Killing Lara Croft
Andy Sandham first saw her over Toby Gard’s shoulder. Both men worked as artists at the British game developer Core Design, but on separate projects. Sandham, on a game called Machine Head, hadn’t seen anything of Gard’s Tomb Raider until Gard was ready to show off the character he’d designed and animated.
The character was female, lithe and athletic, and tightly clad in tank top and shorts. Gard, from his keyboard, had her pull herself up from a ledge — which she did slowly, rising with what passed convincingly real exertion — into a perfect handstand, which she held gracefully for a moment before letting one poised leg and then the other fall. In that same, steady motion she let her hands go and righted herself, limbs moving like the hands of a clock.
That’s shit, Sandham teased his friend: you’ve wasted your time and disappointed everyone. Inside, though, Sandham knew: a video game character that looked that good, that human, moving in real-time 3D? And a woman? There was nothing else like her. Lara Croft was breath-taking.
Three years later, he killed her.
“OK, this is going to change your life.”
That was how Jeremy Heath-Smith, Core Design’s founder and chief executive, braced Andy Sandham for his first taste of Tomb Raider royalties. The change was, indeed, profound. One of Sandham’s colleagues, soon after getting his own cut, scorched into Core’s Derby parking lot in a brand new sports car with gull-wing doors. Before a crowd, he struggled to exit the car ass-first, old jeans slipping down his thighs.
At Core, which juggled multiple teams and games at once, working on Tomb Raider was a glamorous and highly lucrative tier of the company hierarchy, coveted and resented by those who toiled underneath on forgotten projects like Swagman. Sandham, previously a concept artist at Theme Park developer Bullfrog, had been with Core since 1994, but hadn’t broken through until he was promoted to level designer on 1998’s Tomb Raider III. It might never have happened had the team from the first two Tomb Raiders not begged off to do something new. Sandham was called up, along with colleagues like programmer Martin Gibbins and designer Richard Morton, to take care of Lara Croft.
“We were all absolutely shitting ourselves,” Sandham remembers. “We knew we had an enormous responsibility. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life.”
It’d be an understatement to say that Toby Gard’s creation kept the lights on at Core — if the developers had lit the offices with burning cash, they’d still have been able to buy country houses and space cars on Lara’s dime. Success was even sweeter for publisher Eidos, who had acquired Core in 1996. The first Tomb Raider sold five million copies and by itself put the struggling firm into the black.
Tomb Raider was critical to Eidos’s financial bottom line, but the publisher didn’t interfere creatively with Core out of concern that doing so could screw up a good thing. In turn, Heath-Smith more or less gave his developers free rein. “I know nothing about writing a video game,” he says, “but I’m pretty good at fronting a business, raising some money and getting out there and making the company successful. My philosophy’s always been that you let people do what they’re good at, and they let me do what I’m good at, and between us all the whole thing works.”
Sandham remembers it, fondly, as “the Wild West years of game development”. At the start of a project, the developers would pitch their level ideas to Heath-Smith and that was about the extent of his involvement, says Sandham. He recalled the conversation when he proposed a level set in London.
HEATH-SMITH: What the fuck are you talking about?
SANDHAM: It’s to do with the London Underground stations, and…
HEATH-SMITH: Right, right, fuck off and make it then.
Generally, Heath-Smith’s “Wild West” approach paid off. Tomb Raider III finished on schedule, Sandham thinks, not because of corporate oversight but developer self-policing. “In the last months of that project,” he says, “we’d be staying every day and every night for three months.”
Hours like that were de rigeur for game development. Core was no different. To release a new Tomb Raider every year, you had to work like that. (Heath-Smith estimates the actual development time at a mere seven months.) “If you want a girlfriend, avoid working in computer games like the plague,” Toby Gard told the fashion magazine The Face in 1997, in reply to a question about whether his girlfriend ever got jealous of Lara. “If you work seven days a week, 15 hours a day for almost two years, with barely enough time for a pint, you have no time whatsoever for relationships.”
The pressure of making Tomb Raider year in and year out, Heath-Smith agrees today, was huge. “Did it stifle creativity? Of course it did. Did it affect the long-term franchise? Yes, probably did. Did it make us all a lot of money? Yes, a huge amount. So you know, you weigh all that up!”
Sandham and the Tomb Raider III team dealt with stress in part by cultivating a healthy disrespect for the character of Lara Croft, mimicking how she’d obstinately say “No!” whenever the player would try and make her do something she wasn’t supposed to. In the morning, the team would robotically walk into each other like bumper cars, squeaking a nasal “No!” ad nauseum. The happiest person on the project seemed to be the guy whose job it was to animate Lara dying in spike traps and being shot by enemies. He loved it.
“Success comes and creates its own problems, doesn’t it?” says Heath-Smith today. “Tomb Raider was such a phenomenal success that we went on and did [a sequel] in a very short space of time, which was an even bigger success.” Tomb Raider III also turned out to be a hit, and then there was no reason, from Eidos’s perspective, why Core could not release a new Tomb Raider every 12 months — indefinitely. “Eidos was hugely pressurizing us,” says Heath-Smith, “and you also got pressure from the likes of Sony, who wanted to sell more hardware and were then offering amazing deals for exclusivity with the PlayStation.”
The work was gruelling, but hardly without reward. The Tomb Raider III team — about a dozen people — were each cut royalty checks in the area of three hundred thousand pounds. “For me, it was really important that they did something with that money — bought a house, or invested it — that they didn’t go out and buy a Ferrari, or something bloody ridiculous,” says Heath-Smith — who, at the peak of Tomb Raider’s commercial success, had earned a £7 million bonus. “We were a tight-knit team and I desperately wanted to look after them.”
(Heath-Smith, by way of digression, once summoned the entire office to the Lara Croft statue in the lobby, where he sat reading a magazine in silence until putting it down and shouting: “Right, which one of you filthy fucking bastards wiped their ass on the hand towel? Who’s fucking done it?” Nobody owned up to it. “I don’t remember that,” he says now, “but knowing me, that’s the sort of thing I would do, because I would be incensed! I’d be incensed by the fact that one of our team, one of our family — and we always were, no matter how big we grew — could actually do that!”)
The Tomb Raider III team, having proven they could deliver a complete game in a year, were put straight back to work on the sequel. Heath-Smith’s only requirement was that the level designers get Lara out of the London Underground and Venetian canals: “Put [her] in a fucking tomb.”
“We wanted to make Tomb Raider IV the best game in the universe,” Sandham remembers. “It was an amazing opportunity, we knew it was.” That’s how he made his peace with another round-the-clock, seven-month grind — it was Tomb Raider! But he was exhausted already — the whole team was — and there were already plans for them to work on a fifth and a sixth Tomb Raider. With Lara Croft more popular than ever, there was no sign that annual pace would be slowing. “The public expects a new Tomb Raider game every year by Christmas,” Core’s PR manager Susie Hamilton affirmed that year. Sandham sure as hell didn’t want to be the one making those games every year. He had to find a way out.
“Put her in a fucking tomb.”
Vicky Arnold, who’d written the first three Tomb Raider games, had left Core after the third game. Sandham, interested in screenwriting, volunteered to write in her absence. As the franchise’s new writer, Sandham decided that at the end of the fourth game, Lara Croft would die. And he decided not to tell Heath-Smith about it.
Toby Gard quit Core Design because he’d lost control of Lara Croft. Throughout development of the first Tomb Raider, he enjoyed final say over every aspect of the character. On the back of its success, however, Eidos made an aggressive marketing push exploiting Lara’s sex appeal. The Core artists who used a higher-quality Lara model for cutscenes were now asked to render her for magazine spreads: Lara in a bikini, in a leopard-print dress, thrusting her cleavage forward, topless on the couch, naked on the carpet, naked and clutching a pillow to her chest. “It was a total violation,” Gard said.
“Lara was designed to be a tough, self-reliant intelligent woman,” he told The Face; comments which appeared opposite Lara, dual wielding Uzis, wearing a black jacket loosely buttoned beneath her breasts. Gard hadn’t built Lara with a thin waist and large bust for her erotic potential, more like: if you were going to be looking at that character for weeks at a time, she should be aesthetically pleasing. To him, she was the quintessential “strong female character”, dignified and not objectified, and as appealing to women as to men. She was unrealistically good-looking, but Gard’s Lara showed zero interest in sex or sexuality.
“She wasn’t a tits-out-for-the-lads type of character in any way,” said Gard. “Quite the opposite, in fact. I thought that what was interesting about her was she was this unattainable, austere, dangerous sort of person.”
In the scant biography Gard and Vicky Arnold wrote for Lara, she firmly rejects romance for solo adventure. “Unable to stand the claustrophobic suffocating atmosphere of upper class British society,” they wrote, “she realised that she was only truly alive when she was travelling alone…. Famed for discovering several ancient sites of profound archaeological interest she made a name for herself by publishing travel books and detailed journals of her exploits.” Their Lara is not much of a character, but it’s clear that she is defined not by her appearance, but her ambition.
Marketing went in a different direction. So, in the end, did Gard.
“Poor old Toby, that was his original reason for leaving,” Heath-Smith remembers, “that he felt it was going in the wrong direction and this, that and the other…. [But] I don’t think you can ever make anything too big. Can you?”
“The digital Lara is going to sign a modeling contract with a big agency,’’ Eidos spokeswoman Cindy Church informed the New York Times in 1999. ‘’She’ll become a supermodel, like Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista.” Under Eidos’s stewardship, Lara landed magazine covers — Time, Newsweek, Details — comic books, action figures and two movies starring Angelina Jolie.
With supermodel status came licensing deals: Lara Croft was briefly the face of Lucozade; Jolie filmed an in-character TV spot for Pepsi (“The commercial… shows video-game character Lara Croft battling demons to recapture her Wild Cherry Pepsi); and Core produced original footage for U2’s 1997 stage show. Eidos even kept models on the payroll to portray Lara at promotional events. (Some, under the terms of their contract, were not permitted to speak when representing Lara.)
This Lara — saucy, suggestive and showing off for the camera Lara — was for the boys. Eidos’s San Francisco ad agency made that explicit in a series of TV spots for Tomb Raider II showing stadiums, bars, pool halls, strip clubs and men’s rooms: all empty, it said, because “The Boys” were off playing Tomb Raider. (Why aren’t the Boys going to the bathroom?)
It was a different Lara to the one in the games, who mostly remained true to Gard’s aromantic vision. “When I was writing her I wanted to make her a strong female character,” Andy Sandham remembers. He nixed a line from an external script polish on Tomb Raider IV where Lara’s middle-aged male mentor, in a flashback, ogles the sixteen-year-old tomb raider in tight shorts and demands she “move those lovely legs.”
But generally, neither Sandham nor the team ever felt like they had a lot of control over who Lara was. “From our perspective Lara would change in her incarnation in every new game: different voice actor, different animations, different models. Somebody would be creating a new version of Lara and it would be dropped into the new game.”
In each iteration, Lara’s breasts grew more and more prominent, a fact much remarked upon in the press. (“Bigger tits for Lara Croft”, ran a headline on tech website The Register.) By Tomb Raider IV, Core had turned Lara from a woman who’d endure constant discomfort to a woman who’d campaign for the right to assisted suicide. Germaine Greer called them “weightless cyber-globes”. Core even had Lara’s official measurements on file (34D-24–35). Such was the import of Lara Croft’s bosom that Angelina Jolie, when she played Lara on film, wore padding to achieve the proportions of the character; Rhona Mitra, the official Lara model between 1998 and 1999, underwent surgery.
With the models, Lara Croft began to slip even out of the control of her marketers. Nell McAndrew, Mitra’s successor, posed without permission for Playboy in 1999, the magazine’s cover boasting “TOMB RAIDER NELL MCANDREW A.K.A. LARA CROFT NUDE”. Eidos’s court injunction came too late to stop the issue going to print, but it was successful in requiring Playboy to place physical stickers over the words “Tomb Raider” and “Lara Croft” on every copy of the magazine. Eidos also fired McAndrew.
Meanwhile, Lara’s efforts to colonise the media landscape were trending towards the garish and embarrassing. In 1998, Rhona Mitra recorded a dance-pop-electronica album — as Lara Croft — produced by ex-Eurythmic Dave Stewart. Mitra/Lara sang lead on tracks like Making Love, Naked, and Getting Naked. (“I know you want to be my lover, boy/but I’ve got a lot of things going on…. All we’re doing is getting naked/I never said that I would… [suggestive moan].) The result was thought to be mortifying, and consequently the album was only released in France, where Stewart lived, apparently on a boat.
What stands out most amongst the lads’ mag lyrics is this quiet bit of morbidity, almost hidden away: “All the things that life had shown me/All the walls that I was climbing/All the time that I spent falling/and all was fine when I was drowning.”
The whole artifact is a real oddity in the Tomb Raider merchandising catalogue: an album where Lara Croft sings that just because she’ll get naked with the Boys doesn’t mean that she’ll fuck them; and, also, that she would like to die. It doesn’t call to mind Linda Evangelista as much as Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer…
DONNA: Do you think that if you were falling in space… that you would slow down after a while, or go faster and faster?
LAURA: Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn’t feel anything. And then you’d burst into fire. Forever… and the angels wouldn’t help you. Because they’ve all gone away.
…who decision to die could be viewed as a triumph for her soul over a life of exploitation and excess.
Andy Sandham says the Tomb Raider developers never really knew how big Lara Croft was. They worked tight timeframes and had virtually no contact with marketing. Core didn’t even hear much from its fans save for the occasional abusive postcard.
But the developers knew enough, by the time of Tomb Raider IV — now titled Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation — to find it funny that anyone would entrust the franchise to the sort of people who’d wipe their ass on the company towels. “It felt like taking the piss that we were in charge of Lara,” Sandham says. “[But] we loved the feeling of power, I suppose. That we were in charge of this world famous character.”
The team was on board with the idea of killing Lara at the end of Last Revelation. Not as a publicity stunt or a cheap cliffhanger to be undone later: really killing her, for good. They planned to compound that act of defiance by refusing to work on any sequel. The standard slog of game development hardly dissuaded them from their plan: the last few weeks, the team regularly finished work at four in the morning.
“Some days I can stare at Lara and really hate her,” said designer Richard Morton, while promoting Last Revelation. “Lara was obviously the figurehead of our irritation with having to churn out a game each year,” Sandham agrees. “We were creative people and we wanted to do something new.”
Heath-Smith still didn’t know about Lara’s death, and obviously, the team knew he wouldn’t be thrilled. But just the thought of being done with Lara invigorated them, and they were excited about getting away with it.
Lara’s death scene fell to Sandham to write. “Originally,” he remembers, “we talked about things like having her visibly decapitated, but then we thought that [Heath-Smith] would kill us. And we always had a fondness for Lara, we were just sick of her, really. We were buying houses because of Lara. Because of Toby, in hindsight. I don’t think we actually wanted to do anything brutal to her.”
The team landed on a simple, elegant answer: Lara Croft, tomb raider, would die in a tomb.
In her past adventures, Lara had saved the world by foiling the fiendish plans of the queen of Atlantis, a Mafioso who turned into a dragon, and a cosmetics executive. This time would be different. Lara would screw up, and fall victim to her own ambition.
In Last Revelation, Lara’s in Egypt, raiding tombs until she finds her prize, the Amulet of Horus. But taking the magic amulet releases, from god prison, the ancient Egyptian deity Set. Set’s mad, and raises an army of the dead to kill everybody. Lara must put things right. Which she does, over the course of the game, by fighting demons and mercenaries through Alexandria and Cairo, reclaiming both the amulet and all the fabled pieces of the mystical Armor of Horus, summoning the power of Horus in the Great Pyramid of Giza under the light of the Millennial Constellation, and finally locking Set away once more.
It’s interesting to note that in Egyptian mythology, Horus defeats Set by smearing his own semen on some lettuce that Set then eats. The gods declare that Horus, by doing this, has “dominated” his rival. It seems unfair — and frankly smacks of gender — that Lara Croft has to embark upon a whole cross-country hero’s journey when a man can just masturbate on a salad and call it a day.
Sandham, by the way, says it’s coincidence that Last Revelation is about how chasing after fortune sometimes leads to unleashing an immortal, insatiable tormentor upon the world — then having to sacrifice yourself in penance.
In the end, Lara defeats Set. She’s redeemed herself, she’s the hero again, but it’s all taken its toll. As the Great Pyramid collapses around her, she limps toward the exit, clutching her stomach. Just feet away from daylight, the floor gives in, and she grabs the ledge. Then everything comes down on her — tons of rubble — and the door caves in. She’s buried. There’s no post-credits hand stirring in the debris; that’s it, she’s done, she’s dead.
“I remember almost crying,” says Sandham, when he watched that cutscene for the first time. “[It was] hugely cathartic. [Catharsis] was the reason, I think, subconsciously, we had to do it.”
That was when Heath-Smith first learned that Lara died — “when they showed me the bloody cutscene! I’m going, ‘Well, what the fuck happens now?’ They all sort of smiled.”
But Heath-Smith wasn’t too bothered about Lara dying. Nor, when the game was released in October 1999, was anybody else. The game was another hit, and Core never caught any flak for killing Lara Croft. Deep down, Sandham knew the reason why, and he always had.
It didn’t matter at all.
Of course you couldn’t kill Lara Croft, of course you couldn’t stop making Tomb Raider. “The team never wanted to kill her off,” Heath-Smith says. “Why would you want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg? I think it was more of a kind of statement.”
Sandham agrees. “We absolutely knew it was a foregone conclusion, that [Heath-Smith] was going to tell us to somehow bring her back. Obviously we knew that we couldn’t do it. [But] for a period, I think about two weeks, we thought, hilariously, that it was great, and we were going to get away with it. It gave us the feeling of freedom for those few weeks.”
“Catharsis was the reason, subconsciously, we had to do it.”
Nothing had changed at Core. There would be a Tomb Raider V, right on schedule — which had to meet its deadline, because there was already a team working on Tomb Raider VI. That one, Angel of Darkness, needed a longer lead time as it would be the first in the series developed for the new PlayStation 2. The Angel of Darkness team were already proceeding on the assumption that Lara Croft was alive and well, and always had been.
The team still went ahead and told Heath-Smith they didn’t want to work on Tomb Raider V. Sandham remembers that setting him off. “I suspect,” Heath-Smith says, “[I said] something along the lines of ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid. You’re going to make an awful lot of money for this and it’s seven months of your life. You’ve got a lot of living to do yet.’”
Heath-Smith told the team that if they did work on it, they could expect about a hundred thousand pounds each for doing so. They thought about that, and thought about how they’d feel about seeing another team reap the benefits of being on Tomb Raider.
So they did it.
It went badly.
“We sat there with our headphones on and sulked, like spoiled kids, really,” Sandham remembers. “Nobody would really speak to each other. I think some of us were actually depressed.”
“[I’m] not too happy,” said Richard Morton, in an interview with the official PlayStation magazine promoting the game. Programmer Martin Gibbins agreed he was “extremely pissed off…. The team before us did the first two and said [they] couldn’t possibly do another one. So we’ve done another two, really stretched ourselves and to be told we’ve got to do another one was a nightmare.”
The hours were still bad. People would sleep in their cars for three hours a night, feet sticking out of gull-wing doors. And all they’d done by killing Lara Croft was to give themselves the headache of figuring out how to bring her back.
“It was interesting to watch the way that people would interact with [Lara],” Toby Gard observed in 2012. “There was an urge to protect her, but then there was this other curious urge that I was seeing in other people… which is they just loved killing her. It was a very strange thing that people would constantly take her to the highest places and throw her off head first.
“There was a strange power thing that people were experiencing over this virtual character. I think part of it was… the fact that she was a very strong character, she was super tough… and I think people really got a god complex off playing with her.”
Tomb Raider V didn’t do so well, but Angel of Darkness was a catastrophe: released unfinished and full of bugs after years of delays and struggles with the hardware. (Sandham, seeing the writing on the wall, left while it was still in development.) Eidos was quick to mete out punishment. Heath-Smith was put on paid leave for a year, but resigned before it was up.
He’s philosophical about it today. “I was always the advocate of, ‘Let’s make as much hay as we can while the sun shines,” he says. “And while that’s not, from a creative perspective, the best approach, it certainly is one approach when the sun is out. As we all know, the sun does finally go in.”
Tomb Raider — the intellectual property, the assets, the whole thing — was confiscated from the studio and given to another Eidos developer, California-based Crystal Dynamics. Core Design, the small outfit with Heath-Smith’s laissez-faire hand on the tiller, could no longer satisfy the requirements of the franchise. Lara’d outgrown her creators. Eidos sold what was left of Core in 2006, and was itself bought by Square Enix in 2009.
Crystal Dynamics rebooted Tomb Raider twice, in 2006 and 2013. The 2013 game debuted an all-new Lara Croft: younger, softer, and less sexualised. “Lara [had become] more like a female Batman,” said writer Rhianna Pratchett, in an interview with Eurogamer. “Nothing touched her, nothing stuck to her. We wanted to go back to a time when she was more vulnerable.”
Marketing followed suit. Lara Croft models “will never happen again,” Crystal Dynamics brand director Karl Stewart told Kotaku. “We want people to look at Lara and see the psychological aspect of her character. Having a real Lara out there doing cartwheels kind of destroys that.”
But this did not augur, exactly, a new, dignified era of Tomb Raider marketing. Microsoft, in a stunt to promote the 2015 Xbox One release of Rise of the Tomb Raider, strapped eight people to a billboard in central London, in winter — and challenged them to “survive”. Not only could you watch them, via webcast, struggle to stay awake and upright, you could vote on which “weather conditions” they should suffer, from a menu that included “arctic cold, intense wind, wild snowstorms and sudden heat.”
For twenty-four hours, those eight people hung suspended in the London skyline while, basically, random assholes took turns pressing the button to blast industrial fans in their faces. One contestant dropped out after medics worried she was showing signs of hypothermia.
Why? Why, to any of that? Well, the conceit of the billboard was to really push that buzzword Square Enix had taken to emphasizing so heavily in all its Tomb Raider marketing: survive. Tomb Raider, Square Enix wanted you to know, is about surviving, and Lara Croft’s a survivor.
What took place on that London night in November, then, was a celebration — after a perverse, dystopian fashion — of the whole idea of Lara Croft: that you can throw her head first off a ledge, drop a pyramid on her, recast her, fuck her game up, reboot her, reboot her again, make her do an album with the Eurythmics guy, destroy her developers, alienate her creator, but Lara Croft will always, always survive. At least, for as long as the sun shines.
Special thanks to Andy Sandham and Aisling Conlon.
