Please Don’t Screw This Up…

I still remember back in 1996 (My first year in Singapore) with my still relatively shiny and relatively new Playstation when I finally got around to picking up what was touted as the revolutionary new next generation adventure game, a little title by the name Tomb Raider. Back then it was getting rave reviews in the press as a pretty deep game and a strong indicator of what kind of evolutionary game play we could expect from these more substantially powerful new systems. The super-realistic graphics looked like this:

Mind you this was when the about to become legendary marketing blitz known as Lara Croft was anything but, and the game was still considered a “serious” game for aficionados who knew what they were doing rather than the “casual friendly” atmosphere that older–and some would say more elitest–curmudgeonly gamers bemoan in today’s video game climate.

But the original Tomb Raider was one hell of a fun game. Graphics which are laughable by today’s (And tomorrow’s impending) standards were still pretty amazing back then, and Tomb Raider did one thing right that few games had managed to accomplish; a sense of wonder.

By that, I don’t mean the novelty of having a girl running and gunning, but the more innocent kind, such as the first time Lara drops through a hole and sees the vast sunken ancient Greek ruins in their entirety, and you realize “I get to wander around in that.” It was exploration at its best, because for the first time, huge environments were yours for the wandering, and the work put into those 1996 graphics was clearly a labor of love. Tomb Raider, purely as a game, was a wonderous thing to play and behold.

Part of that has a lot to do with the original designer, Toby Gard, who at the time was still with Core, the developer of Tomb Raider. His initial idea for Lara Croft was an intelligent, eccentric, athletic archaeologist type who bonded to players because of how capable she was. He wanted the player to like and respect Lara and off-handedly note that she was not half bad lookin’ either.

Eidos, the publisher, had other ideas, and though the game became the darling of critics for its strong gameplay elements, there was quite a bit of buzz over this early female heroine of gaming, and Eidos saw a marketing opportunity that they chomped down on like a rabid dog thrown into a room with a man who has a T-bone steak tied to his leg. Lara became their mascot and she was pimped out to many a magazine, news article and televised appearance because she was a girl, she was digital, and that was incredibly new and shiny.

Strangely enough, at this point, Toby, seeing what had become of his creation, left Core.

Even more strangely enough, each successive sequel became less fun and innovative than the original and soon, Eidos found themselves coasting more off their initial marketing momentum than any great leaps of gaming or evolution, unlike, say, Solid Snake of Metal Gear Solid fame, or the various incarnations of Grand Theft Auto that always got bigger and better. Hm… Creator leaves franchise, franchise starts to bomb. Coincidence?

It got to the point where serious gamers had all but abandoned Tomb Raider completely. It was almost an embarrassment to gamers that Lara still had fame in the eyes of the public when she had been deserted by players years ago. The marketing machine continued with Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider movie, which was just so-so, but the real blow, the one that knocked Lara off her feet in recent years has been the one-two combo of a bad movie AND bad game.

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness is the first and currently only version of Lara on the current generation of consoles, and it’s not a great game. Eidos had hoped it would salvage the dying franchise in the minds of the gamers, but instead merely confirmed to gamers that they Eidos had, indeed, completely lost it. Add to that the new movie Cradle Of Life doing far worse than either Eidos or Paramount had expected and you can practically hear the saws working on the pinewood to hack together a Lara sized coffin.

But wait, there’s hope yet. In recent months, people who still pay attention to these things have noticed this floating around:

Yep. The old girl’s back, looking younger, more realistic, and more reasonably proportioned than past outings. And, in what must surely be killing some people over at both Core and Eidos, alarm about each successive failure to keep Lara’s respect in gamer circles has reached fever pitch, and development of this new Tomb Raider game, dubbed Tomb Raider Legend, has been passed over a developer named Crystal Dynamics. And they’re hoping to have it out by 2006.

Oh, and the guy at Crystal Dynamics working on the new game? Toby Gard, the same one that started this all in the first place and left when he saw nothing but failure in what Core/Eidos intended for his creation. From all accounts, he’s trying to make it a good game again, rather than just a kick start excuse for another Angelina Jolie movie.

I still have fond memories of the first Tomb Raider game. By the time I played the latest version, I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it of my own free will, and it was the demands of the job that forced me to slog through the rest of it. I hope that Toby can bring a little more of that magic back again, as he seems to think it’s time to put more “Tomb” back in Tomb Raider rather than turning it into a big stealth-fest, imitating whatever new genre happens to be hot that year.

Go on, Toby.

Make us like Lara again.