Crysis was such an infamously hard game to run at its max settings it became a meme, but apparently you weren’t even meant to do so at release.
“Can it run Crysis?” That’s probably a meme you saw everywhere in gaming spaces about a decade ago, in fact it’s so prolific the only thing I know about the game is that it was meant to be hard to run, I have no idea what the story even is. But with the advancements since its release almost two decades ago in 2007, it’s not really a joke that works anymore because most computers can, in fact, run Crysis now. As it turns out, though, that kind of works out, because the developers behind it had intended it to be future proof, so that it would always stand the test of time as soon as hardware got better.
Speaking to PC Gamer as part of a larger retrospective on the game, Crysis director and Crytek founder Cevat Yerli spoke of the meme and the game’s legacy, saying that he wanted to “make sure Crysis does not age, that [it] is future proofed, meaning that if I played it three years from now, it should look better than today.” The game’s highest graphic settings were designed with hardware you might have in 2010 and further, even though of course people still tried to crank them up back in 2007. “A lot of people tried to maximize Crysis immediately. And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s not why we built the Ultra mode, or Very High’.”
Luckily, as prevalent as the joke once was, Yerli never took it to heart in any particular way, saying, “It was this ambivalent kind of meme that was good and bad, but I actually enjoyed it. Last year, Jensen [Huang] for Nvidia announced a new GPU, and they said, ‘Yes, and it can run Crysis.'” Maybe if you played the game all the way back in 2007 on medium settings you can finally find out if your rig can run Crysis (I really imagine it can).