I joined Core Design in the summer of 1994 and met Toby Gard, who showed me his concept sketches for Tomb Raider. He’d already come up with the title and drawn a mock-up box cover with a woman holding two pistols. I was working on a golf game called The Scottish Open when Toby persuaded me that we should pitch his idea to Jeremy Heath-Smith, Core’s co-founder, who gave us the go-ahead to make a prototype.
If I had stuck to the golf game, I would have had a much easier life. We had a couple of brainstorming sessions, and settled on the game’s four main pillars: platforming, puzzles, combat and story. Combat was always the weakest element but we didn’t have time to improve it.
We also came up with the plot and level themes, and whittled a long list of interesting archaeological locations, including Petra and Angkor Wat, down to four: Peru, Greece, Egypt and Atlantis. Lara was originally Latina and her appearance was more realistic, almost androgynous. We felt that more stylised movement would play better, so her physique changed to reflect that.
She became a British mercenary and then, thanks to scriptwriter Vicky Arnold, an aristocrat who tracks down historical artefacts just for fun. Toby and I came up with the movement metrics by measuring out a hopscotch grid in the car park. Lara was three paces tall and each block in the game’s environment was four paces.
All of the gameplay systems grew from those measurements and constraints. It was brutal getting it delivered on time. I took just three days of holiday in two years.
Toby and I were in the office until 2 or 3am every day, including weekends, for the best part of a year. Toby made himself sick with the stress. We were on the cusp of 3D games going mainstream and the action-adventure focus made us somewhat unique.
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