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    The Making of Tomb Raider
    The Making of Tomb Raider
    The Making of Tomb Raider
    Ebook223 pages5 hours

    The Making of Tomb Raider

    By Daryl Baxter

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    About this ebook

    Back in 1994 at the game company ‘CORE Design’ in Derby, Lara Croft was born. Through eighteen months of pure hard work from the team, Tomb Raider was released in 1996 and became the success that we see today; taking part in the mid-nineties celebrations of Brit-Pop and Girl Power. This is the story of the team who were involved in creating the first two games, then leaving the series to a new team in 1998. Lara Croft brought class, comedy, and a James Bondian role to the game, dreamt up by Toby Gard and helped to become a pitch with Paul Douglas. The game was a gamble, but because everyone at the company believed in it, it led to huge success for everyone, except for Toby and Paul. ‘The Making of Tomb Raider’ goes into detail of how Lara and the games were born, alongside why Toby Gard and Paul Douglas left before the sequel was released. Throughout eleven chapters of countless interviews, this book will tell you who was responsible for creating the first two games; from its levels, its music, the many voices of Lara Croft, and much more. The team also reveals all about the star of the second game; Winston the Butler, and how he came to be by Joss Charmet. Over twenty people were interviewed for this story; from the pitch for what would be Tomb Raider, alongside the challenges along the way, up until the release of Tomb Raider 2 in 1997…
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 20, 2021
    ISBN9781399002066
    The Making of Tomb Raider
    Author

    Daryl Baxter

    Daryl Baxter is a writer and podcaster from Lincoln, where his work has featured in sites such as WIRED, TechRadar, SUPERJUMP, Den of Geek and many more. Alongside Sonic and Metal Gear, Tomb Raider was a series he grew up with, wanting to create a writing career born out of games.He’s interviewed people in the industry such as David Hayter; the voice of Solid Snake, Ed McMillen who co-created Super Meat Boy, and plenty more throughout his career so far.

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    • 4/5
      I inhaled this. I'm a huge fan of the early Tomb Raider games and have read and listened to a huge amount of what's been written about their production, story and reception. Despite that, Daryl Baxter's oral history of the making of the first two games finds a niche for itself as a gossipy retelling, rich on technical detail that's sure to delight even the most familiar fan. Disagreements are picked over, differing takes given, and a surprising number of perceived failures admitted to. A great little account of how games were made, back in the day.

    Book preview

    The Making of Tomb Raider - Daryl Baxter

    CHAPTER 1

    A CORE Beginning

    We need to start at the beginning by visiting the company that originally made Lara Croft.

    The games industry in 1988 was a sea filled with independent developers. They created games on their Amstrad or Amiga computers, in the hope that they would have their game sold to a magazine distributing shareware games on a floppy disk.

    It was also the year where the third generation of consoles was in full swing. Players were looking forward to playing Super Mario Bros 3, Ultima V, and Bionic Commando, while others were going to their nearest arcade to play Afterburner and Super Contra.

    While the home-console wars of SEGA and Nintendo were raging—with the SEGA Mega Drive about to launch, and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) still blowing past the competition thanks to its plethora of games ready to play—in the UK, Britsoft was taking off. People were quitting their jobs and setting up gaming companies, the majority of them developing games from the privacy of their bedrooms.

    Jeremy Heath-Smith had just come back from a meeting at Gremlin Games in Derby, UK and it was here that he saw an opportunity;

    Gremlin had a Derby office and they had to shut it down, they wanted to move 8 of them up to Sheffield. I went down to the office and I knew them well, and said look, you’re about to be relocated. They didn’t want to, and I said, let’s just start a new company. I borrowed sixteenthousand from my Grandma and CORE Design began. I remember even before TR that we were doing quite well regardless, it was an era of amazing times. The PC was starting to happen, and I recall one of our programmers would do our music, and Martin Iveson came in as this spotty kid, and he said he’d work for free; Toby said the same. Obviously they didn’t, they got a salary, but in that period it felt like the start of something, we had so much fun. Games like Thunderhawk on the Amiga ST in 1991, and etc sold in the region of 100,000 copies of that game, and we only wrote it in 4–5 months. I remember some games were just done for Virgin like Hook, and they were just terrible, but we still had such a great time developing all of these; it was a tight-knit team.

    It was on 13 May 1988 that CORE Design was first established. Based in Derby, CORE’s mission was to develop games for the Amiga. One year later CORE launched two games: Action Fighter and Rick Dangerous. These two games had a great impact with gamers and journalists on their first release.

    Released in 1989.

    Released in 1990.

    Simon Phipps is known to many as the creator for Rick Dangerous; whilst he left before development of Tomb Raider, he remembers how working at CORE was like in the early-nineties:

    I was one of the original guys that was hired when CORE started. Basically, we’d been working at Gremlin Graphics’ Derby offices making games and one day, Gremlin got into a bit of a cashflow pickle and had to make cutbacks. One of which was shutting down the satellite office in Derby. They offered us the chance of relocating to continue working for them in Sheffield—we didn’t fancy the 40 mile commute so when Jeremy came and said ‘work for me and you can carry on working here’ we all signed up. The early years were pretty solid—there were 8 or so of us knocking out platform games on the 16 bit machines, having fun, finishing at a reasonable time of an evening, and some of us so happy to be making games that some of us spent our evenings coding up our own projects that ended up getting published by other publishers, because at that time, CORE was a developer for hire.

    As the years progressed, CORE went on to develop games such as Rick Dangerous sequels, Chuck Rock, and Asterix. The company would be slowly recognised by the games industry as a team that would release games on time and on budget, while maintaining great reviews in the magazines.

    Despite the workloads every year, Simon would recall that it was a fun place to work at regardless:

    It was real good fun—the guys I were working with were all supertalented and fun to work with. We had challenges to be sure - I remember the Monty Python game we made on six formats (Spectrum, Amstrad, PC, Atari, Amiga, C64) being particularly torturous because it was a really hard subject to turn into a game. But, folks like Terry Lloyd, Rob Toone, Chris Shrigley, Stu Gregg, John Kirkland, Sean Dunlevy, Billy Allison—we’re still friends to this day. What folks tend to think of is what the game is like when it’s finished and whether it’s any good or not—for me—what really matters is the time you have making it and the people you make it with.

    The first level of the game.

    The team didn’t just consist of people from Gremlin Games. The company also looked for outside talent and sought those who were hungry for a fresh challenge, with great opportunity for future growth. Troy Horton was one of those brought into the fold in the early nineties:

    I was introduced to CORE actually. I was always interested in computers and stuff. After I left the army, I did a short programme course in Nottingham of like, six weeks. And a representative from the Nottingham Chamber of Commerce appeared, and just asked him some questions. And I don’t know why the subject of games came up. And he says, Oh, I know, a game company in Derby. Because I was thinking about what to do with my career at that point. And he says, I’ll introduce them. So I just went along for an interview and got it. I started in the ‘Quality Assurance’ department and there was only another person if I recall. And essentially, I built out their QA department, added some processes, built a database system which people could use online and collaborate for quality control of games more effectively and for reporting. I developed that in Visual Basic, if I remember, then very quickly they moved me over to a production role, where I was essentially the role of Producer on games after 1994.

    Released in 1991.

    Chuck in level 4.

    While the company was already looking at outside talent for future projects, there were employees who were friends with similar interests and an ambition to break into the industry. Stuart Atkinson was one of these, who already knew someone working at CORE:

    My lifelong friend Martin Iveson was a Musician at CORE. We’d both been using our computers at home to create art, music and small games – he knew I could probably get a job if I started sending artwork to him. I started skiving off doing my A levels and spent all day, every day on my Amiga producing work to send. That was enough to get me a trial period with the company which led to me spending ten years there!

    With any new project—be it a magazine, a television show, or a movie—it needs to be marketed to as many people as possible. Games were still in their early stages, but marketing was still key to the success of many entries that CORE were making in the early nineties. This was where Susie Hamilton arrived at the company as a fresh-faced assistant in the marketing department.

    I worked there for about eight years. I first started out as assistant to the marketing director in 1992. At that time we were based in relatively small offices on Ashbourne Road in Derby. We all smoked like troopers and drank too much coffee! When I first joined, the company was working on Amiga and PC titles. I wasn’t a gamer before I started work at CORE, but I soon found myself playing their games at home! We then got a license to produce games for the SEGA Mega Drive and I really remember us all playing Street Fighter to death every lunchtime! We produced a few titles for SEGA; at the time they seemed so cutting edge!

    Another person who was going to be a big part of CORE Design’s history was programmer Andrew Howe, who took notice of the music that was being created for a game destined for the SEGA Mega CD.

    I was working at Attention To Detail in Warwick. We helped CORE with some sort of audio driver for the Atari Jaguar. I was very impressed by Nathan’s music for Soulstar. Also one of our artists had a boyfriend at CORE and it was he who persuaded me to move to the Derby company. Previously at ATD I had worked on Riddle of the Runes, a screensaver for Windows 3.1. Then Blue Lightning for the Jaguar. I wrote the graphics engine for that.

    Released for the SEGA Mega CD in 1994.

    Paul Douglas is a big part of the Tomb Raider story. He was a programmer who sent a demo of one of his creations to several games companies at the time, CORE included, which led to him receiving a phone call that would shape a significant chapter of his life to come:

    When I was a teenager I’d done a fair amount of bedroom programming on the ZX Spectrum. Mainly little hobbyist games. I really wanted a C64 as it had such superior sound but couldn’t really afford it and by that time I’d finished my A levels and went up to study electronic engineering at University. My intention was to get into the technical side of music production - I’d built my own amplifiers, oscillators and effects and had been obsessed with synthesizer technology since the late 70s. Following university the economy wasn’t so hot and I ended up in a few graduate jobs that I didn’t particularly enjoy whilst looking for something I would find more fulfilling.

    During this time I bought a Commodore Amiga and started coding demos and games again in my free time. It was a great little machine to code on. I ended up quitting a short-lived development job in finance in the City and doing a bit of games contract work on the Amiga and Atari ST for some chaps I’d met in the scene. Once that had finished, I sent out a demo of a 3D game I’d been developing to several companies including CORE. Jeremy called up the next day asking when I could come in for an interview. That must have been sometime in spring/ summer 1994.

    When I started at CORE I was put in a room with Soren and Jacob who were Scandanavian and spoke little English, and they were finishing their game ‘Banshee’ on the Amiga1200.

    At this point I didn’t even have a PC or machine to work on so was given the early Saturn development documentation to read through - it was mainly Japanese with a few badly translated English bits. It felt like I had been thrown into the deep end, into an environment where most everything was foreign. I felt like it was sink or swim time.

    The SEGA documentation came in ring-binders - every so often CORE would get updates sent through from SEGA Japan, all watermarked with CORE and SEGA’s name printed diagonally across each page. This was clearly confidential stuff. I could see how their hardware designers had supercharged their 2D scaling sprite hardware and adapted it to do rudimentary 3D. The PlayStation hardware would prove to be more elegant but it too was quite rudimentary. This was the early days of 3D where engineering hacks were the order of the day both in software and hardware to meet performance targets at a given budget.

    After a week I got a development PC and started porting and extending my 3D code from the Amiga whilst also helping out on a few other projects.

    CORE were still finishing 16bit games on the Amiga/ST/SEGA Megadrive when I joined but they were not starting anything new on those platforms. A few games were being started on 32X/MegaCD, CORE was quite focussed on SEGA consoles around that time, but it was becoming clear the next generation of consoles, Playstation and Saturn, were going to be capable of 3D and were CD based so that was going to be the focus going forward.

    Son of Chuck; released in 1993.

    However, CORE was facing an uphill battle; while their games garnered goodto-average-reviews, and even though they had been bought by CentreGold in December 1994, the 16-bit era was slowly winding down. It wasn’t until later in that month, on a trip to Japan, that Jeremy became aware of the invention of the Sony PlayStation that a course-correction took place. Upon his return Jeremy decided to call a company meeting on his return.

    CHAPTER 2

    The Pitch

    Jeremy wanted to hear pitches across the company to take advantage of what was coming. They knew the PlayStation was coming, and that this console would fundamentally change the gaming industry. After the company-wide meeting, an artist by the name of Toby Gard offered this pitch involving a male adventurer:

    At this stage of the company in 1994 we were heavily involved with SEGA. I was SEGA blue, through and through, and loved those guys. They were really good to us as a company. They really respected what we were doing; they helped us, we were a SEGA publisher, and especially as we were such a small company at the time, it was a major achievement.

    I guess it would have been September-time of 1994, where I was in Japan visiting Sony, and I was in a room where there was a Sushi chef and Ken Kuturagi giving me a private demo of the Sony PlayStation. Totally surreal.

    For me, this was one of those pivotal moments in your life in the industry where it felt like things weren’t going to be the same.

    I came back from that trip and we had this company wide meeting of 45-wide people, we held it in a golf club up the road which had this function room.

    We couldn’t all get into one room I remember, so we had this company-wide meeting about the direction, and where the future was heading.

    Of course I revealed PlayStation there to everybody,

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