History of Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider is one of the biggest gaming franchises in existence. It's spawned ten games and two films, and it's made a cultural icon of heroine Lara Croft. Yet despite its universal success, Tomb Raider has struggled throughout its history to maintain the high level of quality set by the earlier titles in the series. As Tomb Raider approaches its fifteenth birthday, we look back on the life and times of Lara Croft.

On November 25 1996, Core Design and Eidos Interactive unleashed the original Tomb Raider on an unsuspecting world. 3D gaming had just hit the mainstream with the recent launch of the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, and Tomb Raider offered a potent combination of original gameplay ideas, gorgeous graphics, and polygonal breasts. The original Tomb Raider saw Lara Croft pillaging priceless artifacts and endangering local wildlife from Peru to Atlantis in search of the mystical "Scion" artifact. It was the right game at the right time, and became a critical and commercial hit, selling over seven million copies.

What many people forget about the first Tomb Raider is that it was brutally difficult. The game was puzzle-heavy, its combat and platforming extremely unforgiving, and most of its massive levels contained just one save point. Knowing that many gamers didn't make it to the end of Lara's first adventure, Core Design sought to make Tomb Raider more accessible in the inevitable sequel.

In the run up to the release of Tomb Raider 2, Lara Croft was already a household name, and the next game in the series was highly anticipated, even making national news in the UK. A bigger budget made for a longer game, more eye candy, and a more diverse range of environments, along with new gameplay devices like vehicles and underwater combat. Tomb Raider 2 saw Lara visit Venice, China, and the ruins of a sunken cruise ship in a more action-focused adventure.

Though some fans of the series bemoaned Tomb Raider 2's shift from puzzle-solving and exploration, there's no doubt that this change helped the series obtain more mainstream success. And with this snowballing success came increased sales and more sequels.

It's difficult to fault a developer for sticking to what they know is successful, and that's exactly what Core did with its third Tomb Raider game, offering gamers a steaming bowl of the same Tomb Raider experience they knew and loved. New backdrops such as Area 51, London, and India as well as powerful new weapons and a bikini-clad Lara could only sweeten the deal. However, reviewers of the game at the time started to see a pattern emerging. The two-year-old game engine was beginning to show its age, as was the tried-and-true Tomb Raider gameplay formula. 3D action platformers had been evolving alongside the Tomb Raider series for the past two years, and Tomb Raider 3's graphics and control system compared unfavorably to many of them.

Despite its aging technology, Tomb Raider 3 continued to up the ante in terms of cinematic gameplay. The dialogue was cheesy, the villains ridiculous, and the voice acting questionable at best, but Tomb Raider 3 was one of the first games that gave players the sense that they were acting out a movie (albeit a pretty bad movie, with giant spiders and terrible acting).

2001 brought about the first appearance of Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider movie. Though a critical flop, it was fairly successful commercially, bringing in $274 million for Paramount Pictures. But the mediocre quality of the film was to foreshadow the fortunes of the next Tomb Raider video game.

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness was released in 2003, promising a brand-new game engine, improved graphics, and controls and an intriguing, cinematic plot. However, it was not to be. The game was a train wreck - full of bugs, panned by critics, and met with poor sales. Core had written an entirely new game engine for Angel of Darkness, but it simply didn't work - the game was prone to frequent, frustrating crashes. And while its visuals may have received a much-needed boost, its gameplay remained firmly rooted in the past.

The dissolution of Core Design shortly afterwards, followed by the failure of the second Tomb Raider movie, seemed to signal the demise of Lara Croft. However, franchise owners Eidos Interactive were determined to revitalize Tomb Raider, and three years later, on the series' tenth anniversary, Tomb Raider: Legend arrived. Legend, developed by Crystal Dynamics, rebooted the Tomb Raider series and brought Lara into the era of HD gaming. The more advanced technology of the current generation of consoles allowed Crystal Dynamics to create stunning environments and craft a control system that played to the strengths of analog controllers. Crystal Dynamics even brought in Tomb Raider creator Toby Gard, who had left Core in 1997, to work on the project and ensure it kept true to the spirit of the series. The reaction from critics and gamers was one of cautious optimism. The game sold well, and earned a respectable Metacritic score of 82.

The following year Crystal Dynamics released Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Anniversary was lovingly-crafted HD re-imagining of the first Tomb Raider, which perfectly captured everything great about that game, while deftly avoiding aspects of the original which, looking back, now seem broken and frustrating.

With two successes under their collective belt, the developers at Crystal Dynamics brought a direct sequel to Legend to market in 2008, in the form of Tomb Raider: Underworld. Underworld offered many technological improvements over Crystal Dynamics' previous Tomb Raider games, including motion-captured animation for Lara, making her move, climb and fight in a more realistic way. There were also changes to the way Lara could interact with the world, with more interactivity seen in levels. Parts of the world could be permanently destroyed, and Lara would leave footprints wherever she went. Unfortunately, despite this new technology and a plot which brought back classic Tomb Raider settings and characters, Underworld failed to meet Eidos' sales expectations.

This year, Tomb Raider is due for another reboot. Given the series tempestuous past, it's impossible to predict whether Tomb Raider 2011 will manage to recapture the success of earlier Tomb Raider titles, but it's looking good so far.