Far Cry fans hope surprise source code leak will bring 'new breath' to an old game
It's hard to overstate how good the original Far Cry was. And influential, too: It's the game that put developer Crytek on the map and spawned one of Ubisoft's biggest and best-known series. But it's also 19 years old, a veritable eon in videogame terms, and that passage of time can definitely be seen and felt: It's long overdue for a glow-up.
Unexpectedly, it may actually get one at some point in the overly-distant future thanks to a recent leak of the original Far Cry source code, which appeared «out of nowhere» on the Internet Archive.
The leak is for version 1.34 of the game and purports to be complete, although one reviewer said it's not actually complete, «but close.»
«From my educated guess, this is some source tree leak for the PC version of the game to add support for the Ubisoft game launcher/DRM,» MobCat wrote. «It does contain some exes but no Xbox code and no game assets.» It also apparently doesn't compile without numerous errors, although a different reviewer claimed that it compiles «with [a] few modifications in Visual Studio .NET 2003.»
It's not clear exactly where the code came from or why someone would suddenly drop the source for a game that's been kicking around for two decades. Nobody has taken credit for the leak at this point, and it's the first and only file to be uploaded by Internet Archive user Llaetha.ro. Members of the Far Cry 1 Community Discord speculated (with unmistakable confidence) that a former Crytek employee with a particular interest in the game shared it with a few friends «for studying,» with the intention of making it public later—but one of them jumped the gun and released it to the public first.
What fans are clearly more interested in at this point is what they'll be able to
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