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Tomb Raider
Version 1Tomb Raider is an action-adventure game developed by Core Design and published by Eidos Interactive in late 1996 for Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and MS-DOS. It was built in Derby, England, by a team of just six people on a budget of £440,000, and its lead artist, a quiet 22-year-old named Toby Gard, created in Lara Croft the most famous character in British videogame history. I came to it years after the fact, through emulation, and what struck me is how clearly it belongs to a lineage: this is the old British 8-bit action-adventure — traps, tombs, careful jumps — reborn in 3D.
The origin story is worth telling. In late 1994, Core's boss, Jeremy Heath-Smith, returned from Japan, where he had seen the PlayStation and Saturn, and asked his studio for ideas worthy of the new hardware. Gard raised his hand: "I've got this idea of pyramids." His first pitch starred a whip-and-fedora adventurer so close to Indiana Jones that Heath-Smith refused it on the spot — "we'll get sued from here to kingdom come" — which was fair, given that Core's own Rick Dangerous had already gotten away with exactly that clone in 2D. Sent back to the drawing board, Gard returned with a woman: Lara Cruz, soon renamed Croft, deliberately aristocratic and as British as he could make her, in open defiance of the era's marketing rule that heroes must be American men. Heath-Smith's reaction — "we don't do girls in videogames!" — did not survive Gard's stubbornness, and the character arrived in 1996 perfectly tuned to the Cool Britannia moment.
The origin story is worth telling. In late 1994, Core's boss, Jeremy Heath-Smith, returned from Japan, where he had seen the PlayStation and Saturn, and asked his studio for ideas worthy of the new hardware. Gard raised his hand: "I've got this idea of pyramids." His first pitch starred a whip-and-fedora adventurer so close to Indiana Jones that Heath-Smith refused it on the spot — "we'll get sued from here to kingdom come" — which was fair, given that Core's own Rick Dangerous had already gotten away with exactly that clone in 2D. Sent back to the drawing board, Gard returned with a woman: Lara Cruz, soon renamed Croft, deliberately aristocratic and as British as he could make her, in open defiance of the era's marketing rule that heroes must be American men. Heath-Smith's reaction — "we don't do girls in videogames!" — did not survive Gard's stubbornness, and the character arrived in 1996 perfectly tuned to the Cool Britannia moment.
Highlights