How Lara Croft lived and died in Derby.

August 3, 2023 7:52 AM

20 years on, the Tomb Raider story told by the people who were there [Eurogamer] “There are conflicting reports about the origins of Tomb Raider, but everyone agrees that it was Toby Gard who created the Lara Croft character and came up with the idea for a third-person adventure game in which the player explored tombs. Legend has it that Frances Gard, Toby's younger sister, was the inspiration for Lara Croft. The devil is in the detail - some remember seeing prototypes that included an Indiana Jones-style male character, and that Core's bosses were terrified it would spark a lawsuit. Others insist Gard had envisioned a female character from the very beginning, although at first she was called Laura Cruz. Whatever the truth, Gard was the driving force behind Tomb Raider, even if others played a crucial role in bringing his vision to life. Jeremy Heath-Smith is clear in his mind how Tomb Raider came to be. "Tomb Raider came out of my trip to the States," he says, "where Ken Kutaragi showed me the PlayStation. "I got back on a plane, flew home, and called an off-site meeting of the company.” [The history of Tomb Raider][YouTube]

• Meet the women who brought Lara Croft to life [Washington Post][Launcher][Non-Paywalled Gift Link]

“When Shelley Blond first stepped into a recording studio in 1996, she had no idea her performance would become a foundational element in the legacy of one of gaming’s most iconic female characters. Lara Croft is one of the most glamorous video game leads of all time. But Blond, the first voice actor to play Croft, remembers the role as anything but. “I remember going into a London studio for five hours and recording all the lines and sound effects like grunts, dying and fighting noises,” Blond told The Post via email. “These days, it’s all a much lengthier process with mo-cap [motion-capture] and all the physicalities that go with that. For me it was just go in, read the lines as directed and leave. I didn’t think about it again until I saw the game advertised and her image on the front of the Face magazine.””

posted by Fizz (8 comments total)

Legend has it that Frances Gard, Toby's younger sister, was the inspiration for Lara Croft.

Given how she's drawn, I, uh, did not want to know that.
posted by praemunire at 8:21 AM on August 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

in an alternate timeline I like to think Laura Cruz is fantastic
posted by elkevelvet at 8:33 AM on August 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

It is sad, but predictable, to read about how the experience of making the games hurt or otherwise burned out most of the team involved.

As a kid growing up playing games on the Atari ST, Core Design were definitely a big deal for me long before Tomb Raider. They had a particular niche in glossy platformers with great artwork and playability: games like Switchblade, Rick Dangerous 2 and Chuck Rock.

Then in 1994 I got a PC and got seduced by Wolfenstein and Doom. I remember getting Tomb Raider not long after it came out and loving the sense of a real world it gave you, rather than the flat pseudo-3D of id’s early games. It is a cliche, but the moment with the T-Rex looming into view in the lost valley was properly scary and is still one of my standout gaming memories.
posted by greycap at 8:46 AM on August 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

in an alternate timeline I like to think Laura Cruz is fantastic

Don't want to derail the entire thread, but the most recent modern "Survivor Trilogy" as its referred to, is filled with missed opportunities to make Lara Croft an engaging and interesting character who confronts her own legacy of colony and exploitation. For anyone who is interested in this subject, give Dia Lacina's review from a few years ago on Vice Gaming a read: 'Shadow of the Tomb Raider' Tries, but Fails, to Tackle Its Own Colonialism.
posted by Fizz at 8:54 AM on August 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

The release of the original Tomb Raider coincided perfectly with the widespread adoption of 3D cards. You could play Tomb Raider without one, but seeing the game on a 3DFX card was something that made you want to buy both. I remember marveling at the beautifully rendered caustics in the water (for comparison, without a 3D card, games couldn't afford to even make water transparent, it was usually just a brown or green texture).
posted by justkevin at 10:42 AM on August 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Tomb Raider at the Digital Antiquarian.
posted by Wolfdog at 11:22 AM on August 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

the experience of making the games hurt or otherwise burned out most of the team involved.
In hindsight, I'm not that surprised to hear it. The game's huge, with memorable architecture in each level, and not just spatially; there's a wheen of special hand-coded features to find also (the multiple handstand and swan dive animations, the t-rex, the hand of Midas, the mirror-mummy, and that's just off the top of my head from playing it nigh on thirty years ago).
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 11:45 AM on August 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

without a 3D card, games couldn't afford to even make water transparent, it was usually just a brown or green texture

Quake was contemporaneous with Tomb Raider, and I remember that the "transparent water" patch for Quake was pretty elaborate -- the game's pre-computed visibility data assumed water surfaces were opaque, so it all had to be recalculated. And since simply shipping a giant map patch wasn't very feasible in 1996, you had to run the visibility calculator yourself...

(early 3d engine trivia: this same visibility calculation is why Quake engine games tended to be fairly enclosed, indoor affairs -- compiling a large, wide-open map took forever, and the resulting map file was huge!)
posted by neckro23 at 6:48 PM on August 3, 2023 [4 favorites]