Any discussion of classic Tomb Raider is incomplete without mentioning that the first Tomb Raider games are essentially exact copies of the original Prince of Persia game, translated to 3D. Not the level layout or story, but the control scheme – very distinct and not used by any other games – is identical. Also the standard traps are replicated, like collapsing tiles and spikes emerging from tiles.
Tomb Raider does add some flourishes, like the swan dive and hand standing ascent, and some necessary additions for 3D, like the ability to turn and jump sideways, but the rest is straight up Prince of Persia (the original 1989 one).
Yeah, basically grid-based, no precise movement. It had some unique innovations though. The camera always stayed behind the main character but without the camera moving into a wall: If there was an obstruction behind Lara, the camera moved closer. Modern third-person games still use this get-closer trick. (Though they use the Mario 64 controls with free camera instead of the tank controls used in Tomb Raider.)
In the first Tomb Raider games, the map was grid-based (I think this was because of limitations of the original Playstation console), but the character could be positioned freely - it's not like moving one step took you to the next grid cell...
There are more additions and differences, in the control scheme and in the gameplay.
About the control scheme, guns, swimming, crouching or vehicles are just a few.
As for the latter, tomb rider balanced platforming with exploration and puzzles (prince of persia was mostly about platforming) and there was no sense of urgency (prince of persia had a timer).
Arent all games derivative? Or is this uncorking that "inspiration vs plagirism" discussion that resolves in everyone having a contest to see who can smugly name what the earliest derivation is... eventually going back to cave paintings
Oh, and there was actually a 2D Tomb Raider game for the GBC which really used the same grid game mechanics as Prince of Persia.
Another fun fact: There was an Indiana Jones game for the N64, which was heavily inspired by Tomb Raider. Which was heavily inspired by the Indy movies.
And the cycle continued in the 2014 remake of Tomb Raider, which was heavily inspired by the Uncharted games. Which was heavily inspired by the original Tomb Raider games.
Thank you for noticing this. This was obvious to me the moment I first played it, but it has always gone totally unmentioned. The later 3D games are often branded Tomb Raider clones, which is backwards.
My problem with the Tomb Raider design is that they swapped out Lara Croft for someone else.
Lara used to have the same consistent design till Tomb Raider 6 (The Angel of Darkness). Her iconic face, known from countless magazine covers, posters, ads, and even music videos (in German speaking countries she appeared in a Die Ärzte music video which topped the charts for weeks [1]). Her trade mark braid hair style, too. It was never just the boobs.
Unfortunately Tomb Raider 6 was a medium flop (due to poor gameplay). The next title, Legend, was a reboot, and they decided to change Lara's face. In subsequent titles they changed her more and more. By the time of Tomb Raider (2013) she was replaced with a completely different person. Not even her signature braid was preserved. It was just some generic looking woman of a similar age.
That's like Nintendo deciding, after the 6th Super Mario title, that Mario should now look like a more realistic man and lose his big nose and his outdated hat. Or as if Capcom had decided, for Metal Gear Solid 3, to swap out Solid Snake for some other guy with the same name.
I would have been okay with changing Lara Croft's not-very-realistic body proportions to something which fits the zeitgeist better. If it is so important for those people who love to complain about such stuff. Though I suspect most of the people complaining about her proportions didn't even play the games themselves. But please at least keep her face and don't change her into a completely different person.
(And in my opinion, keep her braid. No other character has it. Without it she is like Mario without hat, or Sonic without his red/white shoes.)
Game design is limited by the technology of its time. Lara Croft's face was poorly defined, and her features were exaggerated partly because it wasn't possible to render an attractive quasi-realistic character before the first generation of 3D hardware. The renders shown in promos and cover art were done in much higher quality, and the Lara in those hardly resembled the in-game Lara either.
> That's like Nintendo deciding, after the 6th Super Mario title, that Mario should now look like a more realistic man and lose his big nose and his outdated hat. Or as if Capcom had decided, for Metal Gear Solid 3, to swap out Solid Snake for some other guy with the same name.
You're saying that Mario and Snake didn't also change from their initial 2D sprites to their later 3D models? Mario's nose and signature cap were hardly distinguishable in the early games, and just weren't important compared to the gameplay. Mario himself changed radically in each game; from Tanooki, frog and cat suits, to becoming other characters entirely in Odyssey. Snake's features only became visible in the first MGS, and the model in The Phantom Pain might as well be a different character. (It doesn't help that MG chronology is confusing as hell, and I'm not certain that "Venom" Snake is actually the same person as "Solid" Snake...)
The change of Lara Croft was certainly influenced in part by the zeitgeist, as you say, but it's largely the result of normal character evolution in most gaming franchises. Do you really expect a character to have a braid in all versions? And why is Lara's hair or physical proportions so important to her character? Her defining features are being an upper-class explorer and overall badass, which is part of every TR game.
This is a really good article, BTW. Kudos to the author!
Venom, Solid, Solidus, Liquid, and Naked Snake are all different people. Naked becomes Big Boss. Solid, Solidus, Liquid are clones of Big Boss. Venom thinks he's Big Boss. I don't understand what's so confusing? :)
Ah, TIL, thanks. But they all should look like Big Boss then? Considering the reply to your comment that Venom underwent plastic surgery...
Kojima may be a genius game designer, but he's an awful writer IMO. None of his lore makes sense, and is only convoluted for it be served in exposition dumps in hour-long cutscenes. Death Stranding is a prime example of that. I enjoyed playing it, but can't remember a thing about the motivation of any of the characters.
Not quite, because they were not all direct clones the way we think of cloning in real life, because in the Metal Gear universe, they could do "selective cloning".
I forgot the details of how exactly they described it (and I haven't played beyond MGS3 yet). But in MGS, Liquid and Solid have a conversation about it, where Liquid insinuates that they took the "best genes" of Big Boss to clone Solid (who actually looks like Big Boss), and used the remaining "weak genes" to clone Liquid. I would bet that this whole explanation is also sprinkled with a bit of nanomachines-related lore in the later games.
Also, their differences in looks could be explained by environmental factors and style choices. I would argue that Solidus looks just like Big Boss and Solid, but aged, more muscular, and with different facial hair.
Actually, Solid being the better clone and Liquid being inferior is unreliable narration on Liquid’s part. He was led to believe so, but Revolver Ocelot contradicts him later on.
Revolver Ocelot: "Yes. The inferior one was the winner after all. ...That's right. Until the very end, Liquid thought he was the inferior one."
Yeah, I just wanted to avoid spoiling anything more than was strictly necessary, for those who are curious and might consider playing it.
Inbefore someone says "it is an old game", I beat MGS 1+2 just a couple years ago for the first time ever, and I usually am more into newer games. Still looking forward to play MGS3 and the rest of the series in the future.
>her features were exaggerated partly because it wasn't possible to render an attractive quasi-realistic character before the first generation of 3D hardware
Are you saying real women don't have triangle boobs?
> Game design is limited by the technology of its time. Lara Croft's face was poorly defined, and her features were exaggerated partly because it wasn't possible to render an attractive quasi-realistic character before the first generation of 3D hardware. The renders shown in promos and cover art were done in much higher quality, and the Lara in those hardly resembled the in-game Lara either.
Well, the article explicitly shows an early sketch where she looked even more comic-like than in the final renders. The character was never intended to look realistic, that wasn't just a technical limitation of the hardware the game run on. In fact even for Tomb Raider 6 the renders didn't look realistic:
> You're saying that Mario and Snake didn't also change from their initial 2D sprites to their later 3D models? Mario's nose and signature cap were hardly distinguishable in the early games, and just weren't important compared to the gameplay.
There were some early changes, but Mario looks basically exactly like he did on the cover of Super Mario Bros 3 some 25 years ago:
Even Tomb Raider 1 - 6 did not have that much continuity.
> Her defining features are being an upper-class explorer and overall badass, which is part of every TR game.
That could also be someone else. Lara Croft now looks like a completely different woman. And very generic too, nothing like the distinctive face (and with the braids, and the exaggerated proportions) she had before. The continuity of the first six games is simply lost, it's like replacing Homer Simpson with some different, slimmer, more average looking character, while still calling him Homer Simpson.
Maybe they wanted the series to have more realistic graphics, which wouldn't fit her classic stylized design. But I'm sure they could have come up with a design that looked at least similar to the old Lara. Even cosplayers do a decent job:
> Even Tomb Raider 1 - 6 did not have that much continuity.
If you're talking strictly about the physical appearance, sure they did. TR 1-5 are basically the same game, running on the same engine, and Lara looks practically the same. These were all released within a span of 5 years, so it's no wonder only incremental changes were done.
TR 6 was the first attempt to redesign the character, but then again, the game setting and direction was entirely different. After that flopped, the series went on hiatus until the very well received 2006 reboot with Legend, which was developed by Crystal Dynamics instead of Core Design, so the changes aren't surprising.
> The continuity of the first six games is simply lost, it's like replacing Homer Simpson with some different, slimmer, more average looking character, while still calling him Homer Simpson.
I see your point, but video game characters are much more fluid than cartoon characters. For one, the content is released every few years, and each release gives designers the chance to tweak the appearance. Moreover, the technology changes rapidly, which makes some features possible that weren't before, and designers tend to experiment with that. The free-flowing hair braid wasn't possible before the first TR game, and neither was making a character "attractive", so they leaned into those features in the early design. But it doesn't mean that these are the defining features of the character.
Ultimately this boils down to the creative vision of the creators, and how strictly they want to stick to a single design throughout the series. Considering the TR IP changed hands several times, it's likely that designers were given the freedom to experiment.
BTW, those cosplayers are enacting the early version of Lara, but notice that those sunglasses aren't fashionable anymore, and realistically, that outfit is highly impractical for the exploring that Lara is supposed to do. So if the artistic vision for the project changes for whatever reason, so will the character appearance. As long as they keep the fundamental traits of the character, their physical appearance shouldn't matter. At least to me it doesn't, but you're free to disagree, of course. :)
That's just a standard NPC attractive woman face. If she at least had a braid, this alone would make her much more recognizable. If you showed a random gamer the character from the most recent TR game and asked them from which game it is, many would have no idea. Some TLOU NPC? The old Lara would be much more readable from the head alone.
> If it is so important for those people who love to complain about such stuff. Though I suspect most of the people complaining about her proportions didn't even play the games themselves.
You can make your point without claiming that people who have a different view just “love to complain”. It might be worth asking yourself why they're complaining instead of dismissing their views — you wouldn't want someone else to dismiss your view like that.
But it does seem like motivated reasoning. I never hear men complain about the unrealistic depiction of men in women shows. Neither with good nor with bad arguments.
To be fair, most women didn't complain about Lara Croft or Princess Peach either. It was just some (influential!) minority of feminists who complained about this, got amplified by sympathetic journalists (who mostly lean pretty far left), and the rest is history.
> I never hear men complain about the unrealistic depiction of men in women shows.
Err, really? I'm a man and I complain about this all the time, and so do some of my friends. In any case, even if you've never heard people talk about this, I'm sure there are objections to the depictions of men that _you_ could imagine. If you think these objections are underrepresented, talking to those around you about them would be a positive influence.
> It was just some (influential!) minority of feminists who complained about this, got amplified by sympathetic journalists (who mostly lean pretty far left), and the rest is history.
Already in this sentence you're discounting the fact that these complaints resonate with people. I'm not sure in which way you think these feminists are “influential”, but let's say journalists widely covered certain arguments. Do you mean this media coverage somehow brainwashed people? Surely not, because you would be denying the agency of readers. Clearly there is something in these arguments that legitimately appeals to people. Isn't it interesting and important to find out what parts of the arguments resonated with someone and why, even if you think the end result is wrong?
For example, I disagree with those who voted for Brexit to happen. But if I just dismissed them as brainwashed idiots, that would be very foolish of me. These people voted this way for a reason, and I need to understand which part of Brexit resonated with them, even if I think they came to the wrong conclusion, otherwise I can never understand them and I can never advocate for an alternative that will meet their needs as well.
> (who mostly lean pretty far left)
Again, why does this matter? There is no need to resort to football team factionalism, to make things about politics instead of policies. Do you think the arguments are good? Great, then these people have a point. Do you think these arguments are bad? Okay, that's fair, make your opinion heard so that you can add your voice. Tell us in more detail about why those policies are bad, not about why _the people making those points_ are bad. It would be rash of me to psychoanalyse why are you are making certain arguments without even knowing you, let alone to say that you are trying to influence people as part of some conspiracy. (Sorry if I'm portraying your view in an overdramatic way but it did sound like you were saying something like this a little bit.)
> motivated reasoning
Motivated by what? Do you really think a love of complaining is a more likely motivator than a desire to right a perceived injustice?
I have absolute no interest in any of the new Tomb Raider games nor the franchise in general other than as a retro curio, but that decision seems little more controversial than say, recasting James Bond.
It’s far from the only case of developers doubling down on a rebooted character redesign. Kratos didn’t get a physical image shift but isn’t he like a responsible dad now or something?
The character is mo-capped, you can't really maintain that consistency (which tbh, which I'm not sure existed to begin with) if you want to minimise jank in the character's facial animations.
Lara has always been a weirdly uncanny valley character who existed in the coming of 3D graphics but is less realistic than say, Cloud and other Final Fantasy characters who actually have 2D renderings with realistic proportions. Just her face is sort of oval and unreal.
I think actually using cell shading could suit her rather well. Similar to how it is done in recent Zelda games. The "unreal" look comes from combining her simple face with realistic lighting of a normal render.
Duke Nukem is a good example. He also had somewhat exaggerated proportions, but it suited him, because his face didn't look realistic either. Just like Lara, who also had a slight comic-like look. It's absurd to imply (like Michelle Goulet in the article) that having female characters with exaggerated proportions automatically means "disrespecting" woman. She also says that designers may "throw in all the sexuality you want" while insisting at the same time that characters must always retain realistic proportions. Impressive double think.
Anyway, the meme that boys at the time commonly viewed Lara Croft as "sex object" is absurd. We did not. Sorry to say it like that, but that's just some feminists like Goulet being a bit paranoid. Boys would have fantasized about someone like Jennifer Lopez, not Lara Croft.
> Anyway, the meme that boys at the time commonly viewed Lara Croft as "sex object" is absurd. We did not.
You may not have, but everyone else did. Designer Toby Gard literally designed her to appeal sexually to male gamers in order to offset the fear that they otherwise wouldn't want to play a female main character. Early Lara Croft had ridiculous proportions. Her outfit is a t-shirt and booty shorts, for goodness' sake. Gamers of the time were obsessed with the idea of a "Nude Raider" cheat.
"Ever since Tomb Raider's release, its heroine, Lara Croft, has been seen as a major sex symbol in the video game industry, and that has been a large focus of the franchise's marketing."
And yet, Lara Croft wasn't your love interest, Lara Croft is you. She's your avatar under your control, risking your life and limb, in a fantasy setting. So that seems like a powerful dose of unreality to gamer boys, who get immersed in the world and personally identify with the heroine.
Surely there have been incremental instances of this before and after Tomb Raider was released, so choose your profile photo, build your avvie, and have at it.
I believe that's regret speaking. He created Lara Croft as a sexual caricature then got upset when she was also marketed that way.
> In a 1997 interview with culture and fashion magazine The Face, [Toby Gard] was audaciously asked about Lara’s 'unfeasibly large knockers'. […] "Slip of the mouse. I wanted to expand them fifty percent and then — whoops, one-hundred and fifty percent. Darn."
> The Face: "Is Lara a feminist icon or a sexist fantasy?" Toby Gard: "Neither and a bit of both. Lara was designed to be a tough, self-reliant, intelligent woman. She confounds all the sexist cliches apart from the fact that she’s got an unbelievable figure."
Even if the movement is legitimate and has important goals to achieve, self fashioned movement spokespersons whom made a living about being angry can't stop being angry at things, what else are they supposed to do, mission accomplished, pack up and go to the unemployment queues?
Of course they will keep finding new details or interpretations to complain about.
The article touches on this topic. Why should Lara Croft be changed towards a more realistic female shape when pseudo-Schwarzeneggers abound in games?
’On the other hand, the same male gamers had for years been seeing images of almost equally unattainable masculine perfection on their screens, all bulging biceps and chiseled abs. How was this different? Many sensed that it was different, somehow, but few could articulate why. Michelle Goulet of the website Game Girlz perhaps said it best: Lara was “the man’s ideal image of a girl, not a girl’s ideal image of a girl.” The inverse was not true of all those warrior hunks: they were “based on the body image that is ideal to a lot of guys, not girls. They are nowhere near my ideal man.” The male gaze, that is to say, was the arbiter in both cases.’
Yeah, that argument is simply misguided. It's like me demanding, as a man, to change male characters in Sailor Moon, Felicity, or 50 Shades of Grey. Those male characters behave (and sometimes look) like female fantasies of men, not like men view themselves. But that doesn't give me any right to demand changing them, after all, they are created for girls/women. I'm not the intended recipient!
For the same reason it is absurd for feminists like Goulet to demand changing Lara Croft. Those feminists weren't in the main audience in the first place. They could have ignored Tomb Raider like most guys ignored Sailor Moon.
Well, is it more likely that the lack of female main characters caused few girls to play videogames, or that the lack of videogame playing girls caused the lack of female main characters? Arguably the latter, since boys form also the majority at most games without any main character. Boys just like video games more, it's not that alleged sexism sacres the girls away.
Nowadays there are more women in gaming, but when Lara Croft first appeared, it would have been odd to expect anything but a male gaze from a popluation of nearly 100% male developers and customers.
Oh man, I still remember the day my parents found my drawings of naked Lara. Not that I was any good at drawing, I just used the old technique of tracing the original pictures on a thin piece of paper, adding a dash of teenage horniness in the process.
Did you not see the Maxim "photoshoot"? Lara and Aki Ross from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within were both covergirls of Maxim, rendered in underwear or swimwear. Or, perhaps you disregard the fact that the most persistent rumor about Tomb Raider 1 & 2 was the "nude code"?
Lara Croft was the nerd equivalent of Marilyn Monroe and Madonna, at the same time. She was the gaming sex symbol.
Gamers would be interested in a nude code for any attractive female main character of any well-known video game whatsoever. Just like men would like to see even a politician like AOC (like any reasonably attractive celebrity woman) in Playboy. But that doesn't make AOC a sex symbol.
Lara Croft is more like a mixture of Indiana Jones and Duke Nukem: Hot body, badass (two guns at once), and cool sunglasses.
Yes, her figure is one property that makes her stand out, but the others were equally important. In fact, sexy video game woman are nothing new, there have been many before Lara, and with far more revealing outfits. An example is the character from the Brandish series:
> By the time of Tomb Raider (2013) she was replaced with a completely different person. Not even her signature braid was preserved. It was just some generic looking woman of a similar age.
And now she's also a literal mass murderer and the actual tomb raiding feels like an afterthought.
For those who played Tomb Raider when it was released, you know it was a hit because the game was great, movement was smooth and the sense of freedom felt amazing.
Lara as a sex symbol was the cherry on top and free marketing for the game, all the media talked about the game and made more or less obvious jokes about Lara's chest (90s jokes, you know).
I can’t really agree about the controls. Tank controls suck, especially for an acrobatic character. Remember Tomb Raider came out just after Super Mario 64 which essentially redefined how 3D games should be controlled. Even Resident Evil eventually relented on tank controls.
The tank controls in Tomb Raider were more acceptable then in Resident Evil, since the camera was generally behind Lara. So turning to the right on the screen meant pressing right, since this would turn Lara to the right both from her perspective (tank controls) and from the camera perspective (because it was behind her). Of course she still "stears" like a car.
The first Tomb Raider game really was that good. Just this morning I watched someone on YouTube walking through the levels (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiToc0SYkds), and it was impressive how memorable they were. Even the ones that I didn't remember before watching, once I saw them on the screen I was like "oh yeah, that place!".
The quote from Charles Ardai bugs me. The original was a fun game. Women in video games were at that time (and still are? I don't play anymore) consistently over-sexualized, but it was never why I played a game, and I really don't think most gamers buy games just because because of the size of the main character's chest. Yes, the main character has to be cool and interesting, and Lara Croft is. They gave her an interesting backstory, and the rich British angle made her a cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones (and maybe a little bit of Batman).
Maybe it is just me, but the implication that my buying decision are based on something so puerile is just so damn insulting.
I had a poster of Lara Croft in my childhood room. First the original, later Angelina Jolie. I never had another video game character on my wall. I was 10 when the first game came out.
> I really don't think most gamers buy games just because of the size of the main character's chest.
Eidos’s marketing team apparently thought otherwise. No idea if they were right—although the game's sales make me suspect the marketing department was probably at least competent.
Love this guys' posts. If only he would spice them up with diagrams, more screenshots, etc., so typically i read these during travel hours.
Edit: Any idea how his (WP-based?) site's TOC works? Having a hard time continuosly reading associated posts if you don't use his links he inserts in the footer, but instead try to search f.e. for 'Lucasarts'.
Loved the article, and replying again as a top-level comment to point out something else I just learned about.
The last TR game after Shadow of the TR was a mobile one: TR Reloaded[1]. It looks like a lazy cash grab infested with microtransactions. It's a damn shame seeing yet another franchise tarnished like this.
It's great when an IP experiments with different game genres and mechanics. Guardian of Light and Temple of Osiris were beautifully done, and there should be more of that. But these lazy mobile ports do a disservice to the IP.
I'm looking forward to the next proper release in the franchise. We need a good current-gen title to fill the void of Uncharted. :)
> But how many copies of Tomb Raider do you think they’d have sold if they’d made Lara Croft flat-chested?
Probably lots? It helped with publicity for sure, so they would have sold fewer but it was successful because it was a great game, not because of triangular boobs.
I can’t speak for everyone but I never played the games because of her shape. Frankly, I never found her character design that attractive (the low polygon count probably didn’t help) but even if I did, the vast majority of the game is spent from behind her anyway.
They are good. Can you name a better game in the same genre? The only competition I can think of is Uncharted 4. The older Tomb Raider games are too many generations behind to run on modern consoles.
Tomb Raider has become a major movie franchise, so it's not too surprising that the new games from the last decade are essentially movies.
The newer TR games are actually pretty great. Not perfect but it's unfair to label them as generic. The only other games I know that are similar are the Uncharted series.
It is very common to use "generic Ubisoft open world game" to refer to any game regardless of developer that follows Ubisoft's open word formula of having an open world with ton of pointless random collectables, lots of icons in the world map for them, the world being separated in areas/regions you "conquer", kitchensink gameplay where everythings is thrown together with shooting, hunting, crafting, skill trees, quest markers/GPS, etc.
If that describes "most AAA games nowadays" that is because it does :-P. Ubisoft games were successful after all.
As an example this was the first hit when i searched for "generic ubisoft open game":
Anyone from Core want to tell the story of what happened when Angelina Jolie dropped in for a tour of the studio? I can't tell it, it's TFT classified.
Related to "the 2013 Lara Croft is more feminist than the old Lara Croft", I liked Liana Kerzner's discussion on the topic (with a cute pseudo-dialectic at about 11:00 in).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJMj3B1BFko
Also super sad that Rhona Mitra didn’t get the role in the movies having played the live action model for years. I’m sure they needed the star power of Angelina Jolie to sell the movie but her English accent was painful.
Why do I recall seeing pictures of an actual human female model posing for the artists at the studio? I swear there was one, thought they had quotes from her back in Game Developer or somewhere.
These were rather direct descendants of 8-bit games like Bounder: fast-paced, colorful, modest in size and ambition […]”
Whoa… I could call “Corporation ” many things… a proto-FPS, a quasi-RPG, a precursory attempt at something like System Shock… But it definitely wasn’t your typical run-of-the-mill platformer or standard action title. It may have failed at what it set out to do, but it definitely was very ambitious!
The TR movie completed the cycle of movie to movie. Tomb Raider the game was just a gender-swapped Raiders of the Lost Ark. The movie translated that back into movie form.
> 100 million copies combined and three feature films whose box-office receipts approach $1 billion, everybody not living under a proverbial rock has heard of Lara Croft.
Meh, that’s only a small percentage of the world population. There’s a lot of first world Western bias here.
Tomb Raider does add some flourishes, like the swan dive and hand standing ascent, and some necessary additions for 3D, like the ability to turn and jump sideways, but the rest is straight up Prince of Persia (the original 1989 one).