Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  Under its new developer, Tomb Raider became a success again, but relative to the growth in gaming since 1996, a more modest one. And Lara doesn’t feel like a faded Cool Britannia ambassador. Like the best of the brands who once huddled under that dubious umbrella, she has comfortably outlived the fad.

  Despite the varied fortunes of the franchise, Lara’s impact on gaming remains undeniable, especially in Britain. Only a year before Tomb Raider, the medium had felt trivial and confined, and was often opaque to outsiders. With its relatable, ‘human’ heroine, sumptuous 3D environment, and easily graspable gameplay, Tomb Raider opened a window into the world of gaming. And as an icon, Lara Croft’s impromptu marketing blitz saw her smash through it entirely. Throughout 1997, countless media voices who had previously ignored gaming were now debating it, and all due to an accidental female figurehead. ‘It helped take gaming into everyday conversation,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘It was the start, really, of video games being talked about from a social perspective. Tomb Raider touched so many aspects of media that it just became a phenomenon. If anything touches that many pieces of media, it’s going to touch people’s lives.’

  But the nineties Lara Croft would not have convinced a sceptic that computer games were no longer the preserve of immature boys. That was still somewhat true: by the end of the decade gamers had aged, but a majority were still men. In time the gender balance would become more even, and it is possible that Tomb Raider, with its well defined heroine, hastened the change. Ian Livingstone is adamant on the issue. ‘Tomb Raider is a game in which nearly fifty per cent of the audience are female. Because she’s strong, intelligent, athletic, independent, adventurous – in fact, she doesn’t even need men. Guys want to play with Lara Croft, and women want to be Lara Croft.’ Livingstone is a passionate advocate for his franchise; he gives the impression that he has had to make this point many times before.

  Whatever its sexual politics, Tomb Raider is a strong brand, and even after a bumpy ride and a much slower release schedule, it remains one of the most recognised names in gaming. It certainly proved to be more resilient than many rival intellectual properties. It survived when Gard left Core, and, in turn, flourished after it too moved on.

  In 2007, Crystal Dynamics produced a tenth anniversary edition of the first Tomb Raider, entirely rebuilt with its state-of-the-art technology. It included a novel feature: once the game was complete, it could be replayed with a ‘director’s commentary’ in which the developers talked through the process of making each area of the game. One of the voices belonged to Toby Gard. He chatted amiably about his original levels and these redesigns, sounding happy to be reunited with Lara.

  In fact, Gard had been a consultant to Crystal Dynamics since it rebooted the franchise in California. It wasn’t an empty gesture: he’s had key roles on every one of the company’s Tomb Raider titles, writing stories, working on Lara’s animation, and directing cut scenes. And it was Gard who redesigned her look for the new games. Perhaps thanks to his presence, the character has matured gracefully, in tone rather than age. It’s certainly hard to believe that Gard would have stayed if he were unhappy with their choices. Lara Croft might have belonged to Eidos but, once again, Toby Gard had become her guardian.

  11

  Hit and Run

  In an empty coach park on the Isle of Wight, a graphic artist called Neil Barnden drove an ageing Chevy station wagon, slightly over the speed limit, directly at a man called Tony. Barnden had been pursuing him all afternoon, with Tony diving out of the way of the car, or spinning off the bumper as it flew into him. The victim wasn’t entirely unprotected. He had cardboard stuffed down his trousers.

  Tony was a friend of Patrick Buckland. They had met through their mutual interest in ‘banger racing’, where clapped-out cars try to outrun, and smash into, one another for sport. In 1996, Buckland’s company, Stainless Games, was developing a new project that borrowed much from this hobby. But for the purposes of the game, the races had become even more hazardous: as well as rival cars, there would be people wandering around the courses. The company’s artists had asked for reference footage of cars smashing into pedestrians, and Tony had volunteered as the crash test dummy. ‘He was pretty much game for anything,’ says Buckland.

  At the end of the day’s filming, Tony wanted to try rolling over the entire car. Barland cranked the speed up to 35mph. The amateur stuntman made it onto the bonnet, and then smashed heavily into the windscreen. And when it later turned out that a camera setting had rendered all of the shots unusable, Tony offered to record it all again. It made for spectacular footage as the game’s pedestrians jumped, scampered and tumbled realistically. Stainless Games’ artists then added some subtle finishing touches: when a person was hit, they burst into a mess of guts and eyeballs.

  In the mid-nineties, when Tony’s demented devotion to duty was being filmed, it could be said that the games industry had a problem with maturity, but there were different ideas about precisely what that problem was. For gamers and people within the industry, the issue was that, even with breakout titles such as Tomb Raider, their fast-growing medium rarely earned mainstream recognition. Home gaming was still overwhelmingly the preserve of the young, and it showed. From the subject matter to the skills required, there was very little that could connect gaming to the generations that had missed it.

  The demographics were changing, though; players were ageing, and growing in number and diversity as consoles offered richer experiences. But for non-gamers, playing computer games meant being held in a silent, zombie-like state, absorbed for hours in trivial shapes and noises. Games simply didn’t look like a healthy hobby.

  One idea in particular lingered: that games were for children. The mainstream press seemed easily riled at the suggestion of grown-up themes in the medium. Newspaper stories about youthful millionaires had been supplanted by gasps of shock at graphic violence. There was some foundation for this: when the fighting game Mortal Kombat was released in 1992, it was most likely to be teenagers who watched as a pugilist’s head was torn off and waved as a trophy.

  Britain’s tabloid press, ever eager to find topics that might incense its readers, had a long history of fuelling moral panics about the effects of violence on young minds. In the seventies there had been much disquiet about amoral, dystopian comics such as Action, and the VCR boom of the eighties led to widespread anxiety about ‘video nasties’. Computer games were, in the public eye at least, for children, so the marriage of gaming and gore was a potent combination for outrage. But in the nineties, two titles in quick succession would pick a fight with the tabloids on their own turf.

  And win.

  Patrick Buckland had never been an obvious threat to the nation’s moral fibre. For his school’s sports day in 1978, he and a friend had written a BASIC program to collate the results on their RML 380Z computer. ‘We were both a couple of geeks who would only ever have run 100m as a physics experiment,’ he says. ‘We nearly got beaten up in a pub one night due to playing darts and scoring in binary and thus taking forever.’

  His first success as a developer was too abstract to be a menace to anyone. He had written a game for the Apple Macintosh called Crystal Raider, in which the player used the mouse to collect objects from around the screen. It was addictive and therapeutic, and a Californian publisher called Greene Inc quickly picked up a sequel for commercial release. Crystal Quest was one of the first colour applications for the Mac, helping to sell colour monitors. And it stayed in the charts for eight years.

  It was the far reach of Crystal Quest that gave birth to Stainless Games. Neil Barnden, a freelance artist, had been playing the game for some time before he noticed that the author was an old school friend. Barnden and Buckland had been out of touch for years, but found themselves well matched to start a development team. ‘He was the hot-shot artist in our year, and I was the hot-shot mathematician and physicist,’ says Buckland, before adding: ‘I’m talking by highschool standards here you must understand.’
Stainless Games was formed.

  And Buckland did have a wild streak. His hobby, banger racing, attracted thrill-seekers, but even amongst them Buckland stood out. ‘I was known as the craziest nutter out on the track,’ he says. ‘I think I only ever finished one race in my ten years of doing it – I was devastated!’

  So it might have been natural that banger racing should form the basis for Stainless’s first game, but there was another seed. In the kind of racing game that Geoff Crammond wrote, and especially in the arcade titles from Japan such as Ridge Racer and Daytona, the player was always encouraged to match the ideal racing line implied by the track. This suited some people, but other players found it dull: before long, they would be breaking the rules, trying to plunge the car off cliffs or accelerating backwards around the track. This was how Buckland wanted to play, and how he thought others might too. ‘I wanted to make a game where this was the whole point of it,’ he says. ‘It also just happened to be something I knew a lot about, as my weekly whiplash could testify!’

  Since reuniting, Buckland had pulled Barnden into his motor-bashing hobby, and the pair’s first game was an incarnation of banger racing called Demolition Derby 3D. It was only a demonstration, but it showed their agenda. The race was a framing device, not the objective, and the player had the freedom to drive anywhere, revelling in the carnage of pile-ups. As drivers were thrown into each other with impressively boisterous collisions, the finishing place barely mattered. The game was, quite deliberately, destruction oriented.

  But the damage at the heart of the crashes was skewed. Clever code identified the ‘culpability’ of the collision – blame for the impact was calculated, and damage was apportioned asymmetrically. It was, though, the victim who was penalised: Buckland and Barnden’s philosophy was to reward the player for destruction. ‘Basically, if you had smashed into him rather than vice versa, then your car got away unscathed whereas his blew up,’ says Buckland. ‘It was essential that you weren’t punished for smashing into somebody – that was the core concept.’

  The result was an impressive proof of concept, yet publishers were reluctant to take it on. Stainless’s first demo had been written for the Apple Macintosh, which had a slender presence in both the UK and the gaming market. Buckland promised that he could move development to the PC, but it must have seemed an unlikely boast; the architectures of the two machines were quite different. Eventually, the project was taken on by SCi, a publisher with a hunger for licences. It suggested that the game could be a vehicle for Mad Max. As fans of the film, Buckland and Barnden didn’t object, but the licence holders couldn’t be found. And then Roger Corman, the legendarily prolific producer of exploitation films, announced that he was making a sequel to one of the most notorious car movies ever committed to celluloid.

  Death Race 2000 was a road-race movie with a high-concept premise: within the rules of the film’s transcontinental race, points were awarded for killing pedestrians. It seemed a good match for the brutal fun of the Demolition Derby demo. There was already an aggression to the game, and ramming into human beings would crystallise it into outright violence.

  Stainless expanded and recruited. Buckland hired a brilliant young physicist called Kev Martin, who had published his first computer game at seven and now, at twenty-one, had completed his PhD. He didn’t drive, so wrote the physics engine for the car from first principles. It paid huge dividends: the vehicles acquired uncanny liveliness. They weren’t glued to the track or gliding with perfect traction across the roads, they took to the air over ramps and spun out on the course. And the crashes felt real. Cars collided with convincing weight, rolling and bumping as they went.

  Breaking new ground meant a Heath Robinson approach to development, which flowed from the attitude of the team as much as the novelty of the code. It was around this time that they started ramming a car into Tony the human crash barrier, but this was only the most visible manifestation of their gonzo game making. The team were constantly testing new technologies, seeing what worked. The physics engine was refined; now parts could break off cars and scenery. And the Stainless team pandered to the voyeurism of watching carnage with the introduction of an ‘action replay’, a nightmarishly complicated addition that required all of their effects to be reversible, and undermined lots of the tricks that games had previously employed to economise on visuals. But they tackled every challenge, improvising ingenious solutions with the same have-a-go fervour with which they ran over their friend. If bedroom coding had a team equivalent, this was it.

  Stainless was self-consciously pioneering, but it was running out of time. The company’s contract gave the team twelve months to produce a game, and it had passed in a whirlwind of innovation. Yet their publisher indulged them – when SCi’s new development director saw an early build, he recognised the visceral and quite violent potential, and extended both the schedule and the budget.

  And then the licence disappeared. Corman’s proposed sequel never arrived – Death Race 2020 was released as a comic instead – but by now Stainless was well advanced with a game of vehicular mayhem. SCi might have taken the opportunity to tone down the project, but instead made the opposite decision. ‘There was a switch in the code to either lose or gain points when you killed people,’ says Buckland. ‘By default it was on “lose”. But Rob Henderson, an exec from SCi, said, “Fuck it, let’s go for it, no half measures here!”’ SCi had lost its licence, but Stainless gained creative freedom. The team renamed their game Carmageddon.

  The personality of Stainless was visible throughout. The goal was to accrue enough points to open access to the following course, but within that objective anything was allowed. Traditionalists could simply aim to win the race, but there was far more fun to be had by treating it as a destruction derby, earning victory by smashing into other cars. And sprinkled throughout the levels were gatherings of pedestrians. They fled in panic as cars roared towards them, but it was often too late, and the Tony-based outline would disappear under the player’s wheels in a splatter of blood. It appeared deliberately transgressive, but the atmosphere was mostly cheeky, even puerile. Pensioners shouted ‘I was in the war’ as the player approached, a special power sent all pedestrians blind, so that they jumped at the sound of the car’s horn, and cows roamed the courses, simply to act as bumper fodder.

  The violence may have been humorous, but it was also a marketable hook. SCi didn’t hesitate, and the blurb on the packaging piled on the outrage. ‘Pedestrians are the target as you drive towards and through them at speeds of over 100mph,’ it boasted. ‘Not even farmyard animals are safe as you slam on your handbrake and spin into a cow-mincing frenzy – blood, guts and udders fly past your car as you wheel-spin through their remains.’

  The invitation was openly provocative, but SCi also wanted another trophy for the box. Computer games at the time were subject to two kinds of rating classification. The more common was the Video Standards Council, which reviewed games, often within a day, and advised on the rating they would earn. It was a voluntary scheme, with no legal authority over either publishers or retailers, although they almost always complied. And there was also the British Board of Film Classification, the same body that rated and censored movies. Its ratings carried legal weight, and had to be displayed on the packaging and observed by the retailer. In the nineties, it usually wasn’t necessary for a game to be submitted to the BBFC unless, the rules said, there was gross violence towards humans or animals. A lot hung on the realism of the image, and for all its advances, Carmageddon’s depiction of humans was still primitive, making it at worst a borderline case. And yet, almost certainly chasing the stamp of authenticity for the violence an adult rating would bring, SCi submitted the game to the BBFC.

  ‘The first thing we knew,’ says Buckland, ‘was that it had been banned and that we shouldn’t answer the phones to the press!’ The BBFC had refused a certificate. The Board hadn’t hated the game, in fact the reports that the developers heard were that the BBFC staff had ho
oted with laughter while playing it, but that very enjoyment had worried them. Killing pedestrians was too much fun. SCi’s ruse appeared to have backfired.

  ‘As developers we were very frustrated,’ says Buckland. ‘We’d spent a lot of very late nights and weekends getting that game out, and now it was just sat there on the shelf.’ Stainless was left in a bind. It couldn’t remove the gore from the game without changing its essential nature. Carmageddon was meant to be outrageous: without the gore it would be just another racer, yet with the release date in July coming up fast the company had no option but to cave. In a moment of inspiration, Buckland and his team found a workaround: the BBFC’s objection had been about reducing human beings to puddles of gore, but what if they were non-human? The pedestrians were hurriedly transformed into green-blooded zombies, and the opening sequences amended to suggest a noble case for running them over.

  But the green blood didn’t matter. The PC boasted a vibrant community of players who liked to modify games by directly changing their code. Inevitably, ‘blood patches’ for Carmageddon were soon available on the internet, and once installed, the figures on the road bled red once again. There was a suspicion that these patches had a semi-official origin, but Stainless made no comment. The regeneration of the zombies came with plausible deniability.