2) Crysis 3 – 2013
Estimated cost: $66,000,000
When it first entered the fray – with its tech requirements so high that only people with an IBM loyalty card could run it – Crysis was instantly divisive. Sure, it looked like nothing you’d ever even dared to dream about before, but was it actually that good of a game? Were graphics everything? Were they not remotely important? Either way, the benchmark had been set, and “can it run Crysis?” entered the lexicon for everyone measuring the power of their computer.
Then, shock of all horrors, it came to the console market with its sequels. Could the Xbox 360 run Crysis 3? Well, as it turned out, not really. It was buggy and more than rough around the edges, and the PC master race were furious that their game had to be dumbed down for the casual console crew.
Still, millionaire PC owners could max out the graphical settings if they so desired (which they absolutely did) and only then did that $66 million dollars worth of creation start to reveal itself. The overrun, I Am Legend-style New York looked sensational, and it probably would have fared better if it had simply remained nothing more than a kind of virtual art installation. The idiotic aliens ruined it, as is so often the case in life.