The creation of an iconic character is always a bit of a surprise. You can do all the focus testing you want, but the public is fickle and the next big thing can come from just about anywhere. Twenty-five years ago, such an icon made her debut on game store shelves as the protagonist in Tomb Raider, originally released for the first Sony PlayStation on November 15, 1996.
The number of video game characters that can stay relevant over a quarter of a century is small enough to count on one hand. Lara Croft was something special from the instant she was created, one of the first digital personalities to come to life in a bigger way outside of games. From humble beginnings in the English town of Derby to a blockbuster movie franchise, this is how Lara Croft came to life.
Gremlins At Work
The United Kingdom in the 1980s was a hotbed of game development. Platforms such as the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 were perfect for small studios to knock ideas out quickly, and incredible talent flourished all over the land. One of the leading British studios was Gremlin Graphics, which had hits like the Monty Mole series. When a group of Gremlin employees struck off on their own in 1988 and set up shop in Derby, they took the name Core Design.
Core started out on familiar turf, porting arcade games to home computers and developing action titles like Rick Dangerous in-house. But as consoles came to dominate the market in the early 1990s, they pivoted to the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, as well as less storied consoles like the 3DO. But a trip to the United States by Core chief Jeremy Heath-Smith lit the spark that would launch their greatest success.
While in America, Heath-Smith met with Sony’s Ken Kutaragi and got a demo of the upcoming PlayStation console. The cutting-edge polygon power of the machine was obviously the next big thing, and he immediately assembled Core’s staff to get them thinking about the best way to harness it. Artist Toby Gard was one of the first to pipe up, suggesting a third-person adventure title about exploring hidden tunnels and chambers deep below Egyptian pyramids.
Who’s That Lady?
A game needs a protagonist, and the inspiration for what would become Tomb Raider is still shrouded in a little mystery – as it should be. Some say that Gard’s younger sister Frances was the inspiration, with other employees claiming the title was originally going to feature a male Indiana Jones type. But it wasn’t long before Gard himself worked out what Lara Croft would be: a no-nonsense adventurer who would become an unlikely sex symbol.
“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,” Gard said in a 2004 interview. Although Lara’s physical features were… exaggerated, her sex appeal was only one of many factors that the designer wanted to emphasize. His cohorts recall Gard spending tremendous amounts of time on Lara’s animations, making sure her leaps, rolls, and movements were fluid and believable.
The six-person Tomb Raider team quickly became a tightly-knit unit, with Heath-Smith giving them a remarkable amount of freedom. The first game was built without a design document, with the group debating and discussing features and concepts until they came to a consensus. Using a custom-built design, they were able to build environments with an unusual amount of verticality to highlight Lara’s traversal techniques. And, with massive crunch, the game was on track for a November 1996 release.
Lara made her debut at E3 of that year, and publisher Eidos took note of the crowd reactions. It wasn’t long before they were hiring models to dress like the character at trade shows and positioning her as a sex symbol for the digital age. High-res renders of Croft in sultry poses were put on billboards and buses. It was a full-court press backed up by the fact that the game had turned out spectacular. Its fluid controls and immersive environments were like nothing else on the market at the time.
Nobody would remember Lara Croft if Tomb Raider had been a dud – there were plenty of oversexualized female heroes in games before and after. But the team caught lightning in a bottle, releasing one of the best 3D action-adventures ever. The gaming press raved about the huge levels and dynamic storytelling, and it topped sales charts, moving 7.5 million copies when all was said and done. Eidos immediately pushed for a sequel, but Lara’s creator wasn’t interested. Citing creative differences, Toby Gard left the studio in 1997, forfeiting his royalty checks for the game.
The Silver Screen
The runaway success of the first Tomb Raider had Eidos recognizing Lara as their golden goose. The publisher demanded a new sequel each year – a staggering task even for a large studio, let alone one the size of Core. Meanwhile, Lara Croft was becoming a trans-media icon, appearing on the cover of music mag The Face and in advertisements for Spanish automaker SEAT.
It wasn’t long before Hollywood noticed the popularity of video games and wanted to cash in. The year 1998 saw the first announcement of a Tomb Raider movie, set to be produced by Lloyd Levin and Lawrence Gordon with a script by the guy who wrote Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. The flick went through multiple drafts as the studio tried to capture the vibe of the games without going too mystical or hewing too close to the Indiana Jones model. The end result was a perfectly competent but uninspired action flick that pit the character against the Illuminati in a quest to retrieve parts of a mysterious artifact.
Angelina Jolie was cast in the lead. Fans protested for several reasons – the actress being American, not British, for one, as well as her incongruity to the polygonal Croft’s unorthodox measurements. But Jolie delivered a solid lead performance when Lara Croft: Tomb Raider eventually hit theaters in 2001, The movie opened at number one with a $48.2 million gross. Critics liked it less, but it spawned a 2003 sequel that landed at the peak of Tomb Raider-mania. And if there’s one thing we know about peaks, it’s that it’s easy to fall off of them.
Reinventing Lara
After leaving Core, Toby Gard refrained from talking about his most famous creation to the press. But those who knew him said that he was frustrated that Eidos had taken his steely, no-nonsense femme fatale and turned her into a glorified digital stripper posing for lad mags. Meanwhile, the breakneck pace of sequel development had burned out much of Core’s staff. The final blow came with 2003’s Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness, a bloated, messy attempt to bring Croft to next-generation consoles.
At this point, Eidos had too much invested in Lara Croft to let her die. So they made a huge pivot, snatching the franchise from the studio that had created it and giving it to Crystal Dynamics, a Bay Area-based shop that Eidos had acquired in 1998. One of its first moves in creating what would become Tomb Raider: Legend would be to bring Gard on board. The new remit for Lara’s adventures was to start from the ground up and re-imagine how she interacted with the world. A new control and animation system, coupled with a more realistic female body, resulted in a Croft that was a better fit for a maturing audience.
Legend was a success and Crystal Dynamics would helm the series moving forward. Lara Croft would go through another reinvention in 2013 with the tenth game in the franchise, titled simply Tomb Raider, once more pushing away from exaggeration to create a more grounded heroine. In a quarter-century, Lara Croft has served as a mirror for how gamers and developers viewed women, from the exaggerated low-poly boobs of her debut to the more nuanced, realistic figure from the current generation of games. Alicia Vikander would step into the role for a 2018 movie, and a sequel to that is on the way – our first hints at what the next 25 years may have in store for her.
