Trivia / Crysis

• Acclaimed Flop: Every game in the series was critically acclaimed, especially the first. But due mostly to a combination of rampant piracy, the niche audience of the original,^note Not only just PC players, but just PC players with high-end machines. and misaimed marketing, the series as a whole barely broke even for Crytek.
• Genre-Killer: The below-expected sales of the first game, along with those of the same year's Unreal Tournament III and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, ended up demonstrating that the big-budget PC exclusives that pushed the boundaries of hardware were no longer a commercially viable proposition, and that tentpole games had to have some form of console release in order to have any hope of making any money. Tellingly, all three games would get console ports at one point or another.
• Killer App: For graphics card manufacturers. In fact, one of the intro videos is nVIDIA's. Even thirteen years after its release, the original Crysis is still used as a graphics card benchmark.
• Referenced by...: Has its own page.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Crytek made a version of Crysis 3 for the Wii U (which they even said came closer to resembling the PC version than the other console ports), and wanted it to be published on the console. However, Electronic Arts refused to publish it.^note The official reasons are unknown to this day but it has been agreed upon that it was due to a falling out between Electronic Arts and Nintendo over the Wii U's capabilities and Nintendo not giving special privileges to Electronic Arts after they helped with the development of the Nintendo Network. The fact that the Wii U itself wasn't selling well certainly didn't do anything to convince EA to change their stance.
  • Crysis itself serves as this trope for PC gaming hardware in general. The game was designed when the expectation was that CPUs would continue to become faster via increases in clock speed. As such, the game runs almost everything on a single thread with minimal multi-threading (due to it being added later in development), with the expectation that future CPUs with higher clock speeds would eventually be able to run it at max settings. However, CPU manufacturers moved in a different direction, favoring multi-threading and increasing core counts for performance. As such, future games, including Crysis's sequels and other games on the updated version of its engine, went in that direction instead.
  • The first game was supposed to have Nomad fly back to the USS Constitution between missions and interact with the sailors and marines aboard. You can see evidence of this in this pre-release screenshot◊ showing the ship on a clear day whereas in the finished game it only shows up at the end on a rainy night. Also the latter phase of the game was supposed to have Nomad and the USMC team up with the North Korean KPA to battle the aliens in a fight for survival.
  • The North Koreans were originally meant to be Chinese PLA as evidenced by some leftover in-game files viewable in the Sandbox 2 editor (the warships off the coast of the island also resemble real-life Type 052D warships used by the Chinese PLAN). This was later changed to the North Korean KPA.