How Crysis Changed My Life
A story about a game that brought me to where I am in life- and how thankful I am for that.
It is not often that you can claim a mere game had a lasting effect on your life. Most people who would tell these kinds of stories are probably making money off the game in question or had an emotional epiphany of sorts (looking at you, Life Is Strange). In my case it probably has more to do with the first case, because Crysis is the game that made me want to be a developer.
It had to be early in the year 2010; the game was already released for over two years and I was 13 years young. Pretty much the only information I had about it was that it was claimed to be the best-looking game ever when I saw it in a shop for an affordable price. I swiftly decided to ask my parents if they could purchase the M rated title for me, purely because I was fascinated with the idea of witnessing the best and newest technology. Luckily they agreed and I went home eager to see it for myself.
Needless to say, I could not run it on the highest settings. Not even close. I tuned it down to pretty much the lowest level for actual gameplay; that however did not stop me from making screenshots and marvel at the truly gorgeous graphics of the higher settings with something about five frames per second. And although my fascination with great technology was an important factor in my experience with games it was something else that sparked the fire that still burns.
I had not yet experienced any tactical singleplayer FPS at this stage of my life; prior to that I only had brief contact to Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike, both games that were vastly different in feel and gameplay from Crysis. It was kind of overwhelming. I had no clue how to best play this game and I died a lot but that did not stop me from enjoying it. Instead it motivated me even more to find out how to beat the game by its own rules, a motviation that to this day still drives me to analyze and understand each and every aspect of a game’s inner workings and systems.
As you can see, Crysis quickly proved to be a great way for me to experience my own focus points and understand why certain things fascinated me in the way they did. It actually made me able to articulate what really captivated me in games and why I loved them so much as a medium- an important step in realizing what I wanted to do all along. But it might not have come to what it is today if not for another feature the game had.
The Sandbox Editor. The tool that gave us access to the inner workings of Crysis and the CryEngine 2, at that time an immensely powerful instrument to develop your own scenarios. Originally I started working on it just to take even prettier screenshots with additionally post-processing and from impossible angles. While flying through the original levels of Crysis that were completely accessible in the Sandbox I quickly realized- I could do this, too. Well, obviously I could not, but the possibility was theoretically there. I had the tools I needed. So I started experimenting, testing and trying to build my own levels.
I was honestly not very good at it. But I quickly found a like-minded community over at the Crysis-HQ (now Crytek-HQ I guess) where people shared their levels, their ideas, sometimes mods of impressive scale and all the tips and tricks you needed to know as a beginner. Digging through numerous tutorials I started to band together with other young modders and we released a few maps (mostly for the multiplayer) as the mapping group eccentric.maps. From today’s viewpoint it probably is nothing I should be too proud of, but at that time it felt very special. We were doing things like we wanted to do them, creating the maps we envisioned. We were in control and it felt amazing.
Soon I realized that working with the tool itself was not my biggest virtue so I looked into other ways to get involved with the development process that at this point had deeply fascinated me. I became a level concept designer, creative writer, tester and PR person for a number of different projects, some really big and great ones, publishing news and announcements even on some external sites to spread the word about the work we were doing. It was probably the most fun time I ever had with a game without playing it (writing about them seems to be a close second though).
It was at that time that my school time was slowly coming to an end and I was confronted with the question what I wanted to do with my life. I could not imagine doing something “boring” like accounting or law or whatever I might have classified as the most boring thing to do back then. I wanted to have a job that would present me with ever changing challenges, that required me to be creative and have a passion for what I was doing. I wanted to be an artist.
I really liked writing so I thought about being a journalist but something held me back. Instead I wanted to write for my favourite media, games. I liked programming as well and was very interested in it, but it was not what I wanted to solely focus on, either. In the time that had passed I gathered more experience within the modding scene, creating maps for Neverwinter Nights and Counter-Strike: Source and I was absolutely convinced this is what I wanted to do: Inventing and creating my own stories as well as bringing them to life; I wanted a job that would let me do both. And that is how I turned to game design.
Since then I have spent six semesters studying game design and I was part of plenty of projects that I worked on with other students. And it was certainly not always as easy as I imagined it to be when I was younger, but when I work on an interesting world design or a new mechanic or a complicated piece of code or a 3D model I can still feel the same passion flowing through me that made me open up the Sandbox to make maps for Crysis.
This is the passion I have for the interactive media of games and the passion I have for creating fantastical worlds and seeing them come to life. This is exactly what I want to do for a living; it is one of the most rewarding feelings I can imagine and it is largely thanks to Crysis that I found it. It changed my life.
