My memory of Far Cry was much earlier and less kind - there was a few people around the net at the time working for CryTek on several titles (I worked on Silent Space https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/02/10/crytek-to-bring-sile...)

The brothers went to E3 with a demo they were showing us all, but only some of us has the tech to fully run it (I had a GeForce256 I got for free from NVidia because of work I had done with the recently opened up Quake source code) - then things went crazy, they tried to get a bunch of us to move to Germany and put us up in hostels on very restrictive contracts (basically they'd move us then we'd be completely liable for our own costs)

Now, the X-Isle demo really did help push NVidia cards, but the company now had to ramp up quickly.

I heard that 'mafia' money was involved in making this happen (and they came calling for their interest a few years back which is why the company hasn't done so well) - it was odd that Cevat's first purchase was a Ferrari...

Anyway every other project got canned after this - a few of us went on to try set up our own studio, but that didn't pan our after a year.