Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (38 page)

Tomb Raider
’s mainstream credentials were confirmed when it was made into a blockbuster summer movie. Discussions started in 1997, as part of the
franchise’s early gold rush, but as is common in film development, it wasn’t until 2001 that audiences saw
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
on screen. Ian Livingstone was keen to keep
the story faithful to the heart of the game, so Heath-Smith became an executive producer. It was an eye-opening experience for the British developer, playing at producing, choosing actors, but he
didn’t get diverted. ‘I always treated them as 120 million dollar adverts, to be honest,’ he says. ‘I never wanted to make a game of the movie in case the movie was bad.
Fundamentally, we still had a very strong franchise.’

As it was, the film came out at the start of
Tomb Raider
’s longest hiatus. After six years, Sony was finally preparing to launch a successor to the ageing PlayStation hardware.
The PlayStation 2 was powerful but complicated to develop for, and mastering it was crippling the schedules of developers around the world. Core was no longer under an exclusive deal with Sony, but
as the makers of a tent-pole franchise, the company was given early sight of Sony’s new technology.

This early knowledge proved to be a curse as much as a blessing. Core assigned a team of a hundred developers to the next
Tomb Raider
game, and they spent
twelve months devising the technology that would be the basis of their release for the unseen system. But late on, Sony changed the architecture for the PlayStation 2, and much of Core’s work
was rendered worthless. It was the start of a long run of trouble for
Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness
.

Jeremy Heath-Smith ascribes a lot of the problems to pressure from within Eidos. ‘We wanted to essentially do
Tomb Raider 1
on PS2 – but they wouldn’t have it,’
he says. ‘We listened to the marketing people, who wanted it to change. They wanted conversation, they wanted interaction.’ A huge amount of time was devoted to developing technology
for features that were sidelines to the main game. It deprived Core of one of its easier options: buying some working PlayStation 2 technology ‘off the shelf’ from a third party, and
concentrating on the gameplay the team understood. ‘Developing our own technology caused delay after delay after delay,’ says Heath-Smith. He often felt it would be better to abandon
their first attempt at the game’s mechanics and simply start again.

But Eidos had little scope to accommodate delays – the public limited company was in turmoil. At its peak, during the fervour of the dot-com bubble of the late nineties, Eidos had been
valued at more than half a billion pounds. But the fall from favour of technology stocks had coincided with a lull in the earnings from Eidos’s most reliable asset, and the business was in
desperate need of funds. ‘Eidos had built its company on
Tomb Raider
,’ says Heath-Smith, ‘and 2,000 people around the world were relying on Lara feeding them.’

To shore up Eidos’s share price and its prospects, Heath-Smith and the rest of the board invested in a rights issue. Even though he could see the shaky state the game was in, Heath-Smith
personally put up a small fortune. ‘You become blind when you’re so close to something,’ he says. ‘I put half a million pounds of my own money into the rights issue to show
confidence. I always thought as a team we would pull it off.’

In 2003, after three years of public postponements and an unimaginable amount of managerial heartache,
Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness
was released around
the world. Lara Croft was still recognised, but it had been years since she had been the face of the industry. The game itself had been plagued with problems until the very last moment and, despite
a final development rush, its release missed a key financial reporting deadline. Millions of copies had been pressed by Sony when Core found a ‘crash bug’, an error in the coding that
could freeze the game. Heath-Smith tried a final desperate salvage job. ‘We wanted Sony to launch it with that bug,’ he says, ‘and they wouldn’t. Funnily enough.’

Even now, for all its agonising gestation, Heath-Smith is proud of
The Angel of Darkness
. ‘That game truly was phenomenal, the depth was incredible. And, sadly, it never reached
its potential.’ The game’s play-shattering flaw was that the control system, the heart and joy of the original franchise, was imprecise and horribly unpredictable. This fatally
compromised whatever strengths
Angel of Darkness
possessed: the athletic elegance with which the player could once tackle devious architectural trials was lost in frustration, flailing and
unfair failure. It was a shortcoming that attacked the very heart of the franchise; the player had lost their grip on their character. The essential bond of empathy with Lara Croft had been
shattered.

‘As soon as the game was boxed, we knew that it was off the mark,’ admits Heath-Smith. Reaching nearly two million sales,
Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness
didn’t
perform dreadfully. But Eidos had been projecting three to five million units, and for them the shortfall was disastrous. And it’s hard to believe that those gamers who did buy the game made
much headway with it. For Heath-Smith, that’s the real tragedy. ‘Graphically, design wise, I think it was the best work that we’ve done. There are some mind-blowing bits in
Tomb Raider
on PlayStation 2, just mind-blowing. But we always knew that the camera and control system weren’t right. We just knew.’

Lara Croft slipped away from her British creators. Eidos, financially trampled by the sales performance of
Angel of Darkness
, took the
Tomb Raider
franchise away from Core Design and passed it to Crystal Dynamics, a Californian developer that it owned. Heath-Smith also left. ‘I got canned, which was fine. It was my
turn to put my head above the trenches.’

Both Lara and her publisher are still British. They both come from Wimbledon, but they are both becoming more international. Lara’s adventures since leaving Derby have been well received
– the new games didn’t include any of the diversionary features that Eidos’s marketing department had demanded from
Angel of Darkness
, and Crystal Dynamics perfected an
updated control system. Lara’s now settled in to her Californian home, although the player wouldn’t know it unless they checked the box. And Eidos itself is now the British arm of a
multinational publisher. A year after
Angel of Darkness
was released, Eidos put itself up for sale. There was plenty of interest in the owners of Lara Croft: one bid came from a consortium
which included U2’s lead singer, Bono. A sale was completed in 2005, and after a couple of name changes and resales, Eidos became SquareEnix Europe, a subsidiary of a Japanese giant.

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.

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.’