Crysis' magical Nanosuit was so convincing that a nanotech conference asked Crytek's boss to give a keynote speech: 'I said, excuse me, but this is all fake'
Once, when I was in China, a Danish colleague of mine got invited by a business-type to attend some kind of fancy high-powered conference. Thinking it'd be a novel experience at least, she agreed, only to find herself on-stage, in a suit: a deer in headlights presented to shareholders as an exec from a foreign branch of the corp in an attempt to burnish its international credentials.
I imagine this is pretty much what would have happened to Cevat Yerli, Crytek's founder and former CEO, if he'd responded 'yes' to an invitation to a nanotech conference in the run-up to the release of Crysis 1. In a chat with PCG in this month's mag, Yerli recalled that the game's Nanosuit-heavy marketing got interest from some unexpected areas. When the game's website went live, he «got invited to a nanotechnology conference as a keynote speaker. I said, 'Excuse me, but this is all fake.'»
It would have been way funnier if Yerli had gone along and tried to blag the whole thing, but I guess he had a game to make at the time. I guess you can't really blame the nanotech wonks for getting the wrong end of Crysis' stick: To hear Yerli tell it, coming up with and implementing its famous Nanosuit was a huge chunk of development.
«I was getting a bit angry,» says Yerli, because although—midway through development—Crysis felt like a decent innovation on Far Cry, it hadn't done much to set apart the player character. Yerli says the team looked at other big FPSes, like Halo and Half-Life, and decided there was only one possible answer—the hero needed a cool suit.
«This idea of a programmable suit came up,» says Yerli, and before long the devs were thinking about incorporating different skills, like super-strength and invisibility, to shake up that plain-Jane FPS gameplay. «When you play Quake, you play in a different way than when you play in Counter-Strike,» thought Yerli, «And then I was wondering, 'can I incorporate these play styles into one person, then you choose what you want to do?'»
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