This Day In Gaming, November 13: Crysis

This Day In Gaming, November 13: Crysis

On November 13, 2007, Electronic Arts and German studio Crytek released Crysis onto PC in North America, and in doing so handed the gaming world two things at once: one of the finest first person shooters of its era, and a question that would haunt graphics cards for more than a decade. "But can it run Crysis?"

The game that melted PCs

Crysis was built on CryEngine 2, the successor to the technology that powered Crytek's 2004 debut, Far Cry. Director Cevat Yerli and his team set out to make a true next generation shooter, and the numbers behind it were staggering for the time. Nvidia's Roy Taylor cited more than a million lines of code, a gigabyte of texture data, and some 85,000 shaders. Crytek reportedly spent around 22 million dollars building it.

The result was a game so demanding that, for years, no consumer hardware could run it at maximum settings and a smooth frame rate at the same time. That gap between ambition and available silicon is exactly what turned Crysis into a legend. Reviewers and enthusiasts began using it as the yardstick for raw PC power, and the phrase "Can it run Crysis?" spread into a full blown internet meme, applied to everything from freshly launched graphics cards to, as a joke, pocket calculators and even the 1940s ENIAC. Crytek eventually leaned into it: the highest graphics preset in the 2020 Crysis Remastered is named, with a wink, "Can It Run Crysis?"

Sandbox warfare

Beneath the spectacle sat a genuinely excellent shooter. Set in a near future 2020, the story drops players onto the fictional Lingshan Islands, where North Korean forces have seized an archaeological dig and uncovered an ancient alien structure buried inside a mountain. You play as Delta Force operator Jake "Nomad" Dunn, and the mission swiftly spirals from a rescue operation into a desperate fight against both human soldiers and the aliens the dig unleashes.

Nomad's edge is the Nanosuit, a powered exoskeleton with four switchable modes: Armor to soak up damage, Strength for heavier melee hits and higher jumps, Speed for sprinting and faster reloads, and Cloak for near invisibility. Juggling the suit's shared energy pool, deciding moment to moment when to go loud and when to vanish, gave Crysis a flexibility rare among shooters of the day. Its large, open jungle levels let players tackle objectives however they liked, a sandbox philosophy Crytek carried over from Far Cry.

Acclaim, piracy, and a complicated legacy

Critics were smitten. The PC version holds a Metacritic score of 91, with GameSpot awarding 9.5 out of 10, IGN 9.4, and PC Gamer a near perfect 98 percent. It took GameSpot's Best Shooter award for 2007 and PC Gamer's Game of the Year.

Commercial success was murkier. NPD recorded fewer than 87,000 retail copies sold in North America during the first two weeks, a figure widely described as disappointing given the enormous hype. EA reported roughly a million units about two months after launch, and the game eventually passed three million by 2010. Yerli pinned the soft start on rampant piracy, and Crysis became a frequent exhibit in the era's heated debates about PC piracy. There is a neat irony in it all: the game may simply have been too far ahead of its hardware, so many of the people who most wanted it could not actually run it well.

Crysis went on to spawn a trilogy, with Crysis 2 arriving in 2011 and Crysis 3 in 2013, alongside the standalone expansion Warhead and the later Remastered editions. A fourth game was announced in 2022 before being put on hold. Yet the original remains the touchstone, remembered less for its sales than for the way it reset an entire industry's expectations of what a game could look like.

Nineteen years on, the meme has outlived most of the hardware it once mocked. And somewhere, right now, someone is still asking the only question that really matters.

Also on this day

November 13 has seen other notable launches over the years, including Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012), the record breaking entry that pushed the series into a near future setting, and Nintendo's Yoshi's Island DS (2006).

Sources

Crysis (video game), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crysis_(video_game)

"EA and Crytek usher in the next generation of PC gaming with Crysis" (EA press release, 13 November 2007), GamingNexus: https://gamingnexus.com/News/6431/Crysis-ships-to-retailers

Call of Duty: Black Ops II release date, GameSpot: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/call-of-duty-black-ops-ii-hits-nov-13/1100-6374419/

Yoshi's Island DS, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshi%27s_Island_DS