This September sees the release of Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, the final game within the origin trilogy started in 2013 that repositions the game’s protagonist, wealthy British archaeologist Lara Croft, as a videogame hero for the age. Where she once raided tombs, now Lara strives to preserve indigenous heritage. Where once she looked like she was designed by a horny teenager, she now looks, well, normal. Described as "the most recognisable female videogame character" by Guinness World Records, it’s been quite the journey from lads’ mag cover girl to woke action hero. As noted videogame journalist Zoe Flower says, “Lara Croft continues to personify an ongoing culture clash over gender, sexuality, empowerment and objectification…”
In the beginning...
It’s widely accepted that the credit for Lara’s creation lies with the game designer Toby Gard, who created the character during his tenure at the Derby-based videogame developer Core Design. It’s been said she was based on the Essex-born developer’s younger sister, Frances. Others have cited the popstar Neneh Cherry as an inspiration. In the beginning, though, she was simply Laura Cruz. She was South American. Her long braid remained in the transition from Laura to Lara, but her nationality didn’t. Elsewhere, Core wanted to exploit the character's sex appeal. Rumour has it the company asked Gard to include a code that would allow you to play as Lara, naked. He refused. “[My vision was to create a] female character who was a heroine, you know: cool, collected, in control, that sort of thing". He continued: "It was never the intention to create some kind of Page Three girl to star in Tomb Raider". Frustrated by the direction in which his creation was being pulled, Gard quit the company. He left just ahead of a phenomenon. In a 1998 New York Times article, writer David Barboza talked of Eidos and Core Design receiving flowers, Christmas gifts, even wedding proposals, from young boys and men. “The digital Lara is going to sign a modelling contract with a big agency,” said Eidos spokesperson Cindy Church. “She’ll become a supermodel, like Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista”.
The birth of an icon...
Toby Gard’s decision to walk away from Lara and Tomb Raider, would cost him a fortune. Eidos, Core’s parent company, had budgeted for 100,000 units to be sold. It would sell 7.5 million. Core offered their employees a royalty-based contract – but royalties were only redeemable if employees remained at the company. The Nineties were heady times for video games – the first Tomb Raider game was launched by flying journalists from around the world to play it at the foot of the pyramids in Egypt. With the birth of the slick, cool Sony PlayStation in 1994, for the first time video games were aggressively pitched to adults, and Lara was only getting bigger. Now as much a symbol of Britpop and Cool Britannia as Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit, that June Lara appeared on the cover of The Face. "Bigger than Pammy, wiser than Yoda" roared the strap. “You look back at it and you might think it was too much focused on the sexuality of Lara Croft,” British gaming legend Ian Livingstone and then Eidos bigwig says in hindsight. “But we were living in the times of lad magazines. Everyone was a part of that culture. The world has moved on. We've matured as an industry, and Lara Croft the character looks a lot more realistic now and a lot more believable, but back then, things were different.”
The human touch...
There’d been ‘human’ versions of Lara from the off. First was Nathalie Cook, previously a live-action Snow White who’d been employed by Disney and subsequently recruited by Eidos to attend promotional events. "How should I play her?" she asked her new employers. "Just be badass," they replied. Other live-action Laras included French actress Vanessa Demouym, Jill de Jong, Lara Weller, Lucy Clarkson (who was just seventeen when she bagged the role) and Nell McAndrew (who was fired for appearing in Playboy). Then, between the releases of Tomb Raider 2 and 3, Eidos snapped up the services of British actress Rhona Mitra to play Lara. Just in case you’d forgotten how ridiculous the Nineties were, the Mitra era resulted in two albums of music, co-written with Eurthymics’ Dave Stewart. Though they only received a commercial release in France, first came 1998’s Lara Croft: Come Alive (which features the extraordinary single "Getting Naked", probably not Toby Gard’s favourite), then in 1999, Lara Croft: Female Icon. “I was pinching myself the whole time,” remembers Mitra. “It was the most bonkers thing ever. One minute I was doing a play in Battersea Arts Centre and the next I was on a boat up the Amazon with this rock god, both of us with feathers on our heads, writing mad songs and drinking rum”.
Death becomes her...
Burnt out by the relentless pressure to produce new Tomb Raider titles, creatively unfulfilled by a lack of time to work on anything new, in an act of pure rebellion, the team at Core decided to kill Lara off – not that they told management anything about it. 1999 saw the release of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, a game where, at the climax, Lara travels to Giza. Once there she ascends the Great Pyramid. She has a scrap with falcon-headed deity Horus. Then, exhausted, she collapses and falls as the crumbling temple entombs her. “We knew we wouldn’t get away with it,” the games’ scriptwriter Andy Sandham told Eurogamer. “But it was a moment of catharsis”. Terrified they were going to lose their cash cow, the suits ordered the team to bring back Lara from the dead for the next instalment. Which they did, in a convoluted sense, by having players run through memories shared by Lara’s friends at her wake. The game ends with her backpack being discovered and the revelation she is alive, opening up the possibilities for more games. Recently Andy Sandham has regretted not having her decapitated.
Hollywood Raider
You’ve looking to cast the part of a crystal-voiced British heiress. You’ve considered Jennifer Love Hewitt. You’ve toyed with Elizabeth Hurley. For a time you were set on Denise Richards. Nope, scratch that, Angelina Jolie is your Lara Croft. And let’s get her-real-life-dad John Voight (from whom Jolie was famously estranged) in it too! Directed by Simon West (he made Con Air), and with a cobbled-together script about Lara needing to obtain a variety of objects from the Illuminati (a total of five writers were credited, which is rarely a good sign), the first Tomb Raider movie was savaged upon release by critics. Yet, proving there was still lustre in Brand Lara, and perhaps also due to the rising star of Jolie, the movie has gone on to make in excess of $275,000,000 worldwide. A sequel, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle Of Life, was released in 2003. It bombed. Angelina announced she no longer wanted to play the role.
A legend returns...
2003’s Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness, Lara’s first foray into the PlayStation 2, was such a critical and commercial disaster (largely due to it being a borderline unplayable, unfinished mess), that Eidos took the rights to make Tomb Raider games away from Core Design and gave them to California’s Crystal Dynamics Ltd. Their first move was to bring back Toby Gard as a creative consultant on their first Tomb Raider title, Tomb Raider: Legend, though Gard’s involvement ultimately went much further, coming out of the project with a writing credit. The result was a much more realistic, more acrobatic take on Lara. Keeley Hawkes was hired to voice Lara in the game, with Eidos stating the Spooks actress had the "right balance of aristocracy and attitude to really bring to life [Lara] Croft in all her glory". Gard stuck around for 2007’s Anniversary, a no-glitz-spared reboot of the first game, as well as the following year’s Tomb Raider: Underworld, for which he received a nomination from The Writers Guild Of America for "Best Writing In A Videogame". And then it was time for yet another change…
Back to the future...
In 2013, three years after a Derby ring-road was named Lara Croft Way in tribute to her East Midlands origins (“Despite my lack of gaming knowledge”, said councillor Lucy Care of the public vote to name the road, “I accept that a majority of 89% for Lara Croft is too overwhelming to ignore”) it was decided to reboot the franchise with an origin story… and, really, for the first time, a realistic eye-to-face ratio, as well as authentic body proportions. From Grey’s Anatomy came Camilla Luddington to voice Lara – she’s stuck around for the two subsequent ‘origin’ games, Rise Of The Tomb Raider (2015) and Shadow Of The Tomb Raider (2018). In this year’s eponymous movie, based on the plot of the first game, Alicia Vikander played the lead. “My breast are not as pointy as the first Lara, but I had a clear vision of how I wanted to play her,” she told Graham Norton earlier this year, citing what a fan she was of the original series. “She has all the fierce, tough, curious, intelligent traits.” It took a while to get here, but in 2018, Lara is where she was always supposed to be...
Shadow Of The Tomb Raider is out on 14 September for XBox One, PS4 and PC
