Lara Croft was born in 1994 on a rough, ten page design doc. Her name back then was Laura Cruz, and despite her quickly blossoming into a gaming icon with global appeal, her beginnings were humble and small. While 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tomb Raider ✤would go on to rake in over 85 million sal𒈔es, few people were there when this legend began. One of those present at the start of it all was Gavin Rummery, part of the four-strong development team brought in by original creators Toby Gard and Paul Douglas just as things were starting up. As you might imagine, Rummery had no idea where all this would lead.
“It was the first commercial game I worked on, so it all felt new and exciting to me!” Rummery says. “None of us could have predicted we’d stilౠl be talking about it 25 years later though. It definitely did feel magical watching it come together; we were learning as we went along, and graꦆdually this unique experience - for the time - started to emerge from the fog.”
Tomb Raider feels like any other video game to go back and play it now, but that’s because so many of its conventions were borrowed, copied, and used to shape future titles. This inspiration came from, according to Rummery, the idea of taking the 2D gameplay of Prince of Persia and adapting ಞit to the 3D space. The classic teeth traps and spike pits also came directly from Prince of Persia, while Lara’s personality began as more ‘Tank Girl’ and adopted a more ‘James Bond’ feel once writer Vicky Arnold came aboard.
These are all known facts - Tomb Raider has been discussed at length for the pas🌟t 25 years, and any fan worth their salt knows of the Prince of Persia inspiration, while any given cutscene from practically any game will point to the Bond influence. But what of some lesser known details? I asked Rummery if there could possibly be any Tomb Raider development details the world did not yet know, and I didn’t expect the answer to involve ဣexploding animals.
“We could blow up enemies into their separate parts,” Rummery tells me, adding that this system was designed for the Atlantean creatures Lara battles. “At one point I experimented with blowing parts off the animals. It wasn’t nice so it never made it into the game.” Almost two decades before Lara was hunting in the forests of Yamatai for survival, she might have been blowing up furry little creatures for fun.𓆏 It’s probably for the best that she didn’t.
For all of Tomb Raider’s popularity as a game - the series’ sales on PS1 are second only to Final Fantasy - Lara herself quickly became established as a phenomenon outside of the medium, starring in commercials for Visa and Lucozade, all while appearing on the front pages of non-gaming publications like Time Magazine. This element of the Tomb Raider phenomenon was something no one on the team saw coming. “The most surprising thing was that she very quickly became more famous than the game, and people had heard of her and knew who she was who weren’t gamers at all,” Rummery says. “None of us expected that, and even Toby had no plans 🎉to reuse her in anotheꦍr game – she was just t꧋he lead character in this one game we were maꦕking.”
Of course, Lara’s popularity had some downsides. She became a figure of legend, and thus urban legends were created about her. Instead of the rock star who had his ribs removed, Lara Croft had a different myth - 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the Nude Raider code. This myth suggested there was a secret cheat code you could push to make Lara undress. Like most u꧙rban myths, it had a fatal flaw - it wasn’t𝕴 true.
Still, in the ‘90s, it spread like wildfire, and it did not go down well with the T𝄹omb Raider team. “It annoyed us because a) it didn’t exist and b) it meant we&rsquoౠ;d meet people at parties who thought we were perverts making pornographic video games for children,” Rummery says. “Our response was to add the ‘shower scene’ at the end of Tomb Raider 2 where Lara shoots the player for daring to try and spy on her undressing.”
Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider 2 were the main titles Rummery was involved in, but he did briefly return for a minor role on Angel of Darkness. The most divisive title in Tomb Raider’s history, it swapped out the globe-trotting archeological themes of the f꧟irst five games and took Lara to the streets of Paris. The game was supposed to be a more mature tale, with a more modern, gothic Lara in denim and shades instead of khakis. It was an experiment that didn’t really work, and marked the end of the Original era and Core’s involvement in the series - although some fans are reluctant to include it in that era at all, lest they tarnish it. Where, in Rummery’s estimation, did it all go wrong?
“Most of the deviation came about because it was essentially a new team bringing their own ideas to the franchise and trying to take things to the next level,” he says. “The ambition exc𒅌eeded the development time available unfortunately. The game would have benefited from more development time. Nowadays games are regularly pushed back and usually released ‘when they are ready’ because publishers have learnt that rushing a halꦛf-finished game to market is rarely a financially cunning move.”
As for any regrets? Rummery’s is brutal, but accurate. “My personal regret with AoD was that i𝄹t killed💫 Core Design.”
Despite all this, some Tomb Raider fans look back on Angel of Darkness with fondness, 🎃typically citing its bravery to do something different. It’s this bravery, Rummery feels, that Core ♍could have put to good use had it been trusted with another swing. “It was a mess as far as I was concerned, but clearly some fans love it anyway,” he says. “It was just a shame that Core was never given the chance to redeem itself, because I think the company had learnt its lessons and could have done something pretty amazing with the sequel given the chance.”