Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  The secret that Heath-Smith had been flown out to Japan to see flowed directly from the failure of that project. Sony had started work on its own console, and Heath-Smith was one of the first people in the world to be shown the result, a prototype of the PlayStation. Sony’s new console used a CD-ROM, certainly, but the demonstration showed that its innovations stretched far further than that. The PlayStation’s hardware promised an extraordinary leap forward for 3D graphics.

  Over the short life of computer games, there had been plenty of small breakthroughs and baby steps in 3D technology. They often created excitement, a sense of a widening market or new gameplay ideas, but by their nature, 3D games were more technical and abstract than artistic or character led. They leant themselves to subjects with clean, solid shapes, like vehicles, buildings and simplistic landscapes. Even if the player’s character was human, the vista would be presented from a first-person viewpoint, as if the gamer were on wheels, or was a floating pair of eyes. Where more complicated images, like people, were needed, they were often flat pictures superimposed onto the 3D world like floating cardboard cut-outs. The sense of immersion that 3D gaming could bring had always been hampered by its cold architecture and unreal tricks.

  But the PlayStation broke out of this rut. It featured specialist hardware that could ‘map’ pictures onto each of the individual 3D pieces, stretching and warping them so that they matched the perspective of the scene. And it could paint huge numbers of these, fast enough to create screenfuls of detail at frame rates that matched a television. Some of these techniques had already been seen on the top-end PCs of the time, but despite its low price, the PlayStation bettered them, delivering graphics that were faster, richer and more detailed.

  One famous demonstration was of an animated dinosaur head: for the first time a console showed an organic, expressive structure in three dimensions. Heath-Smith could see that a Rubicon had been crossed – at last, relatable characters could be part of immersive 3D worlds. The first game to make use of them was sure to have an enormous impact.

  On his return to Derby, Heath-Smith arranged an off-site retreat for the entire company, with the single purpose of working out how to make use of this hardware: ‘I said to all the guys, “Right, this is the future.”’ The staff were still working on consoles oriented around the flat graphics that favoured platform games, but Heath-Smith, an energetic former salesman, encouraged them to move into a new creative zone. What sort of game could make the best use of this incredible technology?

  ‘We brainstormed a number of ideas,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘“How can we go forward? Let’s get some game concepts together utilising this new power.” And that’s when Toby Gard got up and said, “I’ve got this idea of pyramids.”’

  Toby Gard was a young designer, barely out of his teens, but already one of Core’s rising stars. ‘Toby joined when he was sixteen,’ recalls Heath-Smith. ‘He literally begged for a job, and we took him on, paying him absolute peanuts. He had worked for me for a couple of years, and we obviously knew he had an immense talent.’

  Gard’s vision was for a treasure-hunting adventure set in the ruins of ancient Egypt. The hero would be a buccaneering explorer, dicing with the traps and foes he found while searching for relics. It was a compelling design – Heath-Smith had always been a fan of the setting, and it was also a good match for what little the team knew of Sony’s technology. In a game about exploration the pace could be slow, so a drop in frame rate wouldn’t be too noticeable. But more importantly, the game could make use of a three-dimensional avatar. The hero would always be visible, always part of the scene, always making a connection with the player.

  Core Design’s management were enthused. Gard was working on a spin-off of Core’s Chuck Rock franchise, a kart-racing game called BC Racers, but Heath-Smith moved him as quickly as possible to head a team of six dedicated to the new project, and in 1995, work commenced. They called the game Tomb Raider.

  Gard was the creator and the art designer. The technology was devised by Paul Howard Douglas, who invented a grid system that could map huge, complicated game levels, with buildings spread across multiple storeys, or broken into undulating ruins. The grid allowed the areas to be created as obstacle courses for the player – so that a precise distance was required for the run-up to a jump, for instance – while still appearing natural and somewhat organic. And the team found a way to keep the main character in view using a virtual ‘camera’ that would present the world as if floating a dozen feet behind the avatar. In enclosed areas the camera would swing closer, and in really confined spaces, zoom in for the best of a bad set of options. It was imperfect, but a breakthrough. At the time that Howard Douglas implemented his system, there had been no third-person 3D games at all.

  So Tomb Raider’s main character would be, in every sense, the focus of the game. There has been so much attention paid to the genesis of the Tomb Raider hero, so many stories of how she came about, that some versions have inevitably contradicted others. But they all agree that, whatever she became, Lara Croft was never created as a draw for the prurient attention of adolescent boys. In fact, the first idea was that the hero should be a man.

  ‘When Toby first showed it to me, it was a male character,’ recalls Heath-Smith. ‘It was all a bit scary. He did look like Indiana Jones, and I said, “You must be insane, we’ll get sued from here to kingdom come!”’

  Heath-Smith urged Gard to come up with a different idea, but in fact a female character may have already been in the young designer’s mind. In an interview with the Independent in 2004, Gard recalls his decision. ‘The rules at the time were: if you’re going to make a game, make sure the main character is male and make sure he’s American, otherwise it won’t sell in America. Those were the rules coming down from the marketing men. So I thought, “Ah, I know how to fix this. I’ll make the bad guys all American and the lead character female and as British as I can make her.”’

  Those marketing ‘rules’ did have precedent. Although there had been female avatars, they were very rare, and usually one of many characters a player could choose from, such as a combatant in a fighting game. The most famous female player character up until that time had been Samus Aran from the 1986 game Metroid. But for most of the game she was an anonymous figure in a space suit and it was considered a plot twist when she disrobed to reveal her gender by means of a pixelated bikini and long blonde hair.

  In contrast, Gard’s character sketch was of an assured adventurer called Laura Cruz. She was capable and athletic, kitted out with a backpack, shorts and hiking boots and, bare legs aside, not obviously sexual. It met with incredulity at Core. ‘“Are you insane, we don’t do girls in video games!”’ Heath-Smith recalls telling Gard. ‘But Toby was absolutely adamant that having a female character in video games would be great. She’d be bendy; she’d do things that blokes couldn’t do.’

  Gard’s choice was instinctive, but it had influences. A common story is that his sister was an inspiration for the character, but it seems likely that he also drew on some of the fashions that were obsessing the wider media. ‘There was a lot of girl power stuff happening, Tank Girl had just come out, and a couple of other movies,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘There was this whole movement of females really can be cool, particularly from Japan.’ Japanese manga-style comics and cartoon characters were becoming visible in Britain for the first time, and Gard aped their distinctive style. ‘The original Lara had a huge head, a very manga-esque character,’ Heath-Smith recalls.

  Over a few iterations, the heroine became more conventionally proportioned: an athlete, rather than a cartoon. There’s a legend that at one point during the design process her bosom jumped in size when Gard’s mouse slipped, and his team insisted that it should stay this way, but it’s not a story he’s repeated since some early interviews.

  She was shapely by the time the public saw her, but it wasn’t Gard’s intention to create a sex object. As he told the Independent: ‘She wasn’t a tits-out-for-the
-lads type of character in any way. Quite the opposite, in fact. I thought that what was interesting about her was she was this unattainable, austere, dangerous sort of person.’

  Throughout the nineties, the pressures of huge budgets and volatility of income had driven the British gaming industry to consolidate, and by the time Tomb Raider entered development there were only two publishers listed on the London Stock Exchange. One was the new owner of Core Design, CentreGold Plc, formed from the US Gold publisher and its distributor. Heath-Smith had sold Core when he ‘realised his limitations’, and soon after, the new company had been floated. The other listed company was Eidos plc, which specialising in video compression was run by Charles Cornwall, chaired by the author and tabletop games publisher Ian Livingstone, and had Sophie Wilson on its board. By the beginning of 1996, both companies needed to raise money quickly. CentreGold, in particular, was in trouble, because under the console business model Core had been obliged to run up a large stock of cartridges, and had since found plenty of this back-catalogue unsellable.

  Remarkably, a merger provided the solution to both companies’ problems. ‘Charles Cornwall was the ringmaster of the whole thing,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘Charles was very clever at raising funds, and the way to raise funds if you haven’t got any is to go and buy defunct companies to raise a load more money.’ So Eidos went shopping, and CentreGold was one of four companies it acquired. But as it turned out, it was the one that mattered.

  Ian Livingstone was sent to undertake due diligence on the companies, and vividly recalls the day that he first saw Tomb Raider. ‘I remember it was snowing. I almost didn’t go over to Derby, I had to see another studio near Birmingham. But it was snowing so badly I had to drive over the Pennines and go to Derby anyway. And I guess you could say it was love at first sight when I stepped through the door. Seeing Lara on screen.’

  Livingstone became an advocate immediately, protecting the game, which was already only a few months from completion. ‘They left us to everything,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘We were very arrogant – we weren’t prepared to compromise or change things.’

  The Core team did in fact make one significant compromise. Eidos had an office in America, and although its marketing department were enthusiastic, Heath-Smith found that they were wrong-footed by the name Laura Cruz. ‘The office in the US said, “We love Laah-ra”, and we said, “No, it’s Laura”. And they said, “No, no, it can’t be Laura, Americans don’t say Laura.” And they didn’t like Cruz.’ So Toby Gard leafed through a phone book and found some alternatives. He changed Laura to Lara while Cruz became Croft. Core stuck to its guns on one issue, though – Lara remained British.

  Heath-Smith’s team spent months finessing their star. She was given a back story: she was an aristocrat who chose adventure over a life of soft privilege, and with that came a clipped, ‘received pronunciation’ accent. After rounds of auditions by audio cassette and conference call, Core hired Shelley Blond to be the voice of Lara Croft. She was 26, and had never played a computer game in her life.

  ‘They said we’d like you to be a female Sean Connery, very monosyllabic, without the Scottish accent,’ remembers Blond. ‘They didn’t want too much emotion.’ For five hours she recorded Lara’s voice, most of it spent perfecting the cries and guttural noises she would make as players steered her into harm. The direction notes were certainly unusual: ‘You’ve fallen off a cliff! You’re backing into a wall!’ These were the root of the grunts and gasps for which Lara Croft would be remembered.

  But it was a straight performance that seemed at odds with the pictures that Blond had been shown. ‘Nowhere did they say “make it for the boys”,’ she recalls. ‘I thought she had a nice pair of boobs – I could see that she was gorgeous. But I didn’t feel that the voice they were allowing me to do matched the body. I would have loved to have gone with sexier.’

  Between her design, animation and voice, Lara Croft had developed a personality. The prominent characters at the time engendered limited player empathy. Sonic, Mario and Earthworm Jim were weird, caricatured and cartoonish, and although humanoid, they didn’t seem very human. And ‘grown-up’ games were dominated by brutish anti-heroes, often played from a first-person perspective and only seen as a hand carrying a gun. Beside them, Lara was more immediately compelling, and more tangible as a person.

  The strength of Lara’s characterisation was becoming obvious, and her place in the game was coalescing, too. Howard Douglas’s technology had met its brief masterfully. Tomb Raider was a vast game of architectural ruins, designed for and around Lara Croft. Where 3D gaming had once meant rigid objects, a first-person perspective and an imagined ‘self’, here the player was charged with guiding a graceful gymnast. When Lara climbed, she hauled herself up with an elegant animation; when she jumped, she reached out for a ledge. She engaged intimately with the buildings she explored, and the interaction was seamless: Lara and her world had been built to work together. ‘The fact is,’ says Heath-Smith, ‘that Lara is far more flexible, she’s far more dexterous, she could do many things. The original character was a Duke Nukem gun-toting toughie. Well, suddenly we’ve got a female character, which you could actually relate to for the first time ever.’

  By autumn 1996, Core had completed Tomb Raider. With all of the elements meshed together, the game transcended its individual parts: it was novel and tense, a delight to play and, in places, breathtaking. And its qualities were intimately connected to the character of its heroine.

  As in Gard’s original brief, Lara Croft’s chief talent was breaking and entering tombs and temples that had lain undiscovered for aeons, and making off with their contents. In keeping with the language of video games, these archaeological sites were populated not only with dangerous animals, but with ammunition, medical supplies and elaborate traps. There was a plot, too. It wasn’t of any great depth, an ancient intrigue involving aliens, but given that players at the time were too often used to mundane repetitions of a game’s mechanics, this was unanticipated drama nonetheless.

  While playing, gamers had the unnerving feeling that they were trapped in a giant puzzle, competing against an unseen force embodied by the walls themselves. And so they were, in that the Core team had spent months adjusting the levels to draw in and challenge the player. It only took a slight shift in perception to believe that this was the design of ancient architects, and often the graphics and artwork were enough to immerse the player in the atmosphere.

  Importantly, the environments were all but uninhabited. Wild animals may have prowled, and the occasional villain taunted you, but in as much as it mattered you were on your own. Or rather, Lara was. And this was as much a part of Lara’s appeal as her image – after weeks or even months in her company, gamers developed an affinity with the character who personified their addiction to virtual acrobatics and exploration. The game didn’t need to be marketed with a reference to Girl Power, or use its star to draw the attention of teenage boys. The playing experience alone showed that Lara Croft had all the qualities necessary to become a grass-roots gaming star.

  And inarguably, the character of Lara Croft was essential to Tomb Raider’s success. Identifying with the hero of a game – caring when they achieve or die – is important, especially in third-person games. Players tend to project themselves onto avatars in a game, and while conventionally muscular and aggressive characters can be difficult to relate to, the athletic and capable Lara was an easy vessel for empathy. This identification was aided by the effortlessness with which she could be controlled; jumping and tumbling about quickly became second nature. The charge of adolescent male appeal is hard to refute, though: her physique, especially as it was realised on the box art, was embarrassingly unsubtle.

  Core had been developing the game in parallel on both the PlayStation and the rival Sega console, the Saturn. However, Sega had struck a deal with Core to allow the Saturn an earlier launch date, and this gave Core and Eidos their first inkling of the potential scale of the game’s su
ccess. ‘We launched on Sega Saturn first. It was just pre-Christmas, they had a month of exclusivity,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘As soon as it was on the Saturn, everything went crazy. We had all these PlayStation owners who wanted Tomb Raider to be launched on their console.’

  The launch of Tomb Raider for the PlayStation was scaled up – now it was to be a landmark event. The press were junketed out to Egypt, even while Heath-Smith and his team were frantically finishing the PlayStation version in Derby. ‘I didn’t go – I was stuck in the office,’ he says. ‘We worked up to the wire.’ But it was worth it. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and sales were set to follow. ‘We knew we’d got a good game,’ says Heath-Smith, ‘but never realised that we had a game that was going to be just as phenomenal as it was. Nobody could have.’

  On the cusp of one of the biggest successes in the history of British games, Toby Gard quit.

  ‘It was a disaster,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘I just couldn’t believe it. I remember saying, “Listen, Toby, this game’s going to be huge. You’re on a commission for this, you’re on a bonus scheme, you’re going to make a fortune, don’t leave. Just sit here for the next two years. Don’t do anything – you’ll make more money than you’ll ever see in your life.”’