Anna Daniels
To have any idea about the tomb raider, you should probably know about Tomb Raider. The Core Design-produced video game was a surprise success, pulling the distributor Eidos out of near insolvency when it landed with a splash in 1996.
The game was designed by a six-person team that began work in 1994. The original character was a man, modeled loosely on Indiana Jones. Stories differ on how this rugged man became Lara Croft, with some sources saying that the studio’s owner feared copyright litigation and designer Toby Gard saying he saw that gamers were starved for playable women.
“It became clear to me watching people play Virtua Fighter, which was kind of the first big 3D-character console game, that even though there were only two female characters in the lineup, in the almost every game I saw being played, someone was picking one of the two females,” he said in a 2001 interview with the BBC.
Even after Core Design made the decision to make their protagonist a woman, Lara Croft was not yet built. Designers began their game with the South American heroine Laura Cruz at the center. Cruz was meant to be a hard-charging and militaristic character. The decision to make her British nobility — and the personality quirks that followed — came after they opted to move the character to the UK in a nod to their boss.
Written by: Looper
