Hold onto your quadrillion-voxelbyte flux capacitors, PC fans – would you believe that Crytek was this close to signing up as one of Microsoft’s first-party Xbox devs? Turns out Crysis was just a little too much like one of Microsoft’s other “military future shooters” (three guesses, and the first two don’t count) at the time, though.
“I do think it’s about quality,” Xbox guy Phil Spencer tells OXM, on the subject of the console’s hardcore game catalogue. “And the relationship with Crytek is a perfect example. The first time we met with [Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli] and the team was around seven or eight years ago, and we started talking about what it’d mean for them to become first party.”
“And it was a process of what do you guys want to do, what’s unique for us, and they were just going to do Crysis, and they’d just come out of Far Cry, and we said we’ve probably got enough military future shooters, so go do that.”
Fast-forward a few years, and not only did Crysis 2 end up on Xbox, but the developer is also working on Kinect exclusive, Ryse, and rumour has it that the original Crysis should be seeing a console launch sometime in the future too. The times, they are a-changin’.
