THE MAKING OF FAR CRY
At one point in the 2004 first-person shooter Far Cry, hero Jack Carver slams his oversized hands to his head and growls, “What is this? A bad spy movie?” It’s a well-observed moment of self-awareness with regards to the wantonly B-movie plot he’s part of, in a game that wasn’t worried about making fun of its schlockier elements.
But not even such cheery tackiness could obscure the fact that the original Far Cry is anything but a B-game. It was a technical marvel for the time, made by an obscure but ambitious German developer called Crytek. While it’s best remembered as a graphical tour-de-force, it’s also a hotpot of bold design ideas that quietly shook up the first-person shooter genre.
Crytek was a new studio when it started work on Far Cry. Founded in 1999, it was made up of an international team of young developers whose unfettered creativity was nurtured by its sibling trio of CEOs: Cevat, Avni and Faruk Yerli. One of the first developers employed at Crytek was main programmer and level designer Petar Kotevski, who came on board in 2000 to work on Crytek’s proprietary new engine, CryEngine, as well as the as-then-unnamed Far Cry that would be used to champion it.
Like many of Crytek’s early recruits, Petar learned about the company through the ‘X-Isle’ tech demo that was used to showcase CryEngine at E3 1999. The demo depicted a vast jungle island populated by dinosaurs, with the camera gliding high above the
