Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider series begin in the English city of Derby, the birthplace of Core Design developer studio in the late 1980s.
Core Design Studio has, for nearly a decade, done so many games that in 1992 alone it released ten different games, and as you can observe, the rapid transition between those projects will not result in any projects that remain engraved in the players ’memory, despite some sales that Games like Rick Dangerous and Curse of Enchantia did, but they both haven't achieved what we might call success in the true sense of the developed studio.
The game achieved tremendous success among critics and players alike, and the game quickly proved its position as one of the best-selling versions on the Playstation platform at all. Between the great appearance, the great and well-designed stage stages, and the main interesting character are all factors that contributed to comparing the game with other legendary chains such as Mario, for example.
At the time, there was no higher version to compare the game with on the Mario games series and it may still be the case to this day. All this raised the enthusiasm of the publisher, Eidos, especially after they returned from a massive loss of 2.5 million dollars, which almost destroyed the publisher's future permanently, all thanks to the game Tomb Raider, which achieved a total profit of nearly 15 million dollars, and thus gave birth to a new game series.
Tomb Raider put Core Design Studio on the map of the most important game developers, but with this stumbling block came its start, the most important of which was the departure of Toby Gard, owner of my design, Lara Croft, from the team for disputes with Eidos regarding interference in the game design and the way in which the Lara Croft character was promoted.
“It was never my intention to design the cover magazine girl character to be the hero of Tomb Raider games,” says Tom.
This was already happening as a method of promotion and sale of the Tomb Raider series, and with the exploitation of the success of the first part it was decided that Tomb Raider would be an annual series such as Battlefield, FIFA, Assassin's Creed and other games that took the same path in the past period.
The team already started work on the production of the second part to be released in 1997 bringing a larger experience and new weapons and a change to the Lara Croft hairdo and the possibility to lock the server in your kitchen refrigerator. But unlike its predecessor, the game was not released on the Sega Saturn platform, a decision that later paved the way for the game to be a Playstation exclusive at some point.
The decision to take the exclusive game was not surprising, given the popularity of the Lara Croft character around the world, bypassing the world of video games, and it became a bigger entity, Core Design and larger than the publisher, Eidos, so the character and series were used in everything at that time.
Another year passes and another game from the series comes with profits in millions, but here the real problems begin. Despite the previous success, Core Design is still a small developer, it is not the size of Ubisoft now, for example. In fact, the team was made up of just 6 people, including Tom Gard, who were required to work on producing a game for the size of the Tomb Raider continuously every 12 months.
Although Tomb Raider III: Adventures of Lara Croft is a good game for most fans of the game, by looking with a neutral eye you can only feel the repetition and that we got the game itself again with some minor improvements instead of a new part of the game that contains new ideas and applications .
It happened again in 1999 with Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation with great commercial success with insufficient renovations to continue for this series. It seemed like this could not be the case when Tomb Raider: Chronicles came in the year 2000 except for a few underwater stages. Perhaps we can say that Core Design has reached the limits of their capabilities and what they can offer for the game, which appeared in the reviews of the game that came with lower ratings than ever before and for the first time in the history of the series, sales also decline to be one of the least-selling versions of Tomb Raider so far.
The change was necessary and inevitable for the continued development of the game.
In 2001 the team started working again on the new part of the game which is the infamous part-timed Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. Taking advantage of the new hardware and capabilities of the Playstation 2 platform, the developer team saw this as an opportunity to revamp both the Tomb Raider game and the Lara Croft character itself.
As a result of the combination of these two factors, the new hardware with the need for renewal caused several delays that prevented the game from being released annually as players used to. Almost this is what happened because in the same year a game version was released for the first time on Game Boy Color followed by a second part in 2001 under the name Tomb Raider Curse of the Sword.
But the most important event for Tomb Raider in 2001 was not the release of those games, but the movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider starring Angelina Jolie, which is also the largest event from the financial side, as the film achieved profits exceeding $ 270 million, making it the most successful movie adapted for a game at all.
The movie, of course, was not a movie masterpiece, but the name Tomb Raider alone was big enough at the time to achieve some success.
2002 brings back-to-play platform game Tomb Raider: The Prophecy which has provided a new vision perspective for this type of game. By 2003 Angel of Darkness was not ready for release yet, and it was not proposed that Core Design would be given the time it needed, especially with the approach of the second film approaching, so the game was expedited and expedited to take advantage of the uproar that the new movie was expected to make.
As a result, many of the ideas that the developer wanted to add to the game were left, including aspects of gameplay, character movement and animation, and even whole sites were removed from the game. Not to mention that, with the end of The Last Revelation, it was assumed that the character of Lara is dead and that the events of the new game take place in a period after the mentioned part, but it is not mentioned or explained its appearance again in any way but rather completely ignored.
The game achieved somewhat good numbers in terms of sales although it did not reach the level of sales of the previous four parts, but the game was attacked by the media after that and the reasons are clear. A month after the release of the game, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life has also released the second part of the film series, which made a better monetary impression than the previous movie, but it did not achieve better revenues, though.
So both the game and the movie did not achieve what they expected from them to result in a fateful decision regarding the future of the Core Design development team. Instead of considering Angel of Darkness part of a new trilogy, the idea was crossed out completely and the game development rights were transferred to an American developer, Crystal Dynamics, a legacy of game developer Kain. The fate of Core Design was the resignation of many of its members until it ended up selling to a new publisher, Rebellion Developments, to be closed entirely later in 2010.
Three years after the transfer of rights to Crystal Dynamics the studio brought Toby Gard as a development consultant to lead the first game of their development in 2006 under the name Tomb Raider Legend, the release was not a continuation of Core Design's work but a re-launch of the entire series and is at least better than interpretation How it survived from the fourth part, and the developer has already succeeded in bringing the game back to life in a new style and mechanics, despite the short lifespan of the game by Core Design game standards to become Tomb Raider Legend the best game in terms of ratings since Tomb Raider 2 in a way that brings it back to the days of glory.
After that, the game returns to be an annual issue, and in 2007 Tomb Raider Anniversary is a remake of the first part game using the engine that Crystal Dynamics designed in its first release of the game, then after another year the game returns to us again but not with a new Remake but rather Tomb Raider Underworld introduces new mechanics, better fighting style and deeper puzzle design that encourages players to try. In spite of some problems in copying the Playstation 2 and Wii, the game got high ratings but no translation of these evaluations at the sales level to put the command Eidos again in a situation where they should find a justification for not performing the Tomb Raider as desired.
The decision comes tough this time, so Eidos decided to completely abandon the series and sell it to Square Enix in 2009, so that the new publisher will come up with a new and completely different look. Although the new version of Crystal Dynamics is an update of the series, it did not come up with the same name to be Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, which came in a camera style similar to the Game Boy Advance version, and it is really a completely different game from what the game fans used to. It was available as a digital copy only and is supposed to be played in cooperation with others. It was clear to you that the game is a much smaller and less ambitious project than was previously presented by Crystal Dynamics, which appeared when it was revealed that work on this part was not as strong as the team and that the rest of the development team were busy with larger and more important things and projects.
After several months, and with the end of 2010, Tomb Raider appears, and it got a new Reboot under the name Tomb Raider, to release the game after several delays in early 2013 on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms, which are well known for their capabilities at that time, to achieve the first million of sales in the first Two days since its launch and continued to become the best-selling game in the history of the series ever announcing the return of Tomb Raider.
Of course, Lara that we got with the last Reboot differs a lot from 1996, but the world of the game industry as a whole has varied from that time on. It has evolved not only at the level of technology but at the level of thinking and character design as well, which was reflected in the game's re-launch.
With 2014, a second part that follows Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, will be released. Then came the Rise of The Tomb Raider in 2015, which added several aspects such as Crafting and Stealth, and you should consider factors such as weather and timing of the day, whether day or night.
Then, with the advent of the year 2018, the third part of the game, Shadow of The Tomb Raider, will be issued, which some consider merely an upgraded version of the previous two parts without introducing revolutionary or new ideas despite the clear progress in visual performance.
Let's find ourselves once again within the vicious cycle in which Tomb Raider always falls, which is to provide a continuous atmosphere, each providing updates and ideas that are good but simple enough that we do not consider releases as new games rather than developments and modifications to what was initially created. There are no ideas that are out of the ordinary and nothing new in the style of offering or playing.
And here we are, 20 years after Tomb Raider that started with the dinosaurs until it reached the world of films and ended with the last reboot that provides its look more advanced and in line with the reality of the series, here we are with a name that started from Derby English to California in the United States and from Core Design To Crystal Dynamics. Lara Croft traveled a lot of distances in those years and changed a lot from the image that started with it, as did the game industry as a whole, but we have an important question that only the coming years will answer.
