PARADISE FROST

The making of CRYSIS, PC gaming's most notorious rig-killer

- Rick Lane

When Ubisoft published Far Cry on March 23, 2004, it was a watershed moment in gaming. Casting players as an ex-soldier battling mercenaries across a tropical archipelago, Far Cry dragged first-person shooters out of tight linear corridors into vast, openended levels. A glimpse of gaming’s future, Far Cry was a hit, selling 2.5 million copies and spawning one of the most successful shooter series’ of the last 20 years.

Inside Crytek, the neophyte German studio that had developed Far Cry, the general feeling was euphoric. “The ego was boosted across the board,” says Cevat Yerli, Crytek’s founder and former CEO, and Far Cry’s director. “Everybody was like, ‘We can build Far Cry 2 in a year!’” Ubisoft was likewise keen for Crytek to capitalize upon its success, and follow-up Far Cry with a rapidlyproduced sequel using its remarkable CryEngine tech.

But Yerli wasn’t so sure. “We had never done a game before as a team,” he explains. “When you think you know how to do it, often that’s when people stumble and make huge mistakes. So I said, ‘Is there a way for us to manifest that learning and that excitement?’ I want to be sure we are not a culture that goes into ‘sequelitis’ like, sequel after sequel.”

Instead, Yerli wanted to take everything Crytek had learned from making Far Cry, and use it to rebuild everything they’d made from the ground up. He wanted to establish a whole new IP and build it in a whole new engine, one that would push everything Far Cry did further than before. “I said to the team, ‘Let’s look at how we focus on true innovation, and let’s, let’s push ourselves again, a lot harder.’” It was in this moment when Crysis, PC gaming’s most storied, memetic son, was born.

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