For a few years in the mid nineties, British popular culture had a label. ‘Cool Britannia’, initially the name of an ice cream flavour, was adopted to boast of a vibrant national resurgence in music, fashion, art, and perhaps even politics. It may have been a lazy catch-all signifier for the media, but it was also an advert to the world: Britain was the home of Britpop, the Young British Artists, the movies of Danny Boyle, the fashions of Alexander McQueen and the polished presentation of Tony Blair. With Cool Britannia, Britain proclaimed – perhaps for the first time since the sixties – that its culture was worthy of the world’s attention.
Unlike the sixties, though, ‘New Britain’ wasn’t primarily the invention of ambitious young men, and Cool Britannia was accompanied by another slogan: ‘Girl Power’. This was more purposeful, an appeal to female empowerment, but its message was often drowned out by the marketing for the personalities who spread it: probably, it was best known as the catchphrase of the decade’s most successful pop act, the Spice Girls.
Cool Britannia and Girl Power: for a while these were modish topics that journalists eagerly worked into whatever story passed over their desks; with bizarrely little self-reflection, the veneration of British art and culture and strong young women was treated as a novelty. And even if these phrases were media constructs, they worked – they touched almost every medium.
But only almost. Throughout its brief history, gaming had rarely given more than a passing nod to fashion and music – WipEout’s breakthrough had been noteworthy because it was an exception. If your only guide to popular culture had been a computer games library, there’s very little you would have learnt of rave, or grunge, or Generation X. British gaming had spent fifteen years barely aware of wider cultural touchstones, and there seemed every chance that it would miss these latest fads too.
Then in 1996, a modest developer from Derby launched a technically stunning game. Within months, it became a world-conquering franchise that delivered, almost accidentally, a character who would be embraced as one of Cool Britannia’s greatest icons.
In 1994, Jeremy Heath-Smith was shown one of the most important secrets in gaming. At the time, he was the founder and managing director of Core Design, a British developer that made populist games for Sega and Nintendo consoles. It had some well-liked titles in its library, particularly a jocular prehistoric platformer called Chuck Rock, and the company had grown disconcertingly quickly: within a few years of being founded, Core was turning over tens of millions of pounds. Thanks to this success, Heath-Smith had become an early confidant of a joint project between Nintendo and Sony to introduce CD-ROM capability to the Nintendo console range. It was an ill-fated venture. ‘We developed a version of Chuck Rock for this machine which never saw the light of day,’ says Heath-Smith, ‘and nor did the machine, as Nintendo and Sony fell out.’
The secret that Heath-Smith had been flown out to Japan to see flowed directly from the failure of that project. Sony had started work on its own console, and Heath-Smith was one of the first people in the world to be shown the result, a prototype of the PlayStation. Sony’s new console used a CD-ROM, certainly, but the demonstration showed that its innovations stretched far further than that. The PlayStation’s hardware promised an extraordinary leap forward for 3D graphics.
Over the short life of computer games, there had been plenty of small breakthroughs and baby steps in 3D technology. They often created excitement, a sense of a widening market or new gameplay ideas, but by their nature, 3D games were more technical and abstract than artistic or character led. They leant themselves to subjects with clean, solid shapes, like vehicles, buildings and simplistic landscapes. Even if the player’s character was human, the vista would be presented from a first-person viewpoint, as if the gamer were on wheels, or was a floating pair of eyes. Where more complicated images, like people, were needed, they were often flat pictures superimposed onto the 3D world like floating cardboard cut-outs. The sense of immersion that 3D gaming could bring had always been hampered by its cold architecture and unreal tricks.
But the PlayStation broke out of this rut. It featured specialist hardware that could ‘map’ pictures onto each of the individual 3D pieces, stretching and warping them so that they matched the perspective of the scene. And it could paint huge numbers of these, fast enough to create screenfuls of detail at frame rates that matched a television. Some of these techniques had already been seen on the top-end PCs of the time, but despite its low price, the PlayStation bettered them, delivering graphics that were faster, richer and more detailed.
One famous demonstration was of an animated dinosaur head: for the first time a console showed an organic, expressive structure in three dimensions. Heath-Smith could see that a Rubicon had been crossed – at last, relatable characters could be part of immersive 3D worlds. The first game to make use of them was sure to have an enormous impact.
On his return to Derby, Heath-Smith arranged an off-site retreat for the entire company, with the single purpose of working out how to make use of this hardware: ‘I said to all the guys, “Right, this is the future.”’ The staff were still working on consoles oriented around the flat graphics that favoured platform games, but Heath-Smith, an energetic former salesman, encouraged them to move into a new creative zone. What sort of game could make the best use of this incredible technology?
‘We brainstormed a number of ideas,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘“How can we go forward? Let’s get some game concepts together utilising this new power.” And that’s when Toby Gard got up and said, “I’ve got this idea of pyramids.”’
Toby Gard was a young designer, barely out of his teens, but already one of Core’s rising stars. ‘Toby joined when he was sixteen,’ recalls Heath-Smith. ‘He literally begged for a job, and we took him on, paying him absolute peanuts. He had worked for me for a couple of years, and we obviously knew he had an immense talent.’
Gard’s vision was for a treasure-hunting adventure set in the ruins of ancient Egypt. The hero would be a buccaneering explorer, dicing with the traps and foes he found while searching for relics. It was a compelling design – Heath-Smith had always been a fan of the setting, and it was also a good match for what little the team knew of Sony’s technology. In a game about exploration the pace could be slow, so a drop in frame rate wouldn’t be too noticeable. But more importantly, the game could make use of a three-dimensional avatar. The hero would always be visible, always part of the scene, always making a connection with the player.
Core Design’s management were enthused. Gard was working on a spin-off of Core’s Chuck Rock franchise, a kart-racing game called BC Racers, but Heath-Smith moved him as quickly as possible to head a team of six dedicated to the new project, and in 1995, work commenced. They called the game Tomb Raider.
Gard was the creator and the art designer. The technology was devised by Paul Howard Douglas, who invented a grid system that could map huge, complicated game levels, with buildings spread across multiple storeys, or broken into undulating ruins. The grid allowed the areas to be created as obstacle courses for the player – so that a precise distance was required for the run-up to a jump, for instance – while still appearing natural and somewhat organic. And the team found a way to keep the main character in view using a virtual ‘camera’ that would present the world as if floating a dozen feet behind the avatar. In enclosed areas the camera would swing closer, and in really confined spaces, zoom in for the best of a bad set of options. It was imperfect, but a breakthrough. At the time that Howard Douglas implemented his system, there had been no third-person 3D games at all.
So Tomb Raider’s main character would be, in every sense, the focus of the game. There has been so much attention paid to the genesis of the Tomb Raider hero, so many stories of how she came about, that some versions have inevitably contradicted others. But they all agree that, whatever she became, Lara Croft was never created as a draw for the prurient attention of adolescent boys. In fact, the first idea was that the hero should be a man.
‘When Toby first showed it to me, it was a male character,’ recalls Heath-Smith. ‘It was all a bit scary. He did look like Indiana Jones, and I said, “You must be insane, we’ll get sued from here to kingdom come!”’
Heath-Smith urged Gard to come up with a different idea, but in fact a female character may have already been in the young designer’s mind. In an interview with the Independent in 2004, Gard recalls his decision. ‘The rules at the time were: if you’re going to make a game, make sure the main character is male and make sure he’s American, otherwise it won’t sell in America. Those were the rules coming down from the marketing men. So I thought, “Ah, I know how to fix this. I’ll make the bad guys all American and the lead character female and as British as I can make her.”’
Those marketing ‘rules’ did have precedent. Although there had been female avatars, they were very rare, and usually one of many characters a player could choose from, such as a combatant in a fighting game. The most famous female player character up until that time had been Samus Aran from the 1986 game Metroid. But for most of the game she was an anonymous figure in a space suit and it was considered a plot twist when she disrobed to reveal her gender by means of a pixelated bikini and long blonde hair.
In contrast, Gard’s character sketch was of an assured adventurer called Laura Cruz. She was capable and athletic, kitted out with a backpack, shorts and hiking boots and, bare legs aside, not obviously sexual. It met with incredulity at Core. ‘“Are you insane, we don’t do girls in video games!”’ Heath-Smith recalls telling Gard. ‘But Toby was absolutely adamant that having a female character in video games would be great. She’d be bendy; she’d do things that blokes couldn’t do.’
Gard’s choice was instinctive, but it had influences. A common story is that his sister was an inspiration for the character, but it seems likely that he also drew on some of the fashions that were obsessing the wider media. ‘There was a lot of girl power stuff happening, Tank Girl had just come out, and a couple of other movies,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘There was this whole movement of females really can be cool, particularly from Japan.’ Japanese manga-style comics and cartoon characters were becoming visible in Britain for the first time, and Gard aped their distinctive style. ‘The original Lara had a huge head, a very manga-esque character,’ Heath-Smith recalls.
Over a few iterations, the heroine became more conventionally proportioned: an athlete, rather than a cartoon. There’s a legend that at one point during the design process her bosom jumped in size when Gard’s mouse slipped, and his team insisted that it should stay this way, but it’s not a story he’s repeated since some early interviews.
She was shapely by the time the public saw her, but it wasn’t Gard’s intention to create a sex object. As he told the Independent: ‘She wasn’t a tits-out-for-the-lads type of character in any way. Quite the opposite, in fact. I thought that what was interesting about her was she was this unattainable, austere, dangerous sort of person.’
Throughout the nineties, the pressures of huge budgets and volatility of income had driven the British gaming industry to consolidate, and by the time Tomb Raider entered development there were only two publishers listed on the London Stock Exchange. One was the new owner of Core Design, CentreGold Plc, formed from the US Gold publisher and its distributor. Heath-Smith had sold Core when he ‘realised his limitations’, and soon after, the new company had been floated. The other listed company was Eidos plc, which specialising in video compression was run by Charles Cornwall, chaired by the author and tabletop games publisher Ian Livingstone, and had Sophie Wilson on its board. By the beginning of 1996, both companies needed to raise money quickly. CentreGold, in particular, was in trouble, because under the console business model Core had been obliged to run up a large stock of cartridges, and had since found plenty of this back-catalogue unsellable.
Remarkably, a merger provided the solution to both companies’ problems. ‘Charles Cornwall was the ringmaster of the whole thing,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘Charles was very clever at raising funds, and the way to raise funds if you haven’t got any is to go and buy defunct companies to raise a load more money.’ So Eidos went shopping, and CentreGold was one of four companies it acquired. But as it turned out, it was the one that mattered.
Ian Livingstone was sent to undertake due diligence on the companies, and vividly recalls the day that he first saw Tomb Raider. ‘I remember it was snowing. I almost didn’t go over to Derby, I had to see another studio near Birmingham. But it was snowing so badly I had to drive over the Pennines and go to Derby anyway. And I guess you could say it was love at first sight when I stepped through the door. Seeing Lara on screen.’
Livingstone became an advocate immediately, protecting the game, which was already only a few months from completion. ‘They left us to everything,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘We were very arrogant – we weren’t prepared to compromise or change things.’
The Core team did in fact make one significant compromise. Eidos had an office in America, and although its marketing department were enthusiastic, Heath-Smith found that they were wrong-footed by the name Laura Cruz. ‘The office in the US said, “We love Laah-ra”, and we said, “No, it’s Laura”. And they said, “No, no, it can’t be Laura, Americans don’t say Laura.” And they didn’t like Cruz.’ So Toby Gard leafed through a phone book and found some alternatives. He changed Laura to Lara while Cruz became Croft. Core stuck to its guns on one issue, though – Lara remained British.
Heath-Smith’s team spent months finessing their star. She was given a back story: she was an aristocrat who chose adventure over a life of soft privilege, and with that came a clipped, ‘received pronunciation’ accent. After rounds of auditions by audio cassette and conference call, Core hired Shelley Blond to be the voice of Lara Croft. She was 26, and had never played a computer game in her life.
‘They said we’d like you to be a female Sean Connery, very monosyllabic, without the Scottish accent,’ remembers Blond. ‘They didn’t want too much emotion.’ For five hours she recorded Lara’s voice, most of it spent perfecting the cries and guttural noises she would make as players steered her into harm. The direction notes were certainly unusual: ‘You’ve fallen off a cliff! You’re backing into a wall!’ These were the root of the grunts and gasps for which Lara Croft would be remembered.
But it was a straight performance that seemed at odds with the pictures that Blond had been shown. ‘Nowhere did they say “make it for the boys”,’ she recalls. ‘I thought she had a nice pair of boobs – I could see that she was gorgeous. But I didn’t feel that the voice they were allowing me to do matched the body. I would have loved to have gone with sexier.’
Between her design, animation and voice, Lara Croft had developed a personality. The prominent characters at the time engendered limited player empathy. Sonic, Mario and Earthworm Jim were weird, caricatured and cartoonish, and although humanoid, they didn’t seem very human. And ‘grown-up’ games were dominated by brutish anti-heroes, often played from a first-person perspective and only seen as a hand carrying a gun. Beside them, Lara was more immediately compelling, and more tangible as a person.
The strength of Lara’s characterisation was becoming obvious, and her place in the game was coalescing, too. Howard Douglas’s technology had met its brief masterfully. Tomb Raider was a vast game of architectural ruins, designed for and around Lara Croft. Where 3D gaming had once meant rigid objects, a first-person perspective and an imagined ‘self’, here the player was charged with guiding a graceful gymnast. When Lara climbed, she hauled herself up with an elegant animation; when she jumped, she reached out for a ledge. She engaged intimately with the buildings she explored, and the interaction was seamless: Lara and her world had been built to work together. ‘The fact is,’ says Heath-Smith, ‘that Lara is far more flexible, she’s far more dexterous, she could do many things. The original character was a Duke Nukem gun-toting toughie. Well, suddenly we’ve got a female character, which you could actually relate to for the first time ever.’
By autumn 1996, Core had completed Tomb Raider. With all of the elements meshed together, the game transcended its individual parts: it was novel and tense, a delight to play and, in places, breathtaking. And its qualities were intimately connected to the character of its heroine.
As in Gard’s original brief, Lara Croft’s chief talent was breaking and entering tombs and temples that had lain undiscovered for aeons, and making off with their contents. In keeping with the language of video games, these archaeological sites were populated not only with dangerous animals, but with ammunition, medical supplies and elaborate traps. There was a plot, too. It wasn’t of any great depth, an ancient intrigue involving aliens, but given that players at the time were too often used to mundane repetitions of a game’s mechanics, this was unanticipated drama nonetheless.
While playing, gamers had the unnerving feeling that they were trapped in a giant puzzle, competing against an unseen force embodied by the walls themselves. And so they were, in that the Core team had spent months adjusting the levels to draw in and challenge the player. It only took a slight shift in perception to believe that this was the design of ancient architects, and often the graphics and artwork were enough to immerse the player in the atmosphere.
Importantly, the environments were all but uninhabited. Wild animals may have prowled, and the occasional villain taunted you, but in as much as it mattered you were on your own. Or rather, Lara was. And this was as much a part of Lara’s appeal as her image – after weeks or even months in her company, gamers developed an affinity with the character who personified their addiction to virtual acrobatics and exploration. The game didn’t need to be marketed with a reference to Girl Power, or use its star to draw the attention of teenage boys. The playing experience alone showed that Lara Croft had all the qualities necessary to become a grass-roots gaming star.
And inarguably, the character of Lara Croft was essential to Tomb Raider’s success. Identifying with the hero of a game – caring when they achieve or die – is important, especially in third-person games. Players tend to project themselves onto avatars in a game, and while conventionally muscular and aggressive characters can be difficult to relate to, the athletic and capable Lara was an easy vessel for empathy. This identification was aided by the effortlessness with which she could be controlled; jumping and tumbling about quickly became second nature. The charge of adolescent male appeal is hard to refute, though: her physique, especially as it was realised on the box art, was embarrassingly unsubtle.
Core had been developing the game in parallel on both the PlayStation and the rival Sega console, the Saturn. However, Sega had struck a deal with Core to allow the Saturn an earlier launch date, and this gave Core and Eidos their first inkling of the potential scale of the game’s success. ‘We launched on Sega Saturn first. It was just pre-Christmas, they had a month of exclusivity,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘As soon as it was on the Saturn, everything went crazy. We had all these PlayStation owners who wanted Tomb Raider to be launched on their console.’
The launch of Tomb Raider for the PlayStation was scaled up – now it was to be a landmark event. The press were junketed out to Egypt, even while Heath-Smith and his team were frantically finishing the PlayStation version in Derby. ‘I didn’t go – I was stuck in the office,’ he says. ‘We worked up to the wire.’ But it was worth it. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and sales were set to follow. ‘We knew we’d got a good game,’ says Heath-Smith, ‘but never realised that we had a game that was going to be just as phenomenal as it was. Nobody could have.’
On the cusp of one of the biggest successes in the history of British games, Toby Gard quit.
‘It was a disaster,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘I just couldn’t believe it. I remember saying, “Listen, Toby, this game’s going to be huge. You’re on a commission for this, you’re on a bonus scheme, you’re going to make a fortune, don’t leave. Just sit here for the next two years. Don’t do anything – you’ll make more money than you’ll ever see in your life.”’
But Gard left regardless. His motive, given at the time and since, is that he disliked the prevailing tone of the marketing for Tomb Raider, and of Lara Croft. To him she was a sophisticated, unattainable creation, never intended as a sex symbol. But although Eidos’s marketing had seized on her as the icon of the game from an early stage, the timing of Gard’s decision was curiously pre-emptive. He made his announcement barely two months after Tomb Raider had launched, when the shift in Croft’s image was still barely discernible – certainly the merchandising had yet to start in earnest. Whatever drove Gard’s decision, it included an emotional core that some of his colleagues still cannot fathom. ‘Only Toby really knows, and I think even he, when he relates the story, probably gets confused,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘I could almost appreciate his motive, but I’m not arty, I’m commercial, I couldn’t understand his rationale for giving up millions of pounds for some artistic bloody stand. I just thought it was insanity. I begged him to stay, I absolutely pleaded with him to stay.’
Moreover, there was no immediate financial sense to Gard’s move. Although Tomb Raider had been his conception, there was not a single part of the game that belonged to him. Eidos owned the name, the technology and everything within the 3D world, including Lara herself. There was no ambiguity here – the intellectual property had always been a corporate asset. Gard walked away from everything he had made.
As Jeremy Heath-Smith had predicted, Tomb Raider conquered the PlayStation. It sold six million units, led the charts in the UK and the US for months, and it seems likely that it contributed to the console’s rocketing sales. Shelley Blond was recalled to record lines for cinema adverts, but only realised that the game was an international hit when for once the anonymity of a voice actor was broken. ‘I went to LA to stay with my auntie, and I happened to go into an HMV-type store, and there was an enormous cut-out of Lara Croft. Enormous, larger than life size,’ she says. Shop staff noticed her waiting by the display, and quickly found out who she was. Soon there was a crowd around her, and she was repeating lines from the game for them. ‘I was bright red and shaking. They all wanted pictures, and that was when I thought, “Shit, this is huge!”’
Tomb Raider the game was a triumph, but the Lara Croft character was the heart of the franchise. Throughout 1997, awareness of the game, and particularly Lara, crossed over into the mainstream media. Tomb Raider had been released in the midst of a surge of excitement over the Spice Girls, who topped the Christmas single and album charts at the same time as Lara topped the games charts. It was a coincidence, but it felt like there was a connection, with Lara as another manifestation of Girl Power. She appeared on the cover of the style magazine The Face, joining a long list of icons that already included David Bowie, Johnny Depp and Kate Moss, and this endorsement of Lara’s credibility was soon followed by articles in Time, Newsweek and Rolling Stone. There was no Lara to interview, of course: what these magazines were discussing was Lara the character; the face of the PlayStation and grown-up gaming. Her image, specifically its significance to gender politics, could be endlessly chewed over, but the real story was the one the media had created themselves: that a game character was famous enough to be front-page news.
Tomb Raider stories spilled and spun out everywhere. In an interview with The Times, Liverpool goalkeeper David James claimed that his form was suffering because he’d stayed up all night playing the game. Dance act The Prodigy made the excuse that their album would be late for the same reason. And Tomb Raider stayed newsworthy as the British newspapers entered the summer ‘silly season’. There was especially keen interest in rumours of a cheat code that allowed players to ‘disrobe’ Lara. Of course, no such feature existed, although a third-party patch for the PC edition inevitably appeared to fulfil the fantasy. Eidos was not amused, and eventually sent cease and desist notices to websites hosting the ‘Nude Raider’ code.
Britain’s own opportunistic branding was also peaking in 1997. Union Jack guitars and mini-dresses, a new, young Prime Minister at the peak of his popularity, and the Spice Girls, who set out to break the American charts – the window-dressing of Cool Britannia was now recognised in the United States and across Europe.
Lara was an ideal fit for Cool Britannia. Ultra-modern, confidently British and yet very international, with the built-in advantage of tireless availability, Lara Croft became one of the iconic images that transmitted the brand abroad. And like Ginger, Sporty, Scary, Baby and Posh, she conquered America.
Lara wasn’t a disinterested ambassador, though – she was for sale. For a while she seemed ubiquitous, advertising Lucozade and Fiat cars in the UK, and plenty of other products overseas. U2 commissioned Lara Croft artwork for their ‘Popmart’ tour, and so giant pictures of Lara were shown to packed stadium audiences worldwide, most of who would have recognised her. Generation X author Douglas Coupland wrote a zeitgeisty book of reflections on Lara Croft. ‘She is a composition of devastating force, set against a backdrop of intelligence and intuition,’ ran one musing. Wherever she was employed, the advertising campaigns stepped up their presence; whenever she appeared it was newsworthy.
‘You’re just riding this unbelievable wave of euphoria,’ says Jeremy Heath-Smith of the tide of merchandising. ‘This was like the golden goose; you don’t think it’s ever going to stop laying. Everything we touched turned to gold. Popmart, cult movies, on the front of The Face magazine. It was a just a phenomenon.’
It’s a word that comes up time and again. ‘We realised we had a phenomenon on our hands,’ says Ian Livingstone. As the presence of the game grew, he throttled back the merchandising. ‘We wanted to make sure we controlled the IP, so that nobody ran off with it into a space where we didn’t want it to go. But we also limited the amount of merchandise that we actually put out. We said no to an awful lot of produce, so we didn’t dilute the equity in the franchise.’ Some licences were rejected simply to protect the brand. ‘I think there was some choice underwear that was proposed,’ Livingstone remembers.
Core had developed Lara, but Eidos was in charge of her. Jeremy Heath-Smith joined the Eidos board, but remained Core’s managing director, responsible for Tomb Raider’s sequel. The brand could hardly have been more leveraged and a great deal was depending upon a successful second outing. ‘At that stage it was being driven by Eidos. We had to hit deadlines, we had to get the game out,’ says Heath-Smith. And Sony was keen to tie their hands yet tighter. It had seen the effect of Tomb Raider on the PlayStation’s sales, and sought complete exclusivity over Sega for the follow-up. As part of the deal, it would pay for the marketing.
The launch date was set for the anniversary of the first game, a painfully tight deadline that would have to be met without the lead designer. ‘We spun a game around in ten months,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘There wasn’t a lot you could do. You could tidy up the technology, you could change the animations, you could tweak the camera and the control. But fundamentally, there’s not a lot you could do.’
Core managed to get the follow-up game, now about hunting dragons in Venice and capsized ships, ready for Christmas. It was bigger and more complicated, and had a smattering of new features, in particular vehicles for Lara Croft to ride. But it was still all rather familiar and it looked as if the buzz of the first title might have dampened. In Britain, much attention was focussed on the review in Official PlayStation Magazine, which with a circulation of half a million copies, was seen as extremely influential. There was talk in the industry that a middling score might burst the franchise bubble, but Tomb Raider II was given an unambiguous 10/10, sales surpassed those of its predecessor, and the brand crystallised around the new game.
But for some players, there was the hint of something amiss in Lara Croft’s world. The disturbingly enigmatic animals were supplemented by mute gun-toting goons, in whom similar behavioural routines seemed brainless and cheap. And as the sequels progressed, Lara’s image was moving away from determined adventuring and towards coy looks and provocative poses. As a fashion model she was eternally compliant, and Eidos released increasingly racy images of her: in a cocktail dress, a bikini, and eventually, but for a well-placed bed sheet, naked. Lara was becoming less pop culture, and more pin up.
As if to illustrate this change, Tomb Raider III was endorsed by a range of products with Marks & Spencer, right down to gentleman’s boxer shorts. This acceptance of Lara echoed a broader trend – the PlayStation’s success had led to wider acceptance of computer games, which were pushing ever further into the mainstream. And the Tomb Raider series was visually appealing even to non-gamers. Traditional games could drive casual observers insensible with boredom, but Tomb Raider’s exotic locations and Lara Croft’s acrobatics were a pleasure to watch. Parents might even play it for themselves.
The PlayStation was attracting a new wave of customers to computer games, and all the signs indicated that 1998 would be the industry’s most important year yet. Again Eidos wanted a Tomb Raider game for Christmas release, and Core aimed to avoid repetition by splitting the third game into sections with very different styles. After a classic opening in India, there was urban fighting in London and high-tech infiltration in Area 51. Each scenario was good, but the franchise seemed increasingly distant from the lone adventurer in ancient ruins who had been the soul of the first game.
But that didn’t matter. The game had sold well and Eidos was getting a reputation for delivering decent earnings in the notoriously fickle entertainment software industry, albeit from a single franchise. For all its reach, though, the success of the brand depended on a fan base whose devotion was being tested. Long-term gamers found Tomb Raider III over-familiar, and with the series becoming more difficult and less focussed, it failed to turn casual new consumers into enthusiasts. By the spring, there were plenty of cheap copies to be found in second-hand shops.
And Lara Croft’s star was fading, too. She was still on the cover of games magazines, but trend-chasing editors and rock stars had moved on. Models who had earned some fame portraying Lara at press launches were now spending it by taking jobs as TV presenters and lad-mag celebrities. Lara Croft had never been better known, but her ‘imperial phase’ was passing.
But Core barely slowed down to look. Its Tomb Raider team was now eighty strong, and the company was even larger. ‘It was like a locomotive, almost running out of control,’ says Heath-Smith. And with another year came another game, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. This time, Core reverted to the original concept of a lone adventurer in an Egyptian ruin in a game that was clever, tightly designed and very brown. Perhaps the developers were burnt out, or felt they had written a masterpiece, but at the end of the game they left Lara for dead. The assumption was that they had bought themselves some breathing space to regenerate the franchise.
Sales for Tomb Raider fell away, and the brand appeared to have passed its zenith just as the PlayStation platform was reaching maturity. It was a shame, because The Last Revelation was a pleasure to play, but the fourth game was still using the same ideas, and almost the same technology, as the first. In the rapidly evolving games market, Tomb Raider looked tired.
It was around this time that Eidos’s share price peaked. It declined throughout 2000, and it made little sense to the decision-makers to leave the most valuable asset on its balance sheet unleveraged for a year. ‘The desire from Eidos to get the product out, out and out was immense,’ says Heath-Smith.
Once again, a title was released for Christmas. Tomb Raider: Chronicles was a piecemeal creation, an episodic portmanteau told in flashback, with an unsatisfying half resolution to the previous title’s cliffhanger. It sold poorly for a Tomb Raider game and, although the franchise was obviously tired, Chronicles was probably more ignored than harmful to the brand. Was it a hasty, commercial release? ‘Absolutely,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘And that’s what happens, that the commercial aspect takes over the creative, because creativity takes time. And when you’re launching something commercially, you don’t have time. That is the harsh reality.’ It was the last game of the series for the original PlayStation, and a relief. ‘For five years we sold our soul.’
Tomb Raider’s mainstream credentials were confirmed when it was made into a blockbuster summer movie. Discussions started in 1997, as part of the franchise’s early gold rush, but as is common in film development, it wasn’t until 2001 that audiences saw Lara Croft: Tomb Raider on screen. Ian Livingstone was keen to keep the story faithful to the heart of the game, so Heath-Smith became an executive producer. It was an eye-opening experience for the British developer, playing at producing, choosing actors, but he didn’t get diverted. ‘I always treated them as 120 million dollar adverts, to be honest,’ he says. ‘I never wanted to make a game of the movie in case the movie was bad. Fundamentally, we still had a very strong franchise.’
As it was, the film came out at the start of Tomb Raider’s longest hiatus. After six years, Sony was finally preparing to launch a successor to the ageing PlayStation hardware. The PlayStation 2 was powerful but complicated to develop for, and mastering it was crippling the schedules of developers around the world. Core was no longer under an exclusive deal with Sony, but as the makers of a tent-pole franchise, the company was given early sight of Sony’s new technology.
This early knowledge proved to be a curse as much as a blessing. Core assigned a team of a hundred developers to the next Tomb Raider game, and they spent twelve months devising the technology that would be the basis of their release for the unseen system. But late on, Sony changed the architecture for the PlayStation 2, and much of Core’s work was rendered worthless. It was the start of a long run of trouble for Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.
Jeremy Heath-Smith ascribes a lot of the problems to pressure from within Eidos. ‘We wanted to essentially do Tomb Raider 1 on PS2 – but they wouldn’t have it,’ he says. ‘We listened to the marketing people, who wanted it to change. They wanted conversation, they wanted interaction.’ A huge amount of time was devoted to developing technology for features that were sidelines to the main game. It deprived Core of one of its easier options: buying some working PlayStation 2 technology ‘off the shelf’ from a third party, and concentrating on the gameplay the team understood. ‘Developing our own technology caused delay after delay after delay,’ says Heath-Smith. He often felt it would be better to abandon their first attempt at the game’s mechanics and simply start again.
But Eidos had little scope to accommodate delays – the public limited company was in turmoil. At its peak, during the fervour of the dot-com bubble of the late nineties, Eidos had been valued at more than half a billion pounds. But the fall from favour of technology stocks had coincided with a lull in the earnings from Eidos’s most reliable asset, and the business was in desperate need of funds. ‘Eidos had built its company on Tomb Raider,’ says Heath-Smith, ‘and 2,000 people around the world were relying on Lara feeding them.’
To shore up Eidos’s share price and its prospects, Heath-Smith and the rest of the board invested in a rights issue. Even though he could see the shaky state the game was in, Heath-Smith personally put up a small fortune. ‘You become blind when you’re so close to something,’ he says. ‘I put half a million pounds of my own money into the rights issue to show confidence. I always thought as a team we would pull it off.’
In 2003, after three years of public postponements and an unimaginable amount of managerial heartache, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was released around the world. Lara Croft was still recognised, but it had been years since she had been the face of the industry. The game itself had been plagued with problems until the very last moment and, despite a final development rush, its release missed a key financial reporting deadline. Millions of copies had been pressed by Sony when Core found a ‘crash bug’, an error in the coding that could freeze the game. Heath-Smith tried a final desperate salvage job. ‘We wanted Sony to launch it with that bug,’ he says, ‘and they wouldn’t. Funnily enough.’
Even now, for all its agonising gestation, Heath-Smith is proud of The Angel of Darkness. ‘That game truly was phenomenal, the depth was incredible. And, sadly, it never reached its potential.’ The game’s play-shattering flaw was that the control system, the heart and joy of the original franchise, was imprecise and horribly unpredictable. This fatally compromised whatever strengths Angel of Darkness possessed: the athletic elegance with which the player could once tackle devious architectural trials was lost in frustration, flailing and unfair failure. It was a shortcoming that attacked the very heart of the franchise; the player had lost their grip on their character. The essential bond of empathy with Lara Croft had been shattered.
‘As soon as the game was boxed, we knew that it was off the mark,’ admits Heath-Smith. Reaching nearly two million sales, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness didn’t perform dreadfully. But Eidos had been projecting three to five million units, and for them the shortfall was disastrous. And it’s hard to believe that those gamers who did buy the game made much headway with it. For Heath-Smith, that’s the real tragedy. ‘Graphically, design wise, I think it was the best work that we’ve done. There are some mind-blowing bits in Tomb Raider on PlayStation 2, just mind-blowing. But we always knew that the camera and control system weren’t right. We just knew.’
Lara Croft slipped away from her British creators. Eidos, financially trampled by the sales performance of Angel of Darkness, took the Tomb Raider franchise away from Core Design and passed it to Crystal Dynamics, a Californian developer that it owned. Heath-Smith also left. ‘I got canned, which was fine. It was my turn to put my head above the trenches.’
Both Lara and her publisher are still British. They both come from Wimbledon, but they are both becoming more international. Lara’s adventures since leaving Derby have been well received – the new games didn’t include any of the diversionary features that Eidos’s marketing department had demanded from Angel of Darkness, and Crystal Dynamics perfected an updated control system. Lara’s now settled in to her Californian home, although the player wouldn’t know it unless they checked the box. And Eidos itself is now the British arm of a multinational publisher. A year after Angel of Darkness was released, Eidos put itself up for sale. There was plenty of interest in the owners of Lara Croft: one bid came from a consortium which included U2’s lead singer, Bono. A sale was completed in 2005, and after a couple of name changes and resales, Eidos became SquareEnix Europe, a subsidiary of a Japanese giant.
Under its new developer, Tomb Raider became a success again, but relative to the growth in gaming since 1996, a more modest one. And Lara doesn’t feel like a faded Cool Britannia ambassador. Like the best of the brands who once huddled under that dubious umbrella, she has comfortably outlived the fad.
Despite the varied fortunes of the franchise, Lara’s impact on gaming remains undeniable, especially in Britain. Only a year before Tomb Raider, the medium had felt trivial and confined, and was often opaque to outsiders. With its relatable, ‘human’ heroine, sumptuous 3D environment, and easily graspable gameplay, Tomb Raider opened a window into the world of gaming. And as an icon, Lara Croft’s impromptu marketing blitz saw her smash through it entirely. Throughout 1997, countless media voices who had previously ignored gaming were now debating it, and all due to an accidental female figurehead. ‘It helped take gaming into everyday conversation,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘It was the start, really, of video games being talked about from a social perspective. Tomb Raider touched so many aspects of media that it just became a phenomenon. If anything touches that many pieces of media, it’s going to touch people’s lives.’
But the nineties Lara Croft would not have convinced a sceptic that computer games were no longer the preserve of immature boys. That was still somewhat true: by the end of the decade gamers had aged, but a majority were still men. In time the gender balance would become more even, and it is possible that Tomb Raider, with its well defined heroine, hastened the change. Ian Livingstone is adamant on the issue. ‘Tomb Raider is a game in which nearly fifty per cent of the audience are female. Because she’s strong, intelligent, athletic, independent, adventurous – in fact, she doesn’t even need men. Guys want to play with Lara Croft, and women want to be Lara Croft.’ Livingstone is a passionate advocate for his franchise; he gives the impression that he has had to make this point many times before.
Whatever its sexual politics, Tomb Raider is a strong brand, and even after a bumpy ride and a much slower release schedule, it remains one of the most recognised names in gaming. It certainly proved to be more resilient than many rival intellectual properties. It survived when Gard left Core, and, in turn, flourished after it too moved on.
In 2007, Crystal Dynamics produced a tenth anniversary edition of the first Tomb Raider, entirely rebuilt with its state-of-the-art technology. It included a novel feature: once the game was complete, it could be replayed with a ‘director’s commentary’ in which the developers talked through the process of making each area of the game. One of the voices belonged to Toby Gard. He chatted amiably about his original levels and these redesigns, sounding happy to be reunited with Lara.
In fact, Gard had been a consultant to Crystal Dynamics since it rebooted the franchise in California. It wasn’t an empty gesture: he’s had key roles on every one of the company’s Tomb Raider titles, writing stories, working on Lara’s animation, and directing cut scenes. And it was Gard who redesigned her look for the new games. Perhaps thanks to his presence, the character has matured gracefully, in tone rather than age. It’s certainly hard to believe that Gard would have stayed if he were unhappy with their choices. Lara Croft might have belonged to Eidos but, once again, Toby Gard had become her guardian.