Core Design | Code Like It's 198x

Core Design began as a walk-out that its old employer’s own sales director arranged. In 1988 Gremlin Graphics’ programmers in Derby were told their studio would move to Sheffield, 45 miles away. Gremlin’s sales director, Jeremy Smith, suggested they stay put and form an independent company, with him doing the business. Eight years later the same Derby company made Tomb Raider, and its heroine, Lara Croft, soon became better known than the studio that made her. Core made a new Tomb Raider every year for five years, then lost the series after the sixth, and ended as a studio of Rebellion.

Fast facts

Founded: 1988 in Derby, by Jeremy Smith (later Jeremy Heath-Smith) and staff of Gremlin Graphics’ Derby studio.
Early games: Rick Dangerous (Firebird, 1989), then its own label from 1990: Corporation, Chuck Rock, Heimdall, Thunderhawk.
Owners: CentreGold, the parent of U.S. Gold, from 1994; Eidos from 1996, when Eidos bought CentreGold.
Best known for: Tomb Raider (1996) and its sequels to The Angel of Darkness (2003).
End: sold to Rebellion in 2006 and renamed Rebellion Derby; closed in March 2010.

Out of Gremlin

Retro Gamer’s history of the company, written in 2006, tells how it started. Gremlin Graphics, based in Sheffield, had a studio in Derby because four of its developers, programmers Andy Green and Chris Shrigley, designer Rob Toone and artist Terry Lloyd, had persuaded Gremlin’s boss Ian Stewart to let them work nearer home. More joined, among them Dave Pridmore and the artist and programmer Simon Phipps. When U.S. Gold, which then owned part of Gremlin, ran into money trouble, a move to Sheffield was proposed. Smith, Gremlin’s sales director since 1986, offered the Derby team a way out: they would form their own company and work for him instead of for Gremlin. Greg Holmes came from Sheffield to manage the team.

U.S. Gold’s founder Geoff Brown, who owned a stake in Gremlin, remembered it less warmly. Smith, he said, “went off to form his own company, taking some of the Gremlin staff with him – something Ian was not too pleased about at the time.”

Smith never wrote a line of code himself. His job was to choose the games and find the contracts. “Jeremy pretty much always got it right when deciding which games got the go ahead,” the Core artist Richard Morton told Retro Gamer. The first contracts were conversions for other publishers, including Sega’s Action Fighter for the Commodore 64. The first big original game was Rick Dangerous, a platform game created by Simon Phipps and Terry Lloyd and published by Firebird in 1989. Retro Gamer later said it “aped the Indiana Jones films”, and Core’s staff saw it as a forerunner of Tomb Raider: “Rick Dangerous was really the spiritual father of Lara Croft,” Morton said. The One in 1990 called him one of the few characters to have “risen to international stardom and cult status” after a single game.

Publishing its own games

From 1990 Core published its own games, starting with Corporation, a first-person game that The One reported as “released to much acclaim”. Most of what followed was for the Amiga and Atari ST. Chuck Rock, a caveman platform game, was out in 1991. Thunderhawk, a helicopter game, was in the charts by the end of that year, and ST Format rated it 91%.

As the Amiga market faltered, Smith went to Japan and came back with a Sega licence. “We were probably the smallest publisher to get a licence for the Mega Drive,” he later said. Core made games for the Mega Drive, Master System and Game Gear, and put a great deal into Sega’s CD add-on. The Mega-CD version of Thunderhawk was one of the machine’s best sellers, about 150,000 copies by Smith’s account. But the Mega-CD and then the 32X did not take off, and Core’s money ran short. Brown said Core “had grown too quickly and was in severe financial cash-flow difficulties” by the time Smith approached him.

CentreGold and Eidos

On 26 October 1994 CentreGold, the listed group that owned U.S. Gold and the distributor CentreSoft, announced that it would buy Core Design for £5.34 million. Its chairman told shareholders that Core employed 34 programmers, artists and designers, published under its own name and a budget label, Corkers, and was already developing games for the coming 32-bit consoles. Kevin Norburn, the co-founder Smith had bought out in January 1993, was no longer a shareholder, so the money went to Smith. Amiga Computing quoted him on the deal: it meant Core would be “associated with probably the most respected name in the European computer games market”.

Brown had a particular reason to buy. “I’d seen development on Tomb Raider,” he recalled, and he concentrated CentreGold’s money on it. In March 1996 Eidos agreed to buy CentreGold, and Core with it, for about £17.2 million. Smith stayed on as managing director and his brother Adrian ran the studio. In the account Arcade printed in 1998, Jeremy Smith had founded Core “along with his brother Adrian”.

Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider came out for the Saturn, PlayStation and PC at the end of 1996. It began, Smith told Arcade, as “an Egyptian-style pyramid raiding game” with a male hero, until the lead artist, Toby Gard, came up with Lara Croft. The Tomb Raider entry tells the story of the game. For Core, it changed everything. “Of course the success of the first Tomb Raider meant we were going to do a sequel,” Morton said. “As a company, the emphasis shifted to the Tomb Raider series.” Gard and the lead programmer, Paul Douglas, left in February 1997 to start their own studio.

Core released a new Tomb Raider every year from 1996 to 2000: Tomb Raider II (1997), Tomb Raider III (1998), The Last Revelation (1999) and Chronicles (2000). Smith, by now Jeremy Heath-Smith, was executive producer of the Tomb Raider films. Retro Gamer judged that “Core’s reputation as an innovator began to diminish with each successive Tomb Raider sequel”. Morton saw it from inside: “We started to experience a bit of a backlash, as with any phenomenon… the press begin to dislike it.” Heath-Smith tried to keep at least one other game in development, and Core also made Project Eden (2001), a team-based action game, and Herdy Gerdy (2002), a PlayStation 2 game about herding animals.

The Angel of Darkness

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, for the PlayStation 2 and PC in 2003, was the series’ sixth game and Core’s first on the new console. Core wrote a new engine for it from scratch, with what its staff later called “the biggest team we’d ever had”: thirty-five or so people, where the first game had been made by six. Edge gave it four out of ten. Two weeks after its release Heath-Smith was asked to leave, and a week after that the team heard that Tomb Raider was going to Crystal Dynamics in California.

In 2006 Core’s studio manager, Gavin Rummery, and its executive producer gave Edge their side. In their account the game had to be out before Eidos’s financial year-end, so “a machete was taken to the game and the design, and it was hacked to pieces”; afterwards, “Eidos needed a scapegoat and we were it.” That is Core’s account, given three years later; the article does not give Eidos’s.

Rebellion Derby

Jeremy and Adrian Heath-Smith set up a new company, Circle Studio, near Core’s Derby offices and staffed it with former Core employees. Core carried on with a smaller team and made Smart Bomb for the PSP. Another game, Free Running, had not come out when Core was sold; it was released in 2007 under the Rebellion Derby name. Eidos was itself taken over by SCi in 2005, and SCi put Core up for sale. In May 2006 Rebellion bought Core’s staff and assets, about 60 people in Retro Gamer’s count and 65 in Edge’s. The team stayed in Derby and the studio became Rebellion Derby. Rebellion’s chief executive, Jason Kingsley, called Core “one of the industry’s major success stories”.

Rebellion Derby’s last game was Rogue Warrior. In March 2010, after a review that had begun in January, Rebellion closed the Derby studio.

Sources

The One issue 22, July 1990: Rick Dangerous 2 (Rick “created in 1988 by Core Designers Simon Phipps and Terry Lloyd”). The One issue 37, October 1991: survey of British software houses (“Core Design (Derby)… set up as publisher in 1990. First independent title, Corporation”).
The One issue 39, December 1991: chart (Thunderhawk, Core Design). ST Format issue 32, March 1992: Thunderhawk, 91%.
The One issue 32, May 1991: Chuck Rock.
Amiga Power issue 6, October 1991: Simon Phipps on his career, from freelance graphics for Gremlin to Core.
Amiga Computing issue 82, January 1995, games news, p. 98, “Going for Gold!”: CentreGold buys Core; founding in 1988, early work for MicroProse and Activision, own publishing from 1990; Smith’s comment.
Arcade issue 1, December 1998: Jeremy Smith, who founded Core “along with his brother Adrian”; the origins of Tomb Raider.
Edge issue 172, February 2007: Free Running review (PlayStation 2 and PSP, Reef Entertainment, developed by Rebellion Derby).
Edge issue 126, August 2003: The Angel of Darkness review, four out of ten.
David Crookes, “Company Profile: Core Design”, Retro Gamer issue 28, 2006, pp. 70–75: Gremlin’s Derby studio and its staff, Heath-Smith’s career and the founding, Kev Norburn and Greg Holmes, Richard Morton’s recollections, Rick Dangerous and Action Fighter, Corporation as a first-person game, the Sega licence and the Mega-CD, Geoff Brown on buying Core, the Tomb Raider years, Herdy Gerdy, the move of the series to Crystal Dynamics, the sale to Rebellion and Jason Kingsley’s comment.
“Whatever happened to the Lara lads?”, Edge issue 165, August 2006: Heath-Smith asked to leave two weeks after The Angel of Darkness; Circle Studio; Free Running and Smart Bomb; SCi and Rebellion; 65 employees; Rummery and the executive producer on the game’s development and Eidos; Project Eden.
Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of US Gold (Fusion Retro Books, 2015), pp. 106–108 (modern book): CentreGold’s letter to shareholders of 26 October 1994 (£5.34 million, 34 staff, Corkers, 32-bit development); Kevin Norburn as co-founder and his sale of his shares on 15 January 1993; Core’s games before CentreGold; Geoff Brown’s recollections.
“Rebellion Confirms HQ Layoffs, Derby Studio Closure”, Game Developer, 18 March 2010 (web, secondary): the closure of the Derby studio, formerly Core Design; Rogue Warrior. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/rebellion-confirms-hq-layoffs-derby-studio-closure
Chris Faylor, “Rebellion Confirms Layoffs, Derby Studio Closure”, Shacknews, 18 March 2010 (web, secondary): the closure after a review begun in January. https://www.shacknews.com/article/62864/rebellion-confirms-layoffs-derby-studio