that are created by a supernatural ecological disaster, not by alien visitors.
The Metro universe is a topic to itself and has many spinoffs and deriviatives. The main concept is that after a nuclear war, the only surviving humans left live in the Moscow metro system. Each station becomes like a small city, and the stations trade with and fight against each other.
In the Metro Universe, the word "stalker" refers to the people who go up to the surface, gather resources and sell them to the different stations.
The original series, written by Dmitry Glukhovsky, that inspires everything else.
Made by 4A Games, which was started by developers from GSC Game World (makers of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series)