/ 23 February 2006

Ten years on, should Lara be entombed?

Lara Croft is hitting the comeback trail. With the April 7 release of Tomb Raider: Legend, the seventh iteration of the game that is her main star vehicle, one of the best-known icons of the videogame world is to make her first outing since 2003’s disastrous Angel of Darkness. This year also marks the 10th anniversary of her first appearance. But can she still cut it in the 21st century?

Croft was once the girl who could do no wrong. The first Tomb Raider game, for the PlayStation, launched in 1996 to universal acclaim. One of the first 3D action-adventure games, Tomb Raider was the first such game to feature a female hero. As Ian Livingstone, a founder of the publisher Eidos, puts it: ”Men like her because she’s athletic, sexy, intelligent, independent and adventurous, and women like her because she’s … athletic, sexy, intelligent, independent and adventurous.”

Livingstone says the success of Tomb Raider took Eidos by surprise: ”We only pressed 100 000 units for the launch, but it ended up selling five-million.” Hyperbole quickly followed. In April 1997, then-Liverpool goalkeeper David James cited all-night sessions playing Tomb Raider as the mitigating factor behind a dreadful performance on the pitch. The following month now-defunct magazine the Face put Croft on its cover. Even the Economist wrote about her. She has advertised Lucozade and Land Rover, and been played by Angelina Jolie in two critically panned but commercially successful films.

Eidos and developer Core Design churned out a Tomb Raider game each year between 1996 and 2000, and the public lapped them up: the series has sold a combined 30-million units. But disaster struck. Core Design failed to get to grips with programming for the PlayStation 2 and the sixth Tomb Raider game (the first for that console), subtitled Angel of Darkness, was repeatedly delayed. When it arrived in 2003, it was riddled with bugs. The developers licked their wounds and Core Design’s executives, many of whom were by now Eidos board members, bailed out. Eidos entered a slump, culminating in its takeover last year by the much smaller United Kingdom games publisher SCi.

Tomb Raider‘s fall from grace led to Eidos’s demise, which is ironic since, as Livingstone affirms, Eidos would never have become a major games publisher without the franchise. In 1995, Eidos produced video compression technology, and was looking to move into games, though it had only one major title — Championship Manager — on its books. Livingstone says: ”We had the opportunity to buy the publisher Centregold. As part of the due diligence process, I had to go round their developers. The last game they showed me was Tomb Raider, with Lara in all her glory.” After seeing that, Livingstone rang business partner Charles Cornwall to give the green light.

After the Angel of Darkness debacle, Eidos committed what some games fans saw as sacrilege by instructing Crystal Dynamics, a developer based in San Francisco, to start work on the next Tomb Raider game with a back-to-basics approach. ”We did a lot of focus testing,” says Livingstone. ”People wanted her to return to her roots with lots of tomb raiding rather than wandering around the empty streets of Paris. And they complained about the controls and camera.”

Extreme makeover

The result is Tomb Raider: Legend, to be available for PS2, Xbox and PC, while Xbox 360 and Sony PSP versions will follow. Croft has had a makeover by creator Toby Gard, resulting in a less pneumatic bust and an extended set of animations that see her, for example, hinting where you should move her next by moving her gaze.

The game has been well received by reviewers, but is Croft now an anachronism? William Latham, director of Games Audit, which advises games companies and investors, thinks so. ”The public has moved on to Grand Theft Auto-style games. Older-style games are not doing as well as anticipated. People want a different sort of entertainment now.

”There’s a limit to how far publishers can milk franchises. Publishers are making too many games; they are a bit stuck for ideas, given the size of the investment necessary to create games. Producing demos is very expensive, and publishers won’t commit to projects from just a design document.”

Livingstone argues that Croft’s iconic status will help Tomb Raider become the first games franchise to make a comeback after imploding, and cites another icon of British fiction: ”James Bond is still alive in the 21st century. Lara has survived the test of time and there’s no reason to suggest she can’t be even bigger. Once you’ve broken through that awareness barrier, you become a permanent fixture, and she’s the most famous digital icon in the world.”

Cool moves, not hot pants, are the key to success

I never felt the first Tomb Raider game was about Lara Croft. It was the gameplay that was special — like the feeling you got when you saw the T-Rex charging up the valley towards you. She was just a refreshing avatar. Since then, Croft has become a household name. Unfortunately, for much of the non-gaming population, they have mentally filed the name under ”geeky gamer masturbatory material”.

It’s partly unfair. Eidos has been strict about the use of its heroine and didn’t allow her to take part in Playboy‘s now infamous digital dames feature.

However, it did endow her with very sizeable, almost comedy breasts, that will haunt her for ever. Plus, she is always strikingly inappropriately dressed for ”work”. If I was off to get shot at, I’d want to do it in something more akin to a Kevlar romper suit, than a tank top and hot pants. Women don’t want to look sexy in combat. They want to look not dead.

The new Croft has a more realistic smaller-breasted look (although midriff and excessive leg display is still de rigueur). But damage has been done – in poor game design decisions as much as artistic ones. It is great gameplay, not smaller boobs, that will bring the love back. I really wish her well, because it is a sad day when even a virtual woman gets overshadowed by her own cup size. – Rhianna Pratchett – Guardian Unlimited Â