Strong words, softly spoken. That’s the impression Crytek founder Cevat Yerli left on me halfway between the releases of Far Cry and Crysis, somewhere in the cramped quarters of the studio’s old home in Coburg, Germany. Meanwhile, out on a nearby autobahn, billboards celebrated the small Bavarian town’s first ever McDonalds, giving you a fairly swift idea of why the company made games that took tropical escapism to otherworldly extremes.

Casual delivery of terrifying jargon is something of a lifelong habit for Yerli, who was toying with homebrewed rotoscoping on the Commodore Amiga long before his virtual company began tossing ideas like X-Isle: Dinosaur Island (the tech demo which evolved into Far Cry) across the internet. His mantra to his staff: “Make a difference,” repeated over and over with rising urgency, may sit awkwardly behind games about soldiers and aliens, but it’s there in every pixel of the worlds they inhabit.

Crysis is one of the few ‘current generation’ games in an age still dominated by six-year old consoles, the first game to jump the uncanny valley and land squarely on the other side. The irony is that it’s almost four years old itself and has only just reached the point where average PCs can play it as intended. Yerli’s promise of ‘videorealism, not photorealism’ was delivered ahead of time, dropping its crippling payload of deferred lighting, object motion blur, accurate inverse kinematics, high-res textures, screen space ambient occlusion and fully interactive physics on hardware that could barely cope.

Even now it takes the very latest anti-aliasing solutions to render the game’s foliage properly, which is why this collection uses offline downsampling – CryENGINE 2 has just such a feature built in – to unleash its potential. More than that, though, its goal is to debunk the absurd notion that Crysis isn’t art but rather an exercise in German precision engineering. Ironically, its gamers themselves who have been drilled to think and see in pixels, the burden of this game’s technology obfuscating some of the strongest art design in action game history.

Level by level, it sets itself challenges that demand nothing less: the absolute realism of an island utopia; aliens that move without care or concept of gravity; an extraordinary ship that would carry such creatures to Earth before emerging from hibernation, freezing half the island in a spectacular midpoint twist. The contorted faces and bodies of the victims; the evergreen flora turned white and frail; the surreal interval between landscapes and climates: these are not the sights of a game without vision.

Crytek left Coburg for Frankfurt during Crysis, plugging itself into a world from which it draws top-tier talent, and for which it hopes to make ever-more popular games. What does that do to a tight-knit family from the backend of nowhere run by three actual brothers? Crysis 2, a multiplatform rollercoaster set in the urban jungle of New York, should give us our answers.