The first "Far Cry" game was developed by the German studio Crytek, and premiered their CryEngine software. One of Crytek's goals with the CryEngine was to be able to render realistic outdoor spaces with large viewing distances, which was a unique feature compared with other game engines at the time of its release. The CryEngine was originally demonstrated as a tech demo at Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 1999 under the name "X-Isle: Dinosaur Island" specifically aimed at NVIDIA graphics processors. The demo allowed the user to explore a virtual tropical island populated with dinosaurs, showcasing the size of the virtual world that the CryEngine could handle. Following E3 1999, they secured a deal with NVIDIA to distribute "X-Isle" alongside all NVIDIA cards as benchmarking software, as at the time the CryEngine was the most demanding game engine on the market. Ubisoft made a deal with Crytek to build out "X-Isle" into a full AAA title, and obtained publishing rights for this title.