In March 2020, game creators at Ubisoft’s Toronto studio had just finished wrapping up the “primo moments” of Far Cry 6’s scenes with Breaking Bad’s villain Giancarlo Esposito and Coco’s young dreamer Anthony Gonzalez when Covid-19 became very real, very quickly. The borders between the US and Canada were about to shut down, and the team was anxious to bag the footage they needed before getting the American actors safely and quickly on a plane back home.
The first-person shooter game hinged on performances of the A-list actors, Esposito and Gonzalez, who play Anton and Diego Castillo, a president-dictator and his son from Yara, “a tropical paradise frozen in time.” Esposito and Gonzalez made it out of Canada just before the first lockdown, but Ubisoft was still facing a dilemma. The game’s release was set for less than a year away, and the whole opening scene—arguably the most important sequence of the entire game—hadn’t yet been shot. The game was already five years in the making and there was a lot at stake to figure out.
Only a few Ubisoft employees were allowed back in the office the following Monday to collect the footage they had just captured, and it was jarring to see the studio, including a 12,000-square-foot soundstage, empty. “It looked like the scene of a crime or a zombie apocalypse,” says Navid Khavari, Far Cry 6’s narrative director. Everyone had left their coffees on their desks in a rush to get out. Khavari and his team knew they had to get the edit out to animators ASAP, but the big question was how they were going to wrap up the rest of the game during a pandemic.
