Tomb Raider: Chronicles pays tribute to the original Lara Croft, gaming’s abandoned superhero
Image: Graphic: Libby McGuire Games Features Games
In 1996, Toby Gard introduced the world of video gaming to one of its new icons: Lara Croft, The Tomb Raider. Gard and the rest of his team at Core Designs took the risk of featuring a female protagonist in their new archeological adventure game—a risk that paid off with a franchise that now carries 17 games (and counting), multiple films, and a huge number of various tie-in properties under its dual pistol-packing belt. The original Tomb Raider turned a large profit for video game company Eidos, became one of the PlayStation’s top-selling titles, and won numerous industry awards. Its popularity made Tomb Raider an instant name in gaming, and its sequel(s) some of the most anticipated releases of the decade—until just a few years later, when, just as suddenly, they weren’t. But while the brash, self-confident, improbably proportioned heroine of yesteryear has been replaced by a more human incarnation by the march of time, the version of Lara Croft that existed in games like the largely forgotten Tomb Raider: Chronicles, which turns 20 years old this week, remains indelibly larger than life, and a hero worth remembering.
Despite being well received in the gaming world, Croft drummed up controversy almost immediately over her dramatic curves (which Gard said was a design mistake they decided to leave in the game—take that as you will), and her growing popularity as a gaming sex symbol. Unlike many overtly sexualized female characters at the time, Lara was written to be a strong, independent lead with an ego and skillset to match. Gard’s biggest inspirations for the character came from two well-known tough guys: Tank Girl and Indiana Jones. (You can, in fact, find Easter eggs of both characters hidden throughout the series.)
More than that, though, Lara (never Laura, god help you) became an unlikely role model—even with all her body design flaws. Kids who cut their teeth on the original Tomb Raider had a new superhero, one armed with dual pistols, a sharp wit, and a stereotypical English upbringing. None of it was relatable to the kids cosplaying as or trick-or-treating as her in the years to come, but, then, neither is Batman—another orphaned, rich, stuck-up, overly confident adventurer who found themselves in ridiculously over-the-top scenarios fighting the most unlikely enemies. Looking past her dramatically large chest and skimpy clothing, the original Lara Croft was a badass, and the ultimate femme fatale.
This particular portrayal of the character lasted—through a series of tepidly received sequels— until November 24, 2000, when Tomb Raider: Chronicles was released as the last of Lara’s adventures to be played on Sony’s PlayStation. By the time Chronicles rolled around, Croft 1.0 was already a dead woman running, jumping, and rolling; her developers at Core had wanted to kill her off with the previous year’s Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, closing the franchise at four games, but publisher Eidos had other plans. It was decided that the more veteran team of developers would create one last PS One story for Lara—Chronicles—while a new team would develop Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness for the PlayStation 2. At the time, many of the Chronicles developers expressed lack of interest in the game’s creation, having already released four Tomb Raider games to increasingly diminished returns.
Perhaps out of boredom, or possibly just fulfilling the developers’ sincere desire to see the character dead at last, Chronicles broke with the series’ narrative tradition. In the opening cinematics, we’re told that Lara is dead, and that we are simply replaying past adventures in honor of the fallen heroine while her friends and allies reminisce. As with its predecessor, Chronicles offers a brief glimpse into the life of young Lara, introducing the player to new combat tactics and environmental interactions. You fought demons and dragons, blew up submarines, and broke into high-security vaults while looking for artifacts like the Philosopher’s Stone and the Spear Of Destiny. It was just as silly and whimsical as the previous games, but every bit as challenging and engaging.
Released to shrugs in late 2000 (after the U.S. release of the PS2, it’s worth noting), Chronicles garnered mixed reviews, and was widely ill-received by critics and fans alike. The arguments against the title tended to sidestep questions of whether it was “good” in favor of whether it was “necessary,” continuing as it did a franchise that was getting decidedly long in the tooth—and with the same old clunky engine and mechanics, to boot. What many didn’t realize was that Chronicles would be one of the last outings of the original Lara Croft. While the notoriously bad Angel Of Darkness was technically the final chapter in Lara 1.0's story, Chronicles is the last game to feature some of the original graphics and controls that would later be “improved” for the newer consoles.
Many criticized the fact that Chronicles’ gameplay remained static, but there’s a lot to be said for that original game engine, warts and all. Sure, the controls were choppy and difficult to master, but those same difficulties are what gave the original PlayStation 3D games their edge—and Chronicles is no exception. The added difficulty made reaching the final boss battles all the sweeter, and this concept of a real challenge is lost on the newer installments in the franchise. Their cinematic storylines and smooth game operations lose the charm the originals had. While the controls and graphics improved, we lost Tomb Raider’s intricate puzzles, challenging boss fights, and, in many ways, the better Lara Croft.
Because while Tomb Raider as a franchise is still going strong, Lara herself has seen a more humbling facelift in recent years, replacing the casual super-adventurer who laughs at danger with something far more vulnerable. The newer releases (heralded by the 2013 hard reboot of the series) have been praised among fans, but it is hard to say if this version of Lara is ultimately superior to her predecessor. With 2013’s Tomb Raider, Square Enix cast aside Lara’s thievery and ass-kicking and put a younger, inexperienced, and more selfless version of her in its place. This Lara was a product of a broken home where her mother mysteriously disappeared and her father allegedly committed suicide while she was a young girl. She inherited her family’s wealth and name and set off to follow in her father’s footsteps. Rather than keeping her troves of artifacts for herself, she became a champion of history, focused on restoring balance to good and evil.
This is all fine and good—except that the roguish, cocky, distinctly un-humanized elements of Lara Croft were what first made us fall in love with her. What the new games lack in story and character, of course, they make up for with stunning graphics. (And controls that aren’t absurdly clunky, where nearly everything around you could inadvertently kill you if you so much as pressed the wrong button.) But those older games, for all their flaws, cast a brighter light on Lara’s character. The new games surround her with tragedy and a dark past, but the originals had her surrounded by her own confidence and infamous reputation. She didn’t need her father’s estate, and made her living off of discovered treasure and her own experiences. Yes, the new Lara overcoming her own tragic story is “inspiring.” But it hardly packs the same immediate, “I want to be her for Halloween” punch as Lara from the 1990s. The new games have stripped Lara Croft of everything that made her a superhero, and gave her relatable characteristics that, in turn, cranked the dial backward on her iconic journey to the top. Back then, Lara didn’t need a reason to be legendary—she just was. And now, that iconic version of her only lives on through our memories of those earlier, imperfect, but fondly remembered games.
51 Comments
Fun fact, Tomb Raider was the inspiration for Gus Van Sant’s Gerry…
*one of the inspirations. It’s also loosely based off a real life incident. The Tomb Raider influence was more about how the movie the story is framed and shot.
The controls on those early titles were about as unintuitive as they could be. I had a hard time just trying to figure out how to frickin’ walk forward. Ridiculous.
This nailed the frustration pretty well:I think it took me, like, a month of walking near ledges using the analog stick and dying before I realized holding the “walk” button up to the edge would keep Lara from slipping off to her doom. The game got a lot easier after that, since ledge positioning is crucial for the uniformly cubic way all the puzzles are structured.
oh man, classic clip with a classic game. That drowning sound, brr. Almost as chilling as when she breaks her neck when you do a swan dive towards the ground.
One of my favorite shows of all time “Wire in the Blood” would often feature scenes of Tony Hill being incredibly frustrated (trying to solve a murder) playing Tomb Raider to “relax” only to get more frustrated because he keeps killing Lara. Here’s a clip I found.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_2fr_sPXwU
‘I heard Tim shouting at you the other night. I was shocked! – ‘You stupid cow’, something about a key, ‘You can’t shoot straight, you big-titted bitch’’
Oh, hullo Briaaan.
I normally say this in reference to old horror games, but: clunky controls are always a flaw.A good game can create challenge through its level/encounter design, the balance of its systems, etc. If the challenge is in trying to interface with the game, then that’s just immersion-breaking.
This is what bugs me about console ports as a PC gamer – especially when the port has still been delayed and then “tweaked” for PC.They don’t fix the most important difference between console and PC at all: the interface. Look, I understand the need for three submenus when it comes to a console with only a dozen or so buttons on its control, but foisting those same controls on a KBM is a nightmare.
Tank controls aren’t great, but they’re learnable. Sort of like dull open-worlds and difficulty for difficulty’s sake, they’re a hurdle you clear to enjoy the rest of the game (or not). The older Resident Evil games have a learning curve of maybe five or ten minutes to get accustomed to moving the character, and then you can just settle in and enjoy the backtracking, inventory management, and paintings with switches underneath them.
“Oh no! I broke the dolly!” < ----- Me sending Lara to her doom over and over again in the original game.
About 200 times in the original game, and 500 times in the second. They were great. I always already a grown up when played the 1st game, and oh, boy, running from that dino was the coolest experience in any game.
I played the original on PC, this was one of the first popular titles that took advantage of 3d accelerator cards (3dfx anyone?). People complained about the controls on PC too, but I didn’t find them that bad. At the risk of sounding like a “get off my lawn” old fogey, the very first one is still the best, packaging a sense of wonder and “you are there” feeling in its levels that none of the others have matched in my opinion (and that TRex introduction is a HoF moment in video game history). It also wisely (IMO) treated combat as more of a change of pace to the level exploration rather than an actual hurdle — the increasing focus on combat in the sequels was really to the series’ detriment.
This guy gets it. Yes, there was a learning curve to controls, but you have to remeber we were coming from 2D Genesis and NES games to glorious 3D open world. Of course there would be new things to figure out. Only took a few days for me, and I had her speed running through levels. The T-Rex and the dogs smashing through the windows in Resident Evil sold me on the PSX. Poor gamers today do not have those leaps with next gen hardware.
Ha, I had Tomb Raider 2 on my PC but did not have a 3d card. Using software rendering it was playable at a stable framerate, which is a testament to the skill of the programmers doing the port. But it did not look great at all. The silver lining is that being completely shut out of 3d gaming made me focus on older games that were much cheaper and still wildly fun (hello $10 copy of Blood from Babbage’s Entertainment).
Absolutely agree about the combat. it was all about exploration and puzzle solving, while combat was pretty dangerous and uncommon. To me it should always be Lara vs. nature/ruins/the supernatural. Taking down hoards of faceless human enemies never feels right for her.
Absolutely agree about the combat. it was all about exploration and puzzle solving, while combat was pretty dangerous and uncommon. To me it should always be Lara vs. nature/ruins/the supernatural. Taking down hoards of faceless human enemies never feels right for her.
They’re not mentioned but I honestly kinda enjoyed the “intermediate” Tomb Raider games the most. Anniversary and Underworld (Legend a bit less). They still had the same ridiculous super hero Lara Croft and silly stories and boss fights, paired with more modern engines and gameplay. The new ones haven’t been able to grab my attention. I have the Tomb Raider reboot on Steam but I just can’t be bothered to play much of it. The fun and silliness is not there anymore.
The added difficulty made reaching the final boss battles all the sweeter, and this concept of a real challenge is lost on the newer installments in the franchise. Their cinematic storylines and smooth game operations lose the charm the originals had. While the controls and graphics improved, we lost Tomb Raider’s intricate puzzles, challenging boss fights, and, in many ways, the better Lara Croft.
🤔I mean, I guess that was a little true of Tomb Raider 2013, but even by Rise of the Tomb Raider, intricate puzzles and challenging boss fights (see: the Baba Yaga for both) were in plentiful supply compared to the original games. Could certainly debate the merits of doe-eyed Lara, but the gameplay to gameplay comparisons seem… off.
Stereotypical English upbringing? Really?
I miss Tomb Raider being a big deal. Those last three games were actually really good.
I miss it too. But still, I don’t think the headline is accurate. There is a big difference between a character being Revamped and being Abandoned. I feel like Lara is the former, not the latter.
“The new games have stripped Lara Croft of everything that made her a
superhero, and gave her relatable characteristics that, in turn, cranked
the dial backward on her iconic journey to the top”
There ought to be something put on a surface near every writer – misery isn’t equivalent to meaning. It’s just such a lazy short cut to give a character depth, and it would be great if someone would shake things up either by parodying it to the point you couldn’t use it for a decade, or by making people see different things they can use. Why couldn’t they for example have just had Lara as that bit TOO cocky initially, have it get her in to trouble, and have the rest of the game show her growing from that point, to where she gets that cockyness back, but this time just a bit smarter…
I agree, I think there could be some happy medium between the two depictions. She could also be written as a millenial who uses dark humor and snark to deal with stress.If it means anything, there’s a mobile game being released soon that uses “Classic Lara”.
Uh, hey. You probably don’t remember me but kinja’s not exactly great for reaching out to people. Was reading reddit earlier and it reminded me of a convo we had 5yrs ago, heh. Gave you a Follow, but let me know if that seems weird. Hope you’re doing better these days.
I’m not sure, truthfully. It would depend on what context we’d talked. Thank you, though.
It was on this article:
https://io9.gizmodo.com/1743968113Random, I know. But if you feel the need to talk to a stranger, I’m bahamut86 on reddit too. Cheers 🙂
I don’t remember the article or our conversation, I’m sorry.
I remember being heartbroken Charlie Jane Anders never ungreyed me as I was a huge fan of her articles, but that’s about it. I hope I’m not being rude.
All good 🙂
Was a weird week and I was reminded of the convo for some reason. If things are going better than before, I’m glad. Figured I’d reach out just in case. Have a good one!
I recall playing the first Tomb Raider game on the Sega Saturn (where it appeared before the PC and Playstation versions), and while I had some fun with it, I really hated the tank controls. Sadly for me, those tank controls stuck through the original games.These days I do have the PS1 version of the first game, as well as that original Saturn version. I also have 4 for the Dreamcast (where Chronicles also appeared), and have most every game of the series except the last two on Steam. Got ‘em cheap, but to be honest, the only ones that have gotten significant play are Legend (which I have for the OG Xbox), Anniversary and the reboot.
The odd thing about the controls is I completely get why they were the way that they were – limitations of input devices, desire to do Prince of Persia but edgy and for the ‘90s – but it did weird things like having two ways to jump for no reason.
The article doesn’t touch on the “middle years” – the first Crystal Dynamics trilogy of Legend/Anniversary/Underworld, which were a nice marriage of the old Lara personality with an updated control scheme and mechanics that would pave the way for the 2013 hard reboot. I don’t think the “classic” Lara, also immortalized by Angelina Jolie, has ever left popular culture, the same way that James Bond will always be defined by his iconic traits no matter how they reinvent him.
I feel like it was OK to give Lara a story of young inexperience and self discovery in Tomb Raider (2013)…
And then in Rise of the Tomb Raider we got a girl who was constantly being duped and outmatched, failing to prevent anything from happening and escaping from multiple genocide scenarios instead of helping or thwarting any plans. Ok fine… but by the end of the game she’s going to really come into her own and establish herself right?Then Shadow of the Tomb Raider hits and (SPOILER) it’s Lara’s sole ineptitude and stupidity in the game’s first mission that gets a city destroyed and threatens to end the world. What the hell? Is the entire New-Raider trilogy about some idiot girl pretty much failing to be a good explorer / action hero while being sad about her family?I don’t even care about what the character looks like (I think the latest iteration looks great actually), but the whole “realistic” angle of who she is as a character just deflated any desire to engage in these otherwise great games altogether. I’ve ended up replaying Rise for all the DLC that came in the later PS4 release and ended up just skipping all the cutscenes because I had zero interest in reliving the story of the game.That said, I’ve got about 120 hours and 6-7 playthroughs of each TR 1-3 on my Steam account. When you reach that point where the old controls are instinctual, it really stops being an issue.
Food for thought… Now I’m wondering how the original Lara would look and play like today if the reboots/revamps never happened? Would she still be giving boners to male gamers if the TnA was still prevalent? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I kind of miss the hyper Hollywood James Bond, Indiana Jones glamor. The gritty reality show shtick is tiresome work.
The phrase I remember hearing about the original Lara was “Anatomically unfeasible”.
In the reboots, Lara’s now only burden with one massive tit.His name’s Jonah.
Honestly, the reboots still had an action-movie feel, just a different breed of movie. They’re basically the Die Hard to the original series’ Rambo.
Would she still be giving boners to male gamers if the TnA was still prevalent?
Truth be told, I’m betting the new ones still “give boners to male gamers”. Specially those that complaint about SJWXYZ on social media.
‘is all I’m saying!
If you mean, “Would an originally-proportioned Lara have the same impact if she came out today rather than 25 years ago?” I’d say no. She was unique back then, since there weren’t any other 3d characters or a lot of female main characters and thus she stood out from the rest of the videogame pack. Nowadays there are tons of women in videogames if one happens to like their tittays to be polygonal, so she’d be just another face in the crowd.If you mean “Would the original Lara Croft have the same effect now as she did 25 years ago if the original Tomb Raider was a one-and-done” then also no, for similar reasons. She’d be remembered as the OG of videogame T&A, but since there are far more recent characters with much higher resolution models she’d be well outclassed in the graphics department.
The gritty reboot worked for me the first time around. Rise of the Tomb Raider was a little much but okay two games to become the famous super hero alright. The third one? Nope, I can’t. The fact the first game ends with using two pistols and your using a bow two games later is bullshit.
I can still remember randomly stumbling into the release party for the very first game at an SF bar called Noc Noc. Good times.
I hadn’t played computer games since the early eighties, when on a break at work, I pulled up next to a Playstation in the kitchen. With ‘Tomb Raider’ in it. I was so knocked out by this 3D world (and the gameplay), it took someone to walk in, look at the monitor and say, ”She’s got a nice ass,” before I even noticed Lara’s, um, ‘disdimensions’. I wouldn’t have cared if she was a lumberjack.
“when on a break at work, I pulled up next to a Playstation in the kitchen”Sounds like a pretty nice workplace.
“improbably proportioned” People have many different body shapes hers was not improbable, they changed her cause of what media is used to showing… “more human” this type of belief needs to end. Please don’t body shame.
I wish I could still play the old games. I loved Tomb Raider growing up. I would enjoy playing it now too but I’m not buying a console for one game and don’t have a laptop currently to play it either. I used to play on my PC and loved The Last Revelation, mostly cuz I could drive around in a Jeep for some of it lol. I would have a save point right before getting the Jeep so I could play it anytime. I liked Chronicles too though not sure I ever finished it.
In in 1996 Resident Evil came out. The main character of Resident Evil is Jill Valentine. That is simply one example of many different games that had women in them that came out during that time frame, lol. And specifically spawn franchises that exists to this day.
With the newest Tomb Raider trilogy, at the end of it I feel like at the start: I wish it had been a new series with a new hero beside a separate series with a badass larger than life thrill-seeker Lara jumping through traps, solving puzzles and hunted by ancient forgotten fauna.
Like Lara in the reboot was supposed to bring better female representation, but… we can still have that with the larger than life character. The problem (at least when I was a kid, with the original series) was the advertisement and discourse surrounding the games and not the games nor Lara in the games.
Recently there has been a ressurgence of the idea that the old Lara is kinda waay better than the new one, and i am glad. We don’t necesserally need to make video game protagonists more human, the iconic ones are not. Is Link humanized? Chell? No they are mute, we know next to nothing about their inner turmoil and it’s for the best.
New Lara’s “vulnerability” is badly written and poorly timed, like for exemple in the 2013 game. She still whines and openly doubt herself after murdering three dozens mooks in cold blood and accomplishing other impressive feats. It’s incoherent and it takes the player, me, who is enjoying myself, out of the mood because, somewhat, Lara isn’t. I hope Tomb Raider games comes back to the old receipie: a femme fatale exploring beautiful places, gunning down men, animals and monsters, solving puzzles, collecting ancient artefacts and being generally really terrible at archeology. It’s fun.
That piece by Kotaku seems like a good read in the continuity of this oneAlos: read the comments
https://kotaku.com/i-miss-the-crazy-batshittery-of-the-original-tomb-raide-1845576208