Tomb Raider (1996 video game)
Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Core Design and published by Eidos Interactive. The first instalment in the Tomb Raider series, it was released in 1996 for Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and MS-DOS. Tomb Raider was released for N-Gage devices in 2003, and for the PlayStation Network in North America in August 2009, and in Europe in August 2010. Tomb Raider follows the exploits of Lara Croft, an English archaeologist in search of ancient treasures.
The game received critical acclaim, and it has been frequently cited as one of the greatest video games ever made. It was commercially successful, selling over 7 million copies worldwide. Tomb Raider is considered widely influential, serving as a template for many 3D action-adventure games that would follow.
, a remake of the game, was released in 2007 in celebration of its 10th anniversary, and a reboot of its series under the same title was released in 2013.
Gameplay
The player controls the archaeologist Lara Croft in search of the three mysterious Scion artefacts across the world. The game is presented in third person perspective. Lara is always visible and the camera follows the action by peering over Lara's shoulders by default, but the player can also control the camera to get a better look at Lara's surroundings. The game also automatically switches to a different camera view at key points, either to give the player a wider look at a new area or to add a cinematic effect. The world she inhabits is fully drawn in three dimensions and characterised by its cubic nature. Ledges, walls, and ceilings mostly sit at 90 degrees to each other, but sometimes feature sloping planes.The object of Tomb Raider is to guide Lara through a series of tombs and other locations in search of treasures and artefacts. On the way, she must kill dangerous animals and creatures, while collecting objects and solving puzzles. Gunplay is not restricted to the killing of various animals and occasional human opponents; Lara can fire her weapons at any time. However, the emphasis lies on exploring, solving puzzles, and navigating Lara's surroundings to complete each level. As such, Tomb Raider, in essence, harkens back to the classical form of platform style gameplay.
Movement in the game is varied and allows for complex interactions with the environment. Besides walking, running, and jumping, Lara can perform side-steps, hang on ledges, roll over, dive, and swim through water. In a free environment, Lara has two basic stances: one with weapons drawn and one with her hands-free. When her weapons are drawn, she automatically locks on to any nearby targets. Locking onto nearby targets prevents her from performing other actions which require her hands, such as grabbing onto ledges to prevent falling. By default, she carries two pistols with infinite ammo. Additional weapons include the shotgun, dual magnums, and dual Uzis. If Lara is confronted with more than one enemy when she has one of the dual weapons equipped, she aims at two targets simultaneously, one with each gun. At a certain point in the story, Lara will be stripped of all her weapons, leaving the player defenceless and forced to recover her pistols, a development which later became a staple of the series. Numerous enemies, as well as a variety of lethal traps, can bring about Lara's death, including falling, burning, drowning, electrocution, becoming impaled on spikes, killed by human enemies, or creatures and being turned into gold by the hand of Midas.
A general action button is used to perform a wide range of movements in Tomb Raider, such as picking up items, pulling switches, firing guns, pushing or pulling blocks, and grabbing onto ledges. Items to pick up include ammo, small and large medi-packs, keys and artefacts required to complete a stage. Any item that is collected is held onto in Lara's inventory until it is used. Throughout each stage, one or more secrets may be located. Discovering these secrets is optional, and when the player has found one a tune plays. The locations of these secrets vary in difficulty to reach. The player is usually rewarded with extra items.
In the Sega Saturn and PlayStation versions of Tomb Raider, saving the game is restricted to fixed save points within each level, marked by a floating blue crystal or by completing the level. When Lara touches one of these the option to save is made available. The DOS version of the game allows the player to save at any time. A stage is finished when a certain doorway is reached, an artefact is recovered, or a boss is destroyed.
Plot
-adventurer Lara Croft is approached by Larson, who is working for the wealthy businesswoman Jacqueline Natla. Natla hires Lara to acquire the Scion, a mysterious artefact buried in the tomb of Qualopec within the mountains of Peru. After recovering the Scion from Qualopec's tomb, Lara is confronted by Larson, who reveals that she is holding a piece of the artefact and Natla has sent Pierre Dupont to retrieve the rest. Breaking into Natla's offices to find out Pierre's whereabouts, Lara discovers a medieval monk's prayer book, revealing that the Scion were divided between the three rulers of Atlantis and the next piece is buried beneath an ancient monastery of St. Francis' Folly in Greece.Navigating the monastery, Lara finds the tomb of Atlantean ruler Tihocan, where she kills Pierre and recovers the second piece of the Scion. After joining both pieces of the Scion, Lara sees a vision which reveals that the third and final piece of the Scion was hidden in Egypt after the third Atlantean ruler, a traitor who used the artefact to create a breed of monsters, was captured by Tihocan and Qualopec. Making her way through Egypt to the lost city of Khamoon, Lara kills Larson and recovers the third Scion piece. Emerging from the caves, Lara is ambushed by Natla, who takes the Scion.
Lara escapes Natla's henchmen and stows away aboard Natla's yacht, which takes her to a volcanic island holding an Atlantean pyramid filled with monsters. After dispatching Natla's men and making her way through the pyramid, Lara finds a Scion and sees the rest of the vision, revealing Natla to be the betrayer. Lara faces Natla, who reveals that she attempts to restore her former power with an army of monsters. Lara decides to destroy the Scion, but Natla tackles her off the chamber and plummets into a crevasse. After fighting a large, legless monster, Lara shoots the Scion, setting off a series of tremors that begins to destroy the pyramid. Lara kills a winged Natla and escapes the exploding island by Natla's yacht.
Development
Preliminary work on Tomb Raider commenced in 1994. The title was crafted by Core Design of Derby, England, who took 18 months to develop it. The team consisted of six people, among them Toby Gard, who is credited with the creation of Lara Croft. The character went through several changes before Core settled on the version she became famous for. Initially, Gard designed a male character to be the star of Tomb Raider. As he began working on the design document, Core was planning on giving players a choice of player characters, so he designed an early form of Lara to be the female alternative. Later realising that having two player characters would double the amount of work required for the cutscenes, Gard cut the player characters back down by eliminating the male character, since he liked Lara better. Gard cited Virtua Fighter as an influence on this decision: "It became clear to me watching people play Virtua Fighter, which was kind of the first big 3D-character console game, that even though there were only two female characters in the lineup, in almost every game I saw being played, someone was picking one of the two females."Lara Croft was originally named "Laura Cruz". As her backstory began to take shape and it was decided that she would become more English and that it would be a major part of who the character was, her name was changed to reflect this. According to Toby Gard, the idea to make her more akin to a female Indiana Jones was not present from the beginning. In fact, in early concepts, Lara originally had a cold-blooded militaristic-type personality, but Gard and the team decided to create and play up the "proper English lady" aspect of her character to establish that there was more to Lara's personality and life than just her immediate actions during Tomb Raiders gameplay.
The game's engine was designed and built from scratch by Paul Douglas. Several custom tools were developed to allow the artists to create the levels and characters. The animation for Lara was keyframed by hand in 3D Studio rather than using motion capture. This allowed the development team to precisely match the motions of the character to the level geometry's grid system. The largest technical obstacles in the game's development were the AI, camera and animation systems. The gameplay was partially inspired by the first Prince of Persia game.
A three-dimensional action-adventure like Tomb Raider was unprecedented at the time, and the development team struggled to find a way to make Toby Gard's vision for the game work on contemporary hardware, in particular getting the player character to interact with freeform environments. According to programmer Gavin Rummery, the decision to build the entire game world on a grid was the key breakthrough in making the game possible. Though the 3D platforming gameplay, player character abilities, and focus on exploration have been likened to Super Mario 64, the developers have denied it was an influence on Tomb Raider, and development on Tomb Raider started well before Super Mario 64 had been shown to the public.
It is Core's contention that the company was struggling somewhat with 32-bit development at that time. The first glints of the game were seen on Sega Saturn development kits. However, Gard stated that though Core and Sega had a deal for Tomb Raider to be a timed exclusive for the Saturn, the game was developed simultaneously for the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation. Core and Sega made the deal during the last few months of development, so the team had to finish up the Saturn version six weeks earlier than they had planned on, forcing them to work late hours and weekends. Following the release of the Saturn version, a number of bugs were discovered that affected both versions of the game; because of the timed exclusivity, the development team fixed these bugs for the PlayStation version. While the series would see four more instalments on the original PlayStation, no additional Tomb Raider games were released for the Saturn. Additional Sega ports were released on the Dreamcast.
English voice actress Shelley Blond provided the voice of Lara Croft for the game. She recalled, "I was asked to perform her voice in a very plain non-emotive manner and in a 'female Bond' type of way. I would have added more inflection, tone and emotion to my voice but they wanted to keep it how they felt it should sound, which was quite right. My job was to bring their character to life."
In 1997 Core Design opened negotiations with Nintendo to release a Nintendo 64 version of the game, and started work on the port in anticipation of the negotiations being successful. However, the game was ultimately never released for the platform.
Music
The music for Tomb Raider was composed by Nathan McCree. Unlike most other games of the time, there was not a musical track playing constantly throughout the game; instead, limited musical cues would play only during specially-selected moments to produce a dramatic effect, such as enhancing tension during an action sequence or accompanying the discovery of a hidden secret, in much the same way as a film is typically scored. For the majority of the game, the only audio heard is action-based effects, atmospheric sounds, and Lara's own grunts and sighs, all of which were enhanced because they did not have to compete with music. According to McCree, the game was scored this way because he was allotted very little time for the job, forcing him to quickly write pieces without any thought to where they would go in the game. When the soundtrack was finally applied, the developers found that the tunes worked best when applied to specific places.The game uses a solo oboe melody for the main theme. Variations of this main theme have been used in all of the Tomb Raider games. The soundtrack of Anniversary was composed by Troels Brun Folmann, loosely based on the original.
The symphonic sounds of the earlier games were created using Roland Corporation's Orchestral Expansion board for their JV series keyboards.
Alternate versions, special editions, and remakes
''Tomb Raider: Unfinished Business'' and ''Tomb Raider Gold''
On 2 April 1998, shortly after the release of Tomb Raider II, Tomb Raider was re-released on the PC and in 1999 ported to the Macintosh. This release, titled Tomb Raider Gold - The Shadow of the Cat in North America, and Tomb Raider: Unfinished Business elsewhere, featured the regular game as well as two new expert chapters in four levels, two levels each. The levels for Tomb Raider Gold were created in the San Francisco office of Eidos by Phil Campbell, Rebecca Shearin, and Gary LaRochelle.The first chapter of the game takes place in Egypt and occurs several months after the events of Tomb Raider. The story sees Lara returning to the City of Khamoon to investigate a mysterious statue of the Egyptian goddess Bast. This leads to her discovery of a new temple dedicated to the cat deity, which includes a giant gold statue several stories high. The second chapter takes place before those of the first chapter—after the events of Tomb Raider. This chapter starts with Lara sliding down the same slope as in Tomb Raiders final level and finishes with her destroying the last remnants of the Atlantean Race.
Shadow of the Cat features two levels: "Return to Egypt" and "Temple of the Cat". Unfinished Business features two other levels, called: "Atlantean Stronghold" and "The Hive". It was originally announced that Unfinished Business would be released as a standalone expansion pack in the third quarter of 1997.
2006 reboot
The Tomb Raider series' popularity began to stagnate in the early 2000s and dropped after the critical and commercial failure of '. Core Design was sold to Rebellion Developments, and development of the Tomb Raider series was handed to Crystal Dynamics, best known for Legacy of Kain. ' was released in 2006, the story focused on the mythological King Arthur and the legendary Excalibur. The game started a new timeline with a different incarnation of Lara Croft. The game became critically and commercially successful, selling 4.5 million units.''Tomb Raider: Anniversary''
The first hint about a remake of the original Tomb Raider was a financial release from SCi Entertainment that revealed a game ' for PSP, which was supposed to be released in summer 2006. Another hint appeared as a rumour on 30 May 2006: "Eidos/SCi are planning on celebrating Lara's 10th birthday by releasing a remake of her original adventure". A video game trailer showing footage of a new Tomb Raider game was distributed on the Internet on 8 June 2006. The titles and logos of the trailer claimed that the title was Lara Croft Tomb Raider: 10th Anniversary Edition, a PSP game by Core Design. The trailer featured Lara Croft in familiar yet remodelled environments from the original Tomb Raider. On 15 June 2006, Core Design released a statement claiming that the trailer was "an internal presentation of a game that was being developed by Core Design until very recently", and had been cancelled by SCi.However, on 16 June, Eidos Interactive announced a 10th Anniversary Edition of Tomb Raider, being developed by Crystal Dynamics instead of Core Design. On 30 October 2006 Eidos announced that this new instalment in the series would be named '. The game is a retelling of the first Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider: Anniversary was released for PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 2, Wii, and Windows platforms. The PlayStation 2 and PC versions were released on 1 June 2007 in Europe, and in the US on 5 June 2007. The PSP version was released in June, the Xbox 360 version was released in October and the Wii version was released 14 November. The Xbox 360 version of the video game was made available for download from the Xbox Live Marketplace in November 2007 with the disc being required to use it. However, the game was also released later on a disc to retailers, just like all of the other versions. A mobile version of Tomb Raider: Anniversary was developed by FinBlade.
Tomb Raider: Anniversary was released and remastered in HD for the PlayStation 3, which came in a package alongside Legend and Underworld.
2013 reboot
On 5 March 2013, Square Enix released Tomb Raider, billed as a reboot of the franchise, which follows a much younger Lara Croft after she is shipwrecked and finds herself stranded on a mysterious island rife with danger, both natural and human. In contrast to the earlier games, Croft is portrayed as vulnerable, acting out of necessity, desperation and sheer survival rather than for a greater cause or personal gain.Reception
Tomb Raider remains the most critically acclaimed game in the long-running franchise. Upon its release in 1996, the game was widely praised by gaming magazines for its variety and depth of control, revolutionary graphics, intriguing environments, and use of occasional combat to maintain an atmosphere of tension. Ryan MacDonald of GameSpot summarised, "Take the puzzle solving of Resident Evil, the gory action of Loaded, and the 360-degree freedom most gamers only dream of, and you have Tomb Raider, the closest thing to a Super Mario 64 killer' to date." The game tied with the Saturn version of Street Fighter Alpha 2 for Electronic Gaming Monthlys "Game of the Month", with their review team saying it "really stands out from the rest of the pack" and "is the best PlayStation game to date." Next Generation called it "a thought-provoking, riveting action-adventure easily on par in intensity with any of Hollywood's finest efforts" and "a landmark title for this generation, and one that's sure to be imitated many times over."Some critics rated the PlayStation version as better than the Saturn version. MacDonald said that its graphics were sharper, and GamePro scored it a half point higher than the Saturn version in every category, remarking, "After a solid showing for the Saturn, Tomb Raider scores even higher." However, Next Generation stated that they would not bother to review the PlayStation version because the differences between it and the Saturn version "are negligible." Similarly, Electronic Gaming Monthly only reviewed the PlayStation version, and stated in a feature on the game that Core "has taken special care to ensure that the Saturn and the PlayStation versions of the game play equally well. The graphics certainly look identical."
Tomb Raider was Computer Games Strategy Pluss 1996 overall game of the year and won the magazine's award for the year's best "3D Action" game as well. It also was a finalist for CNET Gamecenter's 1996 "Best Action Game" award, which ultimately went to Quake. Electronic Gaming Monthly named Tomb Raider a runner-up for both "PlayStation Game of the Year" and "Saturn Game of the Year", commenting that both versions had been designed to take optimum advantage of each console's capabilities. They also named it runner-up for both "Action Game of the Year" and "Adventure Game of the Year", as well as "Game of the Year". It won "Best Animation" in the 1996 Spotlight Awards.
Less than a year after its release, Electronic Gaming Monthly ranked the PlayStation version of Tomb Raider the 54th-best console video game of all time, particularly citing its vast and compelling areas to explore. In 1998, PC Gamer declared it the 47th-best computer game ever released, and the editors called it "tremendous fun to play and a legitimate piece of post-modern gaming history". In 2001 Game Informer ranked it the 86th-best game ever made. They praised it for Lara's appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike. The level of sophistication Tomb Raider reached by combining state-of-the-art graphics, an atmospheric soundtrack, and a cinematic approach to gameplay was at the time unprecedented. The resulting sales were consequential, topping the British charts a record three times, and contributing much to the success of the PlayStation. In the previous year, Eidos Interactive had recorded a nearly $2.6 million in pre-tax loss. The success of the game turned this loss into a $14.5 million profit in a year.
As one of the top-selling games of the PlayStation console, it was one of the first to be released on PlayStation's Platinum series, and its success made Tomb Raider II the most anticipated game of 1997. It also won a multitude of Game of the Year awards from leading industry publications. In 1998, Tomb Raider won the Origins Award for Best Action Computer Game of 1997. The Lara Croft character was prominently featured in the popular media outside the realm of video gaming, for instance on the cover of pop culture magazine The Face in June 1997. In the final issue of the Official UK PlayStation Magazine, the game was chosen as the fourth-best game of all time. Tomb Raider, along with its successor, Tomb Raider II, are the two best-selling games in the franchise.
Nevertheless, Tomb Raider received some criticism for minor camera and object glitches. Additionally, some fans complained about the lack of action in the game. Ironically, Tomb Raider II would be criticised for its overabundance of violence, especially against human opponents.
Next Generation reviewed the PC version of Tomb Raider Gold, rating it three stars out of five, and stated that "For the two people who don't own Tomb Raider, this is an excellent package. However, for the rest of us, pass on the Gold box and simply download the new levels" from the game's website.
Tomb Raider sold over 7 million copies worldwide. In August 1998, the game's computer version received a "Platinum" sales award from the Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland, while its PlayStation release took "Gold". These prizes indicate sales of 200,000 and 100,000 units, respectively, across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. During the first three months of 1997, Tomb Raider was the ninth-best-selling console game in the United States, with sales of 143,000 units. This made it the country's highest-selling PlayStation title for the period.
In 1999, Next Generation listed Tomb Raider as number 22 on their "Top 50 Games of All Time", commenting that, "Fantastic level design and art direction enabled a real feeling of exploration and accomplishment. When you played Tomb Raider, you felt like a tomb raider."
Legacy
GameSpot listed Tomb Raider on their "15 Most Influential Games of All Time", saying it served as a template for many 3D action-adventure games that would follow and helped drive the market for 3D accelerator cards for PCs. The game's use of a hard-edged, female heroine has been both hailed as revolutionary and undergone multi-factorial critiques that either consider Lara's portrayal to be a positive visual metaphor of sexual empowerment or objectifying and sexist. Aside from game appearances, Lara was featured on covers of magazines, in comic books and movies. The amount of media coverage Lara received at the time was previously unheard of, with many magazines also outside the video game industry printing articles on her. Several large corporations, such as Timberland, and Lucozade wanted to use her as their spokesperson. The image of Lara Croft was used by U2 in their PopMart Tour.In 1999, Toby Gard and Paul Douglas won the Berners-Lee Interactive BAFTA Award for best contribution to the industry for their work creating the franchise.
The Tomb Raider series was credited with six official Guinness World Records in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008. These records include Most Official Real Life Stand-ins, Highest-Grossing Video-game Movie, and Most Recognizable Female Video-Game Character.
The PlayStation version was re-released for the PlayStation Network in North America in August 2009, and in Europe in August 2010.