Remember the meme "but can it run Crysis?" referring to the reputation the game has obtained for it's steep system requirements at the time of its release. In other words Crysis represented a leap in tech and possibly the original "future-proofed" game; the humorous implication of the meme being that it would take modern computers years to catch up in order to run Crysis as intended. What other games were bleeding edge in terms of graphics & technology (not necessarily gameplay) to the point of being "too advanced" for the hardware of it's era?

I keep thinking the tech shown off in Shenmue must've blown people away back in 1999. Not only were the graphics truly "next-gen" for it's time but it had little flourishes like being able to go into people's homes, open drawers, pick up objects and inspect them in a 3-dimensional space; being able to talk to anyone you see in the street or in shops and they'd all be fully voiced; NPC's had daily schedules they would follow (which I know wasn't new but no game came close to the graphical fidelity Shenmue presented at the time), etc. I wonder, what did PC gamers who were used to cutting edge tech think of Shenmue at the time? Surely it was one of the few times a console game upstaged what was happening on PC? I would consider Shemue a proto-Crysis in the sense it was pushing tech that was take a couple years for other games to catch up to.

As far as a modern day Crysis-like game? I would nominate Cyberpunk 2077 since it's often used as a benchmark for modern PC's; if you can max out Cyberpunk on psycho settings, you know you have a monster PC! It also had that quality of being "too advanced" for it's era as even a 3090 back in 2020 would have trouble running it maxed out at a smooth 60 fps.

What old games would you consider the "Crysis" of their day?