Let's celebrate these wonderful games.įor me, the true measure of a Tomb Raider game is if it exists in the mind as a stark, almost isolated, memory of being in a space - often an audaciously crafted space. For the reboot, yes, but also for that trilogy the studio completed just after it took over the franchise, back when Tomb Raider still belonged to Eidos. More than anything how enthused they seemed for what they were doing.īut then real-life memories gave way to game memories, and I realised how much more I had to thank Crystal Dynamics for. At first I thought of an old press trip when I went to see Crystal, which was developing the reboot at the time: how lovely everyone was, how kind to me and my idiotic questions, despite the obvious exhaustion of working on a game like this. I properly love them.Īnd I thought of them on Monday when I read the news that Square-Enix was selling off studios and licenses, including Crystal Dynamics and Tomb Raider in general. This was Crystal Dynamic's first outing with the series once they took it on: Tomb Raider: Legend, Tomb Raider: Anniversary (co-developed with Buzz Monkey Software), and Tomb Raider: Underworld. But in between both extremes - marquee, character-arc Lara Croft and crackling, mysterious, old-school Tomb Raider - we got another version too. I like these games a lot: I like their obvious production values and blockbuster sense of occasion, their sense of someone on their way to becoming the person they hope to be. A Lara who fills the screen, who reaches out a hand to steady herself when she makes her way through a flooding cave: such a lovely human detail. Over the last decade we've had rebooted Lara: close-up, crafting her own arrows, skinning wolves and falling on rusty spikes. The long wait for a proper gen-hopping follow-up took place when I shuffled through temp jobs, then the eventual release of The Angel of Darkness. The Core games took me through university - back when 3D itself felt weird and experimental and slightly (thrillingly!) unstable, with those jagged edges around the sides of the screen when Lara was exploring underground corridors. I am the right age to measure out a lot of my life in Tomb Raiders.
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