Crysis

Remembering the benchmark for sandbox shooters laid out in Crytek’s strong suit

- PHIL IWANIUK

Right now, your PC can probably – probably – run Crysis. But even as recently as 2015, anyone incanting PC gaming’s most famous meme in response to a new hardware release wasn’t asking an entirely redundant question. What Crytek created in 2007 was a technological spectacle so advanced, and so astonishingly different to the look of its contemporaries, that it took mainstream PCs almost a full decade to accommodate its demands. On launch day back in November 2007, anyone who hoped to enjoy the sandbox shooter (whose scarcely believable screenshots had been ubiquitous in the gaming press for months) at anything like a smooth framerate was about to get their paradigm shifted.

This was mid-noughties PC gaming in a nutshell. A new release would come along and dictate a higher bar for hardware than your current machine could manage, and its allure was strong enough that you’d invest the requisite hundreds into those specs to play it. Then a couple of years later the next Half-Life 2, Oblivion or Arkham Asylum would arrive and you’d either invest in more cutting-edge PC parts or declare insolvency.

But nowhere was it more true than with Crysis. In many ways, the primary activity in the game was simply getting it to run. It was a sort of preliminary puzzle which involved finding the correct combination of dropdown menu options to unlock a path forward, beyond the flip-book drawings of a jungle that arrived on your monitor every half-second or so, and into a full-motion interactive experience. This was a puzzle which might have taken months to reach a satisfying solution.