Tomb Raider

• 1. Introduction

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  Tomb Raider is a video game franchise that began in 1994 at Core Design, a British studio, and had sold more than 100 million units worldwide by 2024. Its pull was felt almost at once. In late 1996 and early 1997 the band the Prodigy apparently played the first game so constantly that their album The Fat of the Land slipped back by several months. It finally appeared in June 1997. The game that delayed it starred Lara Croft, a fictional British archaeologist who travels the world hunting lost artefacts and breaking into dangerous tombs and ruins. Behind the glamour sits an unusual story. Why did the studio that created her lose her? How did a runaway hit wear out the very people building it? And how does one character survive several complete reinventions?

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• 2. A Hero Redrafted

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  Toby Gard was mostly responsible for creating Lara Croft, yet his first idea for the lead was a man. Core Design co-founder Jeremy Heath-Smith worried that a male hero would look like a copy of Indiana Jones. So Gard changed the character's gender. Her design then went through multiple revisions and redrafts while the game was still in early development.

  When Tomb Raider shipped, it proved an unexpected commercial success. It also reversed the bleak financial situation of Eidos, the publisher that owned Core Design. Work on a sequel began soon afterwards. Gard was no longer given creative control of the character. Development staff said he was both saddened and disappointed that Lara's sex appeal had become part of the marketing.

  In 1997 Gard left Core Design. Paul Douglas, co-creator of Tomb Raider, left alongside him, and the two founded their own company, Confounding Factor. The remaining team members and several new arrivals built Tomb Raider II, which reached shops a year after the original. It opened with higher sales than its predecessor.

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• 3. Rooms and Tombs

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  The tomb of Tutankhamun, with its chain of connected chambers, inspired the interlinked rooms of the first game. That is the account of Gavin Rummery, an original software engineer who later became studio manager. The feel of play was meant to echo Prince of Persia, a game from 1989. Puzzles set in ancient tombs and temples could stretch across several rooms, and traps and enemies waited along the way. Lara could also swim, which was rare for games of that time, and the ability stayed with the series.

  In the original games, Lara moved with what the team called a "bulldozer" setup. Two buttons pushed her forward and back, and two steered her left and right. In a fight she locked onto enemies automatically once they came within range. The camera adjusted to her actions but usually sat behind her in a third-person view. This basic formula held through the first series. Only The Angel of Darkness added stealth.

  Building that world took custom technology. Paul Douglas designed the engine and handled the artificial intelligence and the 3D graphics, because other engines available to Core Design were not versatile enough. The team chose 3D partly because they felt the format was under-represented next to first-person shooters such as Doom. That choice made the AI and the camera hard to implement. Levels were multi-layered, while rival 3D action-adventures of the day were limited to a flat floor. Lara's movements were animated by hand rather than captured from actors, since the team wanted a uniform movement that motion capture of the period could not deliver.

  Later games changed the feel of play several times. For Legend, the controls were redesigned so that one action flowed cleanly into the next. Those moves also worked in combat to stun or knock down enemies. Quick-time events appeared in each level, and many puzzles rested on in-game physics. Anniversary rebuilt the original game's locations using the puzzles of Legend. For Underworld, the staff built the design around one question they put to themselves: "What Could Lara Do?" The answer was more varied moves, more interaction with the environment and improved combat. Lara's animations in that game came from full motion capture, performed by Olympic gymnast Heidi Moneymaker.

  The 2013 reboot altered the formula again. Linear levels gave way to an open world in which hunting for supplies and upgrading gear mattered, tombs were mostly optional and combat took priority over platforming. Combat was reworked to resemble the Uncharted series, with free-roaming aim replacing the old lock-on. Rise of the Tomb Raider added dynamic weather, brought back swimming and made more of the tombs mandatory again. Lara's hair was made more lifelike with TressFX in the 2013 game and PureHair in Rise. Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 2018 was the last main game on a proprietary engine, and the franchise is now moving to Unreal Engine 5.

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• 4. Annual Pressure

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  Late in 1997, the plan for the series was an expansion disk called The Further Adventures of Lara Croft, set in India. A full sequel, then billed as Tomb Raider III, would follow a couple of years later. It was to be a survival game for the PlayStation 2, with a remote island setting and a need to find food and water. Eidos began as a supporter of this plan. Then it grew attached to annual releases timed for the Christmas window.

  The publisher asked for a second team to expand The Further Adventures into a full game and release it as Tomb Raider III in the meantime. Nobody told the original team. They learned of the change only when Tomb Raider III was announced publicly as a 1998 title for the original PlayStation. Around then, the Tomb Raider II developers were already burned out by the extreme crunch policy at Core Design.

  Rummery had objected to the plan on the grounds that splitting the series across teams could set the projects in conflict. He has said the episode led him to "eventually throw in the towel." The exhausted original team withdrew from the PlayStation 2 project, and it was soon cancelled. None of the Tomb Raider II team worked on the franchise again, though some went on to Project Eden. The India setting planned for the expansion disk was carried over into the new Tomb Raider III.

  The Tomb Raider III team now carried the series, with annual releases as the aim. Years-long crunch at Core Design brought them the same burnout. Convinced they had used up the series' potential, they tried to kill Lara at the end of the fourth game, The Last Revelation. She was left caught in a collapsing pyramid with her fate unknown. Eidos insisted that the series go on. The Chronicles team strongly disliked being forced to continue, and its lead animator took pleasure in creating new death animations for Lara. Reviewers suggested the series was growing stale.

  The Angel of Darkness had troubles from an early stage. The team wanted a grander game to compete with other action-adventures of the day. When the Chronicles team joined, they found production had gone "off the rails," with the whole project already scrapped and restarted once. The engine was built from scratch for the PlayStation 2, which the team had never worked with. Polygon limits forced them to remove areas and characters. Under pressure from Eidos, key sections were cut, and the game reached shelves before the team felt it was ready. Critics reacted badly. Paramount cited it as the reason the second Tomb Raider film underperformed.

  Rummery blames the failure on burnout in the second team, which he traces to the annual-release plan. These details came out in interviews with former staff for The Making of Tomb Raider in 2021. At the time, the failure prompted Eidos to look for a different developer.

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• 5. Derby to California

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  In 2003, production of the next game went to Crystal Dynamics, a studio that had made its name with the Legacy of Kain series. Eidos chief executive Ian Livingstone said the critical failure of The Angel of Darkness was a major reason. He added that Core Design had struggled badly with the PlayStation 2, and that many of its people said they were "burnt out" on Tomb Raider. He called the move from Derby to California a big decision, and one that was "absolutely the right one to make."

  The new team's first goal was to regain the fanbase's trust and restore the series' selling power. They aimed to put Lara back inside tombs, using a physics-based engine for more intricate puzzles. Legend was well received and began a rebooted trilogy. Its engine and content were developed in parallel, which caused scheduling and workload trouble. Anniversary followed as a tenth-anniversary remake of the first game. Underworld used a new engine shared with other projects, and that brought problems of prioritisation, communication, complicated dependencies and over-ambition.

  Core Design, meanwhile, kept working on the franchise for another three years, and both of its projects were cancelled. A sequel called The Lost Dominion was in preliminary development in 2003. The poor reception of The Angel of Darkness caused it and a wider planned trilogy to be dropped. With Eidos's approval, the studio then started Tomb Raider: 10th Anniversary, an updated edition of the first game for the PlayStation Portable, in late 2005. The target was Christmas 2006.

  Eidos had been averse to more Tomb Raider games from the group. But Eidos had recently been bought by SCi, and the new parent favoured the project. By 2006 the game was nearly finished. Then Crystal Dynamics sent SCi a demo of Legend's first level running on the PlayStation Portable. 10th Anniversary was cancelled, and Crystal Dynamics was told to remake the original instead, partly because it had stronger cross-platform abilities. The decision "went down like a cup of cold sick" at Core Design.

  In June 2006, Core Design was sold to Rebellion Developments, and Eidos asked for the project to be stopped. Some staff suggested Eidos did not want outside developers handling the franchise. The studio tried to turn the game into an Indiana Jones or National Treasure title, but neither was ever finished. Free Running, a platformer, became its final release in 2007. By then named Rebellion Derby, the studio shut down in 2010, and the loss of Tomb Raider was one factor. A January 2006 build of 10th Anniversary leaked online in 2020 and remains on the Internet Archive.

  Another Lara project died even earlier. In the mid-2000s, TT Games made a test animation of Lara Croft as a Lego minifigure. Feeling Tomb Raider was not big enough for its own game, the studio pitched it to Lucasfilm as an Indiana Jones crossover. Lucasfilm rejected it immediately, disliking the series and regarding it as a knockoff of Indiana Jones.

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• 6. Lara's Many Lives

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  In the earliest continuity, Lara's story begins with a plane that crashes in the Himalayas. Her journey back to civilization against the odds starts her path toward adult life as an adventuress and treasure hunter. Afterwards she left her privileged life behind and made a living writing about her exploits as an adventurer, mercenary and cat burglar. Shortly after those books appeared, her family disowned her. Chronicles is told in flashbacks at a wake for Lara. The Angel of Darkness is set an unspecified time after The Last Revelation and reveals that she survived. The explanation of how was originally part of the game but was cut because of time constraints and pressure from Eidos.

  The Legend continuity gives her mother, Amelia, a place in the crash. Lara is driven partly by a need to learn the truth about her mother's disappearance and to vindicate her father's theories about it. That obsession runs through Anniversary and brings the world to the brink of destruction in Underworld. Her father is Lord Henshingly Croft in the original games and Lord Richard Croft in Legend. The Lara Croft subseries has its own separate continuity.

  The 2013 reboot starts again. Lara's mother vanished when she was young, and her father became obsessed with the secrets of immortality, ending in an apparent suicide. Believing, like many others, that the obsession had driven him mad, Lara distanced herself from his memory. After university she joins an archaeology program searching for the mythic kingdom of Yamatai. A shipwreck strands the group on an island that proves to be Yamatai, home to savage bandits who are victims of earlier wrecks. The island itself stops them leaving, a power linked to the still-living soul of the Sun Queen Himiko. Afterwards Lara sees that her father was right and decides to finish his work. The sequels set her against an ancient organization, Trinity, which seeks supernatural items to dominate the world.

  Through every version, certain traits hold. She is the only daughter and heir of the aristocratic Croft family. She is portrayed as intelligent, athletic, elegant and fluent in several languages, and determined to reach her own goals at any cost. She has brown eyes and brown hair worn in a braid or ponytail. Her classic outfit is a turquoise singlet, light brown shorts, calf-high boots and tall white socks. Fingerless gloves, a backpack, a utility belt with holsters and twin pistols recur. Later games give her many new outfits.

  Six actresses have voiced her in the games: Shelley Blond, Judith Gibbins, Jonell Elliott, Keeley Hawes, Camilla Luddington and Alix Wilton Regan. Hayley Atwell voiced her in animation. Off screen, multiple models and body doubles stood in for her in promotional material until the 2013 reboot, and eight different real-life models appeared as her at promotional events.

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• 7. Sound and Score

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  Nathan McCree composed the original Tomb Raider theme after discussions with Toby Gard about who Lara Croft was. Taking Classical English music as his inspiration, he kept the tune simple. That simplicity made it easy to rearrange and orchestrate later. He worked from fairly minimal briefs on the first three games, and for Tomb Raider III he worked as a freelancer because he had left the company.

  Peter Connelly replaced him on The Last Revelation, building on McCree's music. The opening melody, he said, came to him out of the blue, and he added Egyptian motifs to suit the setting. Chronicles was meant to have a sizeable original opening theme. Time constraints meant most of it was discarded, and only the opening segment survived, much to Connelly's later regret. The Angel of Darkness, scored by Connelly and Martin Iveson, was the one part of production that avoided trouble. Recording was finished before the big cuts. Where earlier games used synthesised instruments, it was scored for a full orchestra, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.

  For Legend, Troels Brun Folmann composed the music and managed the sound effects, writing micro-scores for small moments within play. He returned for Anniversary, re-orchestrating and expanding the original score. In Underworld he handled the main theme while Colin O'Malley wrote the rest, which looped far less than Legend's music.

  Jason Graves, known for the Dead Space franchise, scored the 2013 reboot. He used an orchestral style, built a special instrument to produce discordant sounds, and drew on musical elements from around the globe to represent the inhabitants of the island. Rise of the Tomb Raider was scored by Bobby Tahouri, who had earlier been an assistant composer on games and theatrical films.

  The Lara Croft subseries took its own path. Guardian of Light used no original music, only extracts from Legend, Anniversary and Underworld. Will Roget II, who had worked on licensed games including Star Wars: The Old Republic, wrote the score for Temple of Osiris. It was the first Lara Croft title with an original score, mixing Egyptian and Middle Eastern elements. Roget also created a new main theme meant to serve future Lara Croft games.

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• 8. Icon and Owners

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  In 2006, the BBC and the Design Museum ran the Great British Design Quest, and Tomb Raider was voted one of Britain's top 10 designs. It appeared on a list of British design icons that included Concorde, the Mini, the World Wide Web, Grand Theft Auto, the K2 telephone box, the London tube map, the AEC Routemaster bus and the Supermarine Spitfire. In 2020, the Royal Mail featured the game on stamps celebrating classic UK video games. Journalists, including Crispin Boyer of Electronic Gaming Monthly in 1997 and Martyn Carroll of Eurogamer in 2008, called the series a pioneer. Carroll credited it with bringing video gaming into the cultural mainstream.

  The sales story followed a clear arc. The first game topped the sales charts and stayed there for a time, selling over 7 million units. Tomb Raider II reached 8 million. Chronicles sold 1.5 million, and The Angel of Darkness opened strongly but missed expectations because of publisher pressure. Since Legend, sales and acclaim have recovered. The 2013 reboot sold 11 million, the best of any title so far. By 2002 the franchise as a whole had generated close to $1.2 billion in revenue.

  The 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider starred Angelina Jolie and grossed $275 million. That made it the highest-grossing video game adaptation until Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time passed it in 2010. Its opening weekend of US$47.7 million was the biggest for an action film with a female lead since Aliens in 1986. Jolie returned for The Cradle of Life in 2003. Both films made money but earned poor reviews. The first Tomb Raider comic issue was the best-selling comic book of 1999. A 2018 reboot starring Alicia Vikander was better received, and a planned sequel was cancelled. In 2007, GameTap broadcast an animated series, Revisioned: Tomb Raider, voiced by Minnie Driver, with writers and animators including Peter Chung, Warren Ellis, Gail Simone and Jim Lee. Netflix released The Legend of Lara Croft in October 2024, with a second and final season in December 2025.

  Lara herself became a celebrity. After her 1996 debut she appeared on the cover of the British culture magazine The Face, a spot previously held by real-life stars, and she featured in U2's PopMart Tour. She joined the Walk of Game in 2006. That year Guinness World Records named her the most successful human video game heroine, and she earned six awards in 2010. Editor Gaz Deaves said she "epitomises all that's great about video gaming." Opinion on her design is divided. She is hailed as an empowering figure for women and criticised as a negative role model because of her hyper-sexualized and unrealistic appearance. Early on, an internet urban legend claimed that the programmers had hidden a code that stripped her naked.

  Ownership changed hands several times. Square Enix bought Eidos in 2009, with Crystal Dynamics still developing the games. In May 2022, Embracer Group bought Crystal Dynamics, Eidos and the Tomb Raider franchise from Square Enix Europe for a comparatively low price. The sale was meant to help fund Square Enix's pivot to NFT games. The franchise is now operated by CDE Entertainment. Aspyr remastered all six Core Design games in two collections, released in 2024 and 2025. Evercade released the originals on two cartridges, leaving out The Angel of Darkness.

  On the 11th of December 2025, during the Game Awards, two new entries were announced. Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is a remake of the 1996 game by the Polish studio Flying Wild Hog, due in 2026. Tomb Raider: Catalyst, due in 2027, follows Lara in Northern India after a cataclysm reveals ancient secrets. Both will use Unreal Engine 5 and star Alix Wilton Regan as Lara. India, once the planned setting of a cancelled expansion disk, returns as the setting of the next adventure.

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