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?'"
Turns out that, yes, you can, and then you've made Crysis. The only issue remaining was the suit's design: "We went through hundreds of concept arts, and they all looked like Marvel [characters]." Eventually, "this muscle suit came up, with nanofibres that would then connect with your muscle tissues and sync with your movements."
And then Crytek had it—the iconic Crysis Nanosuit. The studio duly plastered it all over its website for the then-upcoming game and, I suppose, caught the attention of the real-life nanotech community. How disappointed do you think the nano-nerds were when they realised Crytek hadn't actually invented an invisibility cloak?