Where did the character Lara croft originate?

Answer 1

A lot can happen in 10 years, and believe me it really did. The Tomb Raider series went from strength to strength starting out as a series of games which later developed into two smash hit movies starring Angelina Jolie as the character we had grown to love. But how did it all begin? Well, the answer begins here, in 1988 when a small Derby based design company by the name of Core Design was first assembled by Mr. Jeremy Heath Smith.

The company focused on quality over quantity, slowly expanding their personnel and output of titles as the years passed. Core's first game was seen in 1989. It was a 2D adventure game with a male lead "Rick Dangerous". Rick was an archaeologist who explored the deadly tombs of a Mayan Temple. Battling with baddies to win the prize artefact... Sound familiar?

A few years later with the increase of technology making bigger and better games possible Jeremy called a meeting with his staff upon hearing news of a brand new games console - The Sony PlayStation. The team sat down and started thinking of possible games that could make use of this "miracle machine". Toby Gard was one of the employees with a suggestion... A game called Tomb Raider was what he wanted to see on this new console. Gard had produced drawings of what he felt the game should look like, he explains how some of the other employees thought he was a bit crazy, however that's where the phenomenon known as Tomb Raider started.

"Toby stood up and said I've got this idea about doing a game based on pyramids", Says Jeremy Heath-Smith. "I've always wanted to do a game based around pyramids to. For some reason I really fancied this idea about pyramids with a Pharaoh, and having to go tunnel under the pyramids. It was just as silly as that. It didn't have characters, it was more just conceptually let's do a game based on pyramids".

Tomb Raider made its way to the drawing board in 1993. The design brief was for a cinematic adventure with elements of exploration, action and puzzle solving. All held together with a strong storyline. Gard decided that he didn't want the series to go down the route of other popular games at the time such as Doom. After all Tomb Raider isn't a shoot 'em up. This meant that the view was switched from 1st person to 3rd person allowing the player to see the character and what they do. Unfortunately the series stumbled at the very first hurdle. "Although Jeremy liked the idea, there were no programmers that would touch it. They all thought it was too difficult because at the time no one had done anything like it. Nobody in the company had done anything 3D. The whole idea was just terrifying to programmers". The project then faced another major hurdle... Who was the lead going to be?

Weeks of design work followed, but each design was always too similar to Indiana Jones. "The male lead was in for a few weeks. He didn't have a name but as soon as I saw him he got binned" says Jeremy. Gard started toying with the idea of the lead being a female character. "It wasn't necessarily going to be a female character, I designed a couple of characters. One was a girl and the other a bloke. My argument was always from watching people play Virtual Fighter. In an all bloke office nearly everyone was playing one of the female characters. It seemed to me that people were missing something if people weren't making characters female."

Toby and Core were taking a huge risk having the lead character of the Tomb Raider series a female one. It had been considered as commercial suicide. "There weren't any girls in videogames at all then. Sure there were a few single women figures but still no games that revolved completely around a heroine" says Jeremy. Deciding to take the dangerous option the Core team pressed the delete button on the male hero of Tomb Raider and focused on the female role.

Choosing a name for the soon-to-be cyber heroine was a huge responsibility. The name has to appeal to the public. A few names were produced one of which was Laura Cruz. This was then changed to Lara Cruz as the American fans couldn't pronounce Laura! "They couldn't get their head around it. Its the way they pronounce the 'aur'. It gives you a headache" says Jeremy. "I didn't like the fact that she was named Cruz because it didn't fit in with making her English" said Gard. Gard and Smith sat down and went through a phonebook to find the perfect surname for Lara. I think we all know which surname appealed to them... Croft became the surname of the heroine. It was quite similar to Cruz and had an English quality to it.

"She was made to be as quintessentially British as possible. Its generally held that unless you have an American hero you won't be able to sell a game in America. I thought that by deliberately reversing as many rules as possible, a female, strong but not tarty. A British not American lead character. and American not British villains, we'd make something that was unusual and fresh" said Gard.

The design process for Lara Croft was a very slow one. Several months of designing and re-designing still hadn't produced the Lara that we know today. "I wanted a character who was really spunky, a lot of attitude and very cool in their own right. I'm the type of person who can't live with characters or designs for very long if I don't feel confident with them. So she did change a few times. She went through three distinct designs before I settled on the last one. She went through a period of wearing slightly more military-looking clothes, but she looked too Nazi-like. For a while she looked like Neneh Cherry with baggy trousers and crop tops, but before long she found her hot pants and leotard and away we went".

An initial look for Lara was a very 'manga' style design. "If you look at the very early models of Lara she has a very big head. Her head is massively out of proportion to the rest of her body. Toby did this. He accentuated all her features. So the initial look was much more of a manga look. We toned that down because people's tastes change. Toby would have pushed that manga look all the way, but luckily the PlayStation and our technology at the time couldn't do it."

Once Toby sketched Lara in her now trademark outfit he knew he'd found his star. "The very first drawing of her wearing the famous costume, that was it, I elaborated from there. There was really no sexuality in the game apart from the fact that she was quite well built, well put together. I think that all characters need to be visually appealing, whatever it is it has to be something that people will want to look at and find interesting."

As time went on Toby started to refine the look of the Manga Lara into the character we know today. Due to restrictions with technology at the time, Lara was not able to sport her ponytail in the game, instead her hair was cut short and tied at the back. This was fixed in the second game of the series "Tomb Raider 2 : The Dagger of Xian".

So the game was made, nearly 3 years after the first proposal for the Tomb Raider series Gard and the rest of the Core Design team had taken bold steps and risked a lot. Composed music, designed levels, designed characters and a lot more. Now for the final task of making the game: The packaging and promotional work.

Through out the development of Tomb Raider Core had made a series of extremely high quality images featuring Lara croft (a select few now own copies of these extremely rare high-res images). They were used to create the front cover to the game. The design for the cover was an important job. It has to be aesthetic and say what the game is about in order to sell.

Before the release of Tomb Raider in 1996, a marketing decision was made to add 3 more words to the game's title: Starring Lara Croft. "I don't know who this was, I'm sure there's about fifteen that want to take credit for it, but someone said we should call the game Tomb Raider : Starring Lara Croft. I thought, why would anyone want to call it that? They thought it made it sound bigger and more movie-like. They forced us into doing it, which is the best thing that could have ever happened. I think that by creating that 'Starring Lara Croft' you suddenly create a new way of naming videogames. You can't say it was Eidos that did that, it just happened." said Jeremy.

"We knew two days after the first game was released that we had a mega hit on our hands, because everything went mad, the World went crazy. Even today I'm still learning of the scale of it."

The box art design for Tomb Raider went through several different stages before they decided on the final one that hit our shelves. There was even a Pyramid shaped box version of the game!

Core Design had hit it big time. Tomb Raider was one of the best selling games ever. The second game in the series "Tomb Raider : The Dagger of Xian" is still today the most successful of the series. Core Design went on to make 5 more Tomb Raider games after their first smash hit back in 1996. In 2004 Core Design lost the Tomb Raider franchise to American developers Crystal Dynamics. In 2006 Crystal Dynamics released their first Tomb Raider game aimed at re-kindling the series, its name: "Tomb Raider Legend".

Well, despite receiving a few more polygons here and there Lara hadn't really changed an awful lot, that was until 2003. In 2003 Core design took Lara down a new route focusing on her darker side in their sixth and final title "Tomb Raider : The Angel of Darkness". The Lara model went from 500 polygons to a staggering 5,000 polygons, this gave Lara a much more realistic appearance. However some fans didn't like this new dark streak to their hero.

Hope that helped.