Core Design and Toby Gard
Core Design was a Derby-based studio that had produced games for Amiga, PC, and early 32-bit platforms when Eidos Interactive commissioned a new action-adventure game for PlayStation. Toby Gard, the character designer, created Lara Croft as a deliberate counterpoint to the male protagonists who dominated action games: an aristocratic British woman with a university education, a backstory of survival and resourcefulness, and a design that was simultaneously athletic and glamorous. Gard's original design was more realistically proportioned; the game's marketing team requested exaggerated proportions, which Gard provided while expressing discomfort with the direction — discomfort that would eventually contribute to his departure from the franchise he created.
Tomb Raider's gameplay — navigating three-dimensional environments by jumping, climbing, and swimming; solving environmental puzzles; combat against wildlife and human enemies — was technically ambitious for 1996. The game used a grid-based movement system that allowed precise platforming in three dimensions, a solution to the 3D movement problem that differed from Super Mario 64's analogue approach by trading fluid movement for precise control. The ancient ruins environments — Egypt, Peru, Greece, Atlantis — were distinctive settings that few games had explored, and the game's emphasis on exploration and discovery over combat gave it a pacing that felt different from contemporary action games.
The Marketing Campaign
Eidos Interactive's marketing for Tomb Raider in 1996 was unprecedented in games marketing because it focused almost entirely on the character rather than the game. Lara Croft appeared in print advertising in publications that did not ordinarily cover video games — fashion magazines, mainstream news publications, men's lifestyle titles. The campaign made explicit arguments about Lara's physical appearance that generated criticism and debate, both of which kept the game in press coverage for months before and after launch. Eidos created a fictional biography for Lara — date of birth, family history, education, interests — that positioned her as a character with an existence independent of any specific game.
This marketing approach was genuinely new in gaming and anticipated the transmedia character development that has become standard in franchise entertainment since. Lara Croft appeared in music videos, most prominently with U2's PopMart tour in 1997, and was the subject of feature articles in newspapers and magazines that were discussing games as a cultural phenomenon rather than merely as entertainment products. The coverage created an awareness of Tomb Raider among people who had not played it and might never play it — a brand visibility that previous game characters, including Mario and Sonic, had not achieved in general-audience media.
The Sequel Treadmill
Tomb Raider sold over seven million copies. Eidos's response was the industry standard: accelerate sequel production. Tomb Raider II (1997) arrived less than a year after the original, increasing the game's combat emphasis and adding a wider variety of environments. It sold well. Tomb Raider III (1998) followed, and Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation (1999) and Tomb Raider Chronicles (2000) continued the annual schedule. By the time Chronicles was released, reviewers were noting that the series had not meaningfully advanced in four years — the engine was the same, the gameplay was the same, and the settings (while varied) could not compensate for mechanical stagnation.
Toby Gard had left Core Design in 1997, citing discomfort with Lara's marketing treatment and creative disagreements with Eidos. Without its character designer, the franchise became dependent on the marketability of an image rather than the vision of its creator. The games continued to sell because brand recognition was self-sustaining at sufficient scale, but the creative differentiation that had made the original distinctive was absent from the sequels. The final Core Design Tomb Raider, Angel of Darkness (2003), was widely regarded as a critical and commercial failure due to rushed development and technical problems — a collapse that led Eidos to reassign the franchise to Crystal Dynamics, where it was eventually revived through the 2013 reboot.
The Legacy of the First Gaming Icon
Lara Croft's cultural moment in 1996-1998 was the games industry's first demonstration that a game character could achieve pop-culture saturation comparable to film and television characters. This was significant not merely as a branding achievement but as evidence that games had developed sufficient cultural weight to produce iconic figures — that the medium was capable of the kind of character mythologising that cinema had practised since the 1920s. The Tomb Raider films (2001, 2003, 2018) were the first major studio productions based on an original video game IP rather than a pre-existing media property, further demonstrating the franchise's crossover potential.
The franchise's collapse and revival is equally instructive. Annual sequels produced to maximise short-term revenue from an established brand without investing in creative development is a pattern that gaming has repeated with multiple franchises — Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk, Call of Duty at various points — with consistent results: brand exhaustion, declining critical reception, and eventual suspension or reboot. The Tomb Raider experience of 1997-2003 was among the earliest and clearest demonstrations of this dynamic, making it a cautionary example that the industry has cited without always heeding.