Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider, also known as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider between 2001 and 2007, is a media franchise that originated with an action-adventure video game series created by British gaming company Core Design. Formerly owned by Eidos Interactive, then by Square Enix after their acquisition of Eidos in 2009, the franchise focuses on a fictional English archaeologist Lara Croft, who travels around the world searching for lost artifacts and infiltrating dangerous tombs and ruins. The gameplay generally focuses around action-adventure exploration of environments, solving puzzles, navigating hostile environments filled with traps, and fighting numerous enemies. Additional media has grown up around the theme in the form of film adaptations, comics and novels.

Development on the original Tomb Raider game began in 1993. Its success prompted Core Design to develop a new game annually for the next four years, which put a strain on staff. The sixth game, The Angel of Darkness, faced difficulties during development and was considered a failure at release. This prompted Eidos to switch development duties to Crystal Dynamics, which has been the series' primary developer since then. Other developers have contributed either to spin-off titles within the series or ports of mainline titles.

                                                    

Tomb Raider games have sold over 58 million copies worldwide, becoming one of the best-selling video game franchises. The series has generally met with critical acclaim, with the series being noted as one of the pioneers of the action-adventure genre. Lara Croft herself has become one of the most recognisable video game protagonists in existence, winning numerous accolades and earning places on the Walk of Game and Guinness World Records. Alongside being praised for pioneering female characters in video games, she has also been the subject of controversy due to her sex appeal being used for marketing.

                                            Toby Gard 

                                Toby Gard (1972 - Chelmsford, Essex), the computer game character designer and consultant who designed the original Tomb Raider video game in 1995

The concept for Tomb Raider originated in 1993 at Core Design, a British game development studio. One of the men most involved in its creation was Toby Gard, who was mostly responsible for creating the character of Lara Croft. Gard originally envisioned her as a man: company co-founder Jeremy Heath-Smith was worried the character would be seen as derivative of Indiana Jones, so Gard changed the character's gender. Her design underwent multiple revisions and redrafts during early development. The game proved an unexpected commercial success, reversing Eidos' then-bleak financial situation. After the success of Tomb Raider, work began almost at once on a sequel. After the first game's success, Gard was no longer given full creative control, and it was stated by development staff that he was both saddened and disappointed by the use of Lara Croft's sex appeal in marketing. Gard left Core Design in 1997 to found his own gaming company Confounding Factor, and was replaced by Stuart Atkinson. Tomb Raider II proved even more of a commercial success than the original.

Over the next three years, Core Design was committed to delivering a Tomb Raider game annually, putting considerable strain on staff.For this reason, and the feeling that they had exhausted the series' potential, the developers tried to kill the character off. This did not work, and while a fifth game was created, the team stated that they were not fully invested in its development. During development on the fifth game, the team split into two divisions, with one division working on the next-generation sequel The Angel of Darkness.During this period, multiple handheld titles were also developed by both Core Design and third-party developers. The production of The Angel of Darkness was beset by problems from an early stage, with the team wanting to create a grander game to compete with contemporary action-adventure games. Under pressure from Eidos, key sections of the game needed to be cut, and it was released before the team felt it was ready. The game received negative reactions from both fans and critics, and was cited by Paramount as the reason for the second Tomb Raider film underperforming.

At Crystal Dynamics (2004-present)

After the critical backlash of The Angel of Darkness, Eidos decided to take production of the Tomb Raider series out of Core Design's hands and give it to another subsidiary studio. Production of the next game was given to Crystal Dynamics, a studio that had made its name with the Legacy of Kain series. Eidos CEO Ian Livingstone stated that while the critical failure of The Angel of Darkness was a major reason for taking the series away from Core Design, the decision was also motivated by their inordinate struggles with developing for the PlayStation 2, and by how many members of the Core team had complained that they were "burnt out" on Tomb Raider. He added that "For a UK company, moving the development of its prized asset from Derby to California was a big decision to make but, as it turned out, absolutely the right one to make."One of the main priorities for both Eidos and Crystal Dynamics was to regain the fanbase's trust in the brand, along with helping the series reclaim the status and selling power it had before The Angel of Darkness' release. Their main goal was to put Lara back inside tombs, with their physics-based engine enabling more intricate puzzles. After Legend was finished, the team decided to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the series by remaking the original game, rebuilding the environments and redesigning the story to fit in with the events and gameplay of Legend. Alongside the development of Anniversary, an entry for seventh-generation hardware was in development, although it used established gaming architecture from Legend and this caused problems for the development team. In 2009, the year after the release of Underworld, Eidos was bought by Square Enix and later renamed Square Enix Europe, giving Square Enix ownership of the Tomb Raider franchise.

Alongside Underworld, the team decided to create a new subseries that featured the character of Lara Croft while not using the Tomb Raider moniker and using the aesthetics of the Legend continuity. During this period, a second development team was working on a second reboot of the series and character, which would put emphasis on a darker and gritter interpretation of the character. Another priority was presenting Lara as a more human character, showing her in vulnerable positions, and showing how she begins her journey to becoming a "tomb raider" through both narrative and gameplay. A sequel, eventually revealed as Rise of the Tomb Raider, was confirmed as being in development a few months after the reboot's release. In response to criticisms about a lack of classic tombs, more optional and story-based tombs were incorporated into the game. It also continued the team's new portrayal of Lara, showing more sides to her character and her growing obsession with discovering the truth. In addition to this, the Lara Croft subseries was continued in multiple titles: the console game Temple of Osiris, and mobile title Relic Run. In addition, the mobile puzzle game Lara Croft Go was created to both give a different gameplay experience and evoke classic Tomb Raider games.

                                      Nathan McCree is an English music composer and sound effects editor for multimedia projects including computer games, television, live events, and radio

                                                           Music

The original Tomb Raider theme was composed by Nathan McCree. He created the original theme music after having discussions with Gard about the character of Lara Croft. Having decided to use Classical English music as an inspiration, he decided to create something simple for the theme song. Its simplicity made rearrangements and orchestrations easy. For his work on the first three Tomb Raider games, he was given fairly minimal briefs, and for Tomb Raider III he was working on the game as a freelancer as he had left the company. For The Last Revelation, Peter Connelly replaced Nathan McCree as the main composer, using McCree's music as a basis for his work. He composed the opening theme for The Last Revelation, saying that the opening melody came to him out of the blue, and added Egyptian motifs to fit in with the game's setting. Chronicles was originally going to have a sizeable original opening theme, but due to time constraints the majority of it ended up being discarded, much to Connelly's later regret. Only the opening segment survived. The music for Angel of Darkness, composed by Connelly and Martin Iveson, was the one element of production that did not encounter problems, as recording was finished before the major content cuts happened. Scored using a full orchestra as opposed to the synthesised instruments of previous titles, it was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.

For Legend, Troels Brun Folmann composed the music and managed the sound effects. Alongside composing a large amount of music for the game, he created micro-scores for small segments within gameplay. Folmann returned to score Anniversary, doing re-orchestrations of the original score, along with expanding them. For Underworld, Folmann handled the main theme while Colin O'Malley handled the rest of the soundtrack, which featured far less looping music than Legend. The 2013 reboot was scored by Jason Graves, who had become known through his work on the Dead Space franchise. Along with his orchestral style, he created a special instrument to create discordant sounds within the music, and musical elements from around the globe to represent the inhabitants of the game's island location. For Rise of the Tomb Raider, the composer was Bobby Tahouri, who had previously worked as assistant composer on video games and theatrical films.Guardian of Light used no original music, instead using extracts from the music of Legend, Anniversary and Underworld. The music for Temple of Osiris was written by Will Roget II, who had originally worked on licensed video games including Star Wars: The Old Republic. Temple of Osiris was the first title in the Lara Croft subseries to have an original score, using Egyptian and Middle Eastern musical elements while creating a new main theme that could be used in future Lara Croft games.

Technology

The first Tomb Raider used a custom-built game engine, as other equivalent engines available to Core Design at the time were not versatile enough to realise the team's vision. The engine was designed by Paul Douglas, who also handled the game's artificial intelligence (AI) and the three-dimensional (3D) graphics. The choice of a 3D game was influenced by the team's opinion that the game type was under-represented when compared to first-person shooters such as Doom. Its 3D style meant multiple elements were difficult to implement, including the AI and camera control. Another noted aspect was the multi-layered levels, as compared to equivalent 3D action-adventure games of the time which were limited to a flat-floor system. Lara's movements were hand-animated and coordinated rather than created using motion capture. The reason for this was that the team wanted uniformity in her movement, which was not possible with motion capture technology of the time. For Tomb Raider II, only minor upgrades were made to the engine, with the main improvements being to the AI and smoothing out Lara's model. Tomb Raider III underwent major revisions, including rewrites to the graphics engine and improvements in the lighting and AI systems. The engine was given a major overhaul for The Last Revelation. The first five games make use of full-motion video cutscenes. For the first three games, they were primarily used as transitional periods depicting Lara moving from one level to another or one location to another. For Chronicles, fairly minor revisions were made.

                                                        

For Angel of Darkness, a new engine was built from scratch, but due to being unfamiliar and unused to the technology of the PS2, the team encountered multiple problems such as needing to remove areas and characters due to polygon restrictions. Due to the deadlines imposed, the team were forced to cut corners, meaning that the game reached store shelves in a poor condition. For Legend, the staff at Crystal Dynamics created a proprietary engine from the ground up, named the Crystal Engine. The engine and the game's content were developed in parallel, leading to scheduling and workload difficulties. Anniversary used the same engine as Legend. Underworld used an all-new engine built specifically for the game, although its basic codebase was shared with Legend. In Underworld, Lara's movements were animated using full motion capture, with Olympic gymnast Heidi Moneymaker providing the character's animations. For the 2013 reboot, a new engine called "Foundation" was created for the game. Motion capture was again used for the 2013 reboot. An updated version of the Foundation engine was used again for Rise of the Tomb Raider. For both games in the new reboot, Lara's hair movements were made more realistic using a technology called TressFX (TR:2013) or PureHair (ROTTR).