Tomb Raider’s makers recall the crunch: ‘until 2 or 3am every day’

Paul Douglas, lead programmer and co-creator of Tomb Raider, joined Core Design in the summer of 1994 and met Toby Gard, who showed him concept sketches for the game. Gard had already come up with the title and drawn a mock-up box cover showing a woman holding two pistols.

Douglas was working on a golf game called The Scottish Open when Gard persuaded him they should pitch the idea to Jeremy Heath-Smith, Core’s co-founder, who gave them the go-ahead to make a prototype. “If I had stuck to the golf game, I would have had a much easier life,” Douglas said.

We worked till 2am every day for a year – and managed to bottle lightning

After brainstorming sessions, the team settled on four pillars: platforming, puzzles, combat and story. Combat was always the weakest element, Douglas said, but there was no time to improve it. They also came up with the plot and level themes, whittling a long list of archaeological locations, including Petra and Angkor Wat, down to four: Peru, Greece, Egypt and Atlantis.

Lara was originally Latina, with a more realistic, almost androgynous appearance. The team felt more stylised movement would play better, so her physique changed to reflect that. She became a British mercenary and then, thanks to scriptwriter Vicky Arnold, an aristocrat who tracks down historical artefacts just for fun.

Douglas and Gard came up with the movement metrics by measuring out a hopscotch grid in the car park. Lara was three paces tall and each block in the game’s environment was four paces. All of the gameplay systems grew from those measurements and constraints.

Getting the game delivered on time was brutal. Douglas took just three days of holiday in two years. He and Gard were in the office until 2 or 3am every day, including weekends, for the best part of a year. “Toby made himself sick with the stress,” Douglas said.

The team was on the cusp of 3D games going mainstream, and the action-adventure focus made the game somewhat unique. Then the marketability of Lara thrust Tomb Raider into the stratosphere. The publisher, Eidos Interactive, took the character and ran with it. “I like to think the quality of the game spoke for itself, regardless of the way Lara was sexualised,” Douglas said.

He said they never imagined Tomb Raider would blow up in the way it did. It was the right time and place, and it was different from the competition. “We showed that ideas that go against conventional wisdom – a female character will never sell! – can uncover new territory and find success.” He added: “We managed to bottle lightning, although I’m still carrying the scars of its creation.”

Heather Stevens, level designer

Heather Stevens said most of Tomb Raider was developed in a big Victorian building on Ashbourne Road in Derby, where the team sat sweating in the summer and freezing in the winter. She was the only female developer, but said that did not faze her. She felt respected and was almost seen as a sister by some – the team was like a family. “It was a defining time in my life.”

She described Gard as lovely, very eccentric and a bit of a genius. He had put together a demo like a simple top-down version of Prince of Persia, with an Indiana Jones-like character jumping and tumbling from platforms. Although management thought no one would want to play a female character, they went with it.

“There’s a certain empathy you get from playing Lara,” Stevens said. “It’s probably the number of times she dies and that awful scream.” She was taciturn and mysterious: a loner who played her own game and didn’t answer to anybody. Women hadn’t really been portrayed like that before.

Giving Lara pistols enabled the team to show off her acrobatic movement. She was mostly pursued by animals rather than people. Hearing a bat, or the growl of a bear, was much scarier than a gunshot. “You felt at the mercy of the wild.” The team pushed the 3D environment to its limits. With limited memory and processor speed, they were clever with it, giving players the sense of a vast, cavernous space that was actually lots of rooms bolted together.

I was able to buy a house with the royalties

Before designing a level, the team always held a meeting to come up with a rough schematic. They all enjoyed history and threw in whatever myths and legends they thought would be fun and interesting. “Our imaginations ran wild – to the point where we threw a T rex into Peru!”

Stevens said Eidos saw the potential of Lara rather than the game, so focused on her. That was the right thing to do, she said, but it went a bit too far with what she was wearing or the poses she was put in for some marketing campaigns. “They showed a lack of imagination by oversexualising her.”

She knew they had made a great game, but it didn’t really sink in until she saw the sales figures. “It was life-changing for all of us. People who were skint before were suddenly pulling up in sports cars. I was able to buy a house from the royalties.”

Stevens said Lara is right up there with iconic characters such as Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. “Feeling as if you’ve left a mark, and connected with millions of people through something you’ve created, is amazing.”