Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (36 page)

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.’