In the autumn of 1996 a Derby developer whose biggest hit had been a helicopter game, Thunderhawk, put a young English archaeologist into a 3D world and let the player run, jump, climb, swim and shoot her way through it. Computer and Video Games reviewed the result that December and reached for an old comparison: “The easiest way to describe Tomb Raider is as Prince of Persia in 3D.” Sega Saturn Magazine had said much the same a month earlier: “Kind of like Resident Evil meets Prince of Persia in full 3D.” The game was Tomb Raider, the developer was Core Design, and its heroine, Lara Croft, soon became better known than either.
Fast facts
- Developer: Core Design, Derby.
- Publisher: Eidos Interactive, which had bought Core’s parent company in 1996.
- Lara Croft’s creator: Toby Gard, the game’s lead artist. Lead programmer: Paul Douglas.
- Formats: Sega Saturn first, then PlayStation and PC, from late October to November 1996.
- Price: £49.99 in Britain for the PlayStation and Saturn versions.
- Sales: “over seven million copies”, according to Eidos’s chairman at the time, Ian Livingstone, speaking in 2010.
A tomb game without a man in it
The idea came before the heroine. Jeremy Smith, who had founded Core with his brother Adrian, told Arcade in 1998 that the company started with “an Egyptian-style pyramid raiding game”, with “pyramids with entire cities beneath them, connected by underground tunnels”. “The original character was actually male,” he said. “He had a whip — more a rope, really — which he was going to use to climb and lasso things, and we just thought, that’s so close to Indiana Jones, it’s scary.” A couple of weeks later Gard came up with Lara. Smith admitted his first reaction had been doubtful: “do we really want to do a female character in a game?” Her surname was changed too. She began as Lara “Cruz” and became the “significantly more English” Croft.
Gard later told Edge where the idea came from: “a mixture of ‘Indiana Jones’ films, Tank Girl, and images of strong women like Neneh Cherry.” He wanted her “very British”, “measured, cool, self-reliant”. He also built and animated her by hand. “None of Lara’s actions were motion captured,” he told Arcade; he “animated her to move as realistically as I could.” Germany’s PC Player reported in November 1996 that Gard had made all the game’s 3D objects himself, and that the level editor was written by Gavin Rummery.
Building it
Edge sat down with Core’s team in January 1997, just after the game was finished. Adrian Smith, by then operations director, said it began as “a character in a cinematic environment”, and that the hard part was “designing a system around the character that would let them move within a camera system.” Asked why it was not a first-person game like Quake, Douglas said: “No, it was character-driven. The artist, Toby, had the idea that he wanted it to be more filmic.”
The same interview shows how a small team made one game for three machines. Only “about 4%” of the code was specific to any one format, Douglas said; the rest was “generic C”. About 40% of the programming time went on tools, Douglas said, so that the artists could get on with their work “without bothering us all the time”. Some features were late additions. “We never envisioned having Lara swimming,” Adrian Smith said, “but we made the decision to put that in, which pushed the development time by a few months but added a whole lot more to the game.”
Playing it
The player guides Lara through 15 levels. The story, told in cut-scenes between levels, has her hired by Jacqueline Natla, head of “a shadowy technology corporation”, to find the pieces of an Atlantean artefact called the Scion, hidden, as CVG put it, in the “lost cities of three ancient civilisations — the Peruvian Incas, the Roman Empire and the ancient Egyptians”. The first levels are in Peru; later ones include the Palace of Midas, entered through an underwater tunnel. Lara’s mansion serves as a training level, with rooms for climbing, vaulting and swimming. There are wolves, lions, apes and panthers in the early levels, later dinosaurs, mummies and mutants, and rival treasure hunters with guns. Ammunition is scarce: CVG noted that shotgun cartridges turn up “only two at a time”.
Lara moves with the “rotate/walk forward” controls later called tank controls. Steven Poole, writing in Edge in 2001, defended them for this game: “success depends critically on very precise positioning and jumping.” CVG’s reviewer warned that Lara’s jumps and climbs were “fixed moves which you need to learn the timing of very carefully”, though “everything soon becomes ‘second nature’”. Sega Saturn Magazine was less forgiving. Its reviewer found that the control method “requires pixel-perfect coordination”, and that combined with “the lag between a button press and the appropriate action” it could be “extremely (no, EXTREMELY) frustrating”. Its buyers’ guide still rated the game 92%. Lara’s pistols aim themselves, as long as she is facing the enemy.
Toby Gard explained the difficulty to Edge in 1998: “Controlling a character in 3D is always going to be harder. Your interface with the computer is 2D — your main movement is governed almost exclusively by Up, Down, Left and Right.”
Saturn first
Most players met Tomb Raider on the PlayStation, but the Saturn version came out first. CVG reported that the Saturn version had been rushed “for a four week release advantage”, and judged the PlayStation version “slightly superior”, with better lighting and sound and a higher frame rate. At the ECTS trade show in September 1996, Edge found the game “seemingly ubiquitous”: it “looked as impressive as any other Saturn title” on Sega’s stand, and could also be “found lurking in Sony’s vast kingdom”. The Saturn version reached number two in the HMV Saturn chart printed by Sega Saturn Magazine that December.
Lara Croft beyond the game
Edge noted in January 1997 that PlayStation games “have never had a leading female game character of any substance before”, and that Eidos was “doing all it can to fuel the Lara fire”, using real models in advertising and discussing a television cartoon. In the years that followed she appeared on the cover of the style magazine The Face, advertised Lucozade and walked across the giant screen of U2’s PopMart tour, as Retro Gamer recalled in 2005. The marketing leaned on her looks. Eidos’s David Burton told Arcade that the company was “very, very careful about how much clothing we let her take off in the artwork”, and that some of the press pushed it the other way.
Gard and Douglas did not stay to see it. They left Core in February 1997 and set up their own studio, Confounding Factor, in Bristol. Gard told Edge in 1998 that Core “really got into the idea of the Tomb Raider franchise and we wanted to go off and do something different”, with “maybe a little bit of creative differences”. “There was a lot of money to be left behind,” he said.
Sales
The figures vary with the date and the speaker. Retro Gamer wrote in 2005 that the first game had been the PlayStation’s best seller “at the time, with around four million copies sold”. Ian Livingstone, looking back in Edge in 2010, said Eidos “went on to sell over seven million copies of that classic first title”. By 1998 Edge reported that Sony had “paid handsomely to keep her away from Nintendo consoles until the end of this century”, and the next two games were PlayStation and PC only.
The series
Core made a new Tomb Raider every year: Tomb Raider II for Christmas 1997, with vehicles and outdoor levels, then III, The Last Revelation and Chronicles. The PC version of the first game was later reissued with four extra levels, Unfinished Business. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, for the PlayStation 2 and PC in 2003, was Core’s last; Edge gave it four out of ten. Within weeks, Edge later reported, Jeremy Smith (by then Jeremy Heath-Smith) had been asked to leave and Eidos had given the series to the Californian studio Crystal Dynamics. Core, by then with “30 million sales to its name” from the series, was sold to Rebellion in 2006.
Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider: Legend (2006) set out, in Edge’s words, to “restore and modernise its fallen icon”, and a reboot, simply called Tomb Raider, followed in 2013 under Square Enix, which had bought Eidos in 2009. The films began in 2001 with Angelina Jolie as Lara. In 2022 Square Enix sold Crystal Dynamics and the Tomb Raider series to the Swedish group Embracer (see Eidos).
Sources
- Sega Saturn Magazine issue 13, November 1996, p. 70: Tomb Raider review (“Resident Evil meets Prince of Persia in full 3D”; the control method and lag; release November 1996). Issue 14, December 1996: buyers’ guide (“By: Core, Price: £49.99, Rating: 92%”) and HMV Saturn chart.
- Computer and Video Games issue 181, December 1996: Tomb Raider review (“Prince of Persia in 3D”; 15 levels; the Scion, Natla and the settings; the training level; ammunition; the Saturn and PlayStation versions compared; £49.99).
- Edge issue 39, December 1996: ECTS report (Tomb Raider “seemingly ubiquitous” on the Sega and Sony stands).
- PC Player (Germany), November 1996: preview and interview with Toby Gard (hand-built models and animation; Gavin Rummery’s level editor).
- Edge issue 41, January 1997: “The Cult of Lara Croft”, and a round-table interview with Core Design staff including Adrian Smith and Paul Douglas (the camera system, “more filmic”, 4% machine-specific code, 40% of programming time on tools, swimming).
- Edge issue 61, August 1998, from p. 50: interview with Toby Gard and Paul Douglas of Confounding Factor (leaving Core in February 1997; Sony’s exclusivity deal).
- Edge issue 63, October 1998: feature on 3D platform games (Gard on controlling a character in 3D).
- Edge issue 65, December 1998: “A Question of Character” (Gard on where Lara came from).
- Arcade issue 1, December 1998: Lara Croft feature (Jeremy Smith on the male original, “Cruz” and Gard; Gard on hand animation; David Burton on marketing; Tomb Raider II; Unfinished Business; Gard and Douglas leaving in February 1997).
- Steven Poole, “Trigger Happy”, Edge issue 95, March 2001: the “rotate/walk forward” controls (see Tank Controls).
- Edge issue 126, August 2003: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness review, four out of ten.
- Retro Gamer issue 20, 2005: “The Complete Lowdown: Tomb Raider” (The Face, Lucozade, PopMart, the films; “around four million copies” on the PlayStation).
- Edge issue 162, May 2006: Tomb Raider: Legend review. Edge issue 165, August 2006: “Whatever happened to the Lara lads?” (Heath-Smith’s departure, the move to Crystal Dynamics, Rebellion, “30 million sales”).
- Edge issue 213, April 2010: Ian Livingstone on Eidos (“over seven million copies of that classic first title”).
- Edge issue 252, April 2013: Tomb Raider (2013) review.
- Wikipedia, “Tomb Raider (1996 video game)” (web, secondary): release dates by region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_Raider_(1996_video_game)