But Gard left regardless. His motive, given at the time and since, is that he disliked the prevailing tone of the marketing for Tomb Raider, and of Lara Croft. To him she was a sophisticated, unattainable creation, never intended as a sex symbol. But although Eidos’s marketing had seized on her as the icon of the game from an early stage, the timing of Gard’s decision was curiously pre-emptive. He made his announcement barely two months after Tomb Raider had launched, when the shift in Croft’s image was still barely discernible – certainly the merchandising had yet to start in earnest. Whatever drove Gard’s decision, it included an emotional core that some of his colleagues still cannot fathom. ‘Only Toby really knows, and I think even he, when he relates the story, probably gets confused,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘I could almost appreciate his motive, but I’m not arty, I’m commercial, I couldn’t understand his rationale for giving up millions of pounds for some artistic bloody stand. I just thought it was insanity. I begged him to stay, I absolutely pleaded with him to stay.’
Moreover, there was no immediate financial sense to Gard’s move. Although Tomb Raider had been his conception, there was not a single part of the game that belonged to him. Eidos owned the name, the technology and everything within the 3D world, including Lara herself. There was no ambiguity here – the intellectual property had always been a corporate asset. Gard walked away from everything he had made.
As Jeremy Heath-Smith had predicted, Tomb Raider conquered the PlayStation. It sold six million units, led the charts in the UK and the US for months, and it seems likely that it contributed to the console’s rocketing sales. Shelley Blond was recalled to record lines for cinema adverts, but only realised that the game was an international hit when for once the anonymity of a voice actor was broken. ‘I went to LA to stay with my auntie, and I happened to go into an HMV-type store, and there was an enormous cut-out of Lara Croft. Enormous, larger than life size,’ she says. Shop staff noticed her waiting by the display, and quickly found out who she was. Soon there was a crowd around her, and she was repeating lines from the game for them. ‘I was bright red and shaking. They all wanted pictures, and that was when I thought, “Shit, this is huge!”’
Tomb Raider the game was a triumph, but the Lara Croft character was the heart of the franchise. Throughout 1997, awareness of the game, and particularly Lara, crossed over into the mainstream media. Tomb Raider had been released in the midst of a surge of excitement over the Spice Girls, who topped the Christmas single and album charts at the same time as Lara topped the games charts. It was a coincidence, but it felt like there was a connection, with Lara as another manifestation of Girl Power. She appeared on the cover of the style magazine The Face, joining a long list of icons that already included David Bowie, Johnny Depp and Kate Moss, and this endorsement of Lara’s credibility was soon followed by articles in Time, Newsweek and Rolling Stone. There was no Lara to interview, of course: what these magazines were discussing was Lara the character; the face of the PlayStation and grown-up gaming. Her image, specifically its significance to gender politics, could be endlessly chewed over, but the real story was the one the media had created themselves: that a game character was famous enough to be front-page news.
Tomb Raider stories spilled and spun out everywhere. In an interview with The Times, Liverpool goalkeeper David James claimed that his form was suffering because he’d stayed up all night playing the game. Dance act The Prodigy made the excuse that their album would be late for the same reason. And Tomb Raider stayed newsworthy as the British newspapers entered the summer ‘silly season’. There was especially keen interest in rumours of a cheat code that allowed players to ‘disrobe’ Lara. Of course, no such feature existed, although a third-party patch for the PC edition inevitably appeared to fulfil the fantasy. Eidos was not amused, and eventually sent cease and desist notices to websites hosting the ‘Nude Raider’ code.
Britain’s own opportunistic branding was also peaking in 1997. Union Jack guitars and mini-dresses, a new, young Prime Minister at the peak of his popularity, and the Spice Girls, who set out to break the American charts – the window-dressing of Cool Britannia was now recognised in the United States and across Europe.
Lara was an ideal fit for Cool Britannia. Ultra-modern, confidently British and yet very international, with the built-in advantage of tireless availability, Lara Croft became one of the iconic images that transmitted the brand abroad. And like Ginger, Sporty, Scary, Baby and Posh, she conquered America.
Lara wasn’t a disinterested ambassador, though – she was for sale. For a while she seemed ubiquitous, advertising Lucozade and Fiat cars in the UK, and plenty of other products overseas. U2 commissioned Lara Croft artwork for their ‘Popmart’ tour, and so giant pictures of Lara were shown to packed stadium audiences worldwide, most of who would have recognised her. Generation X author Douglas Coupland wrote a zeitgeisty book of reflections on Lara Croft. ‘She is a composition of devastating force, set against a backdrop of intelligence and intuition,’ ran one musing. Wherever she was employed, the advertising campaigns stepped up their presence; whenever she appeared it was newsworthy.
‘You’re just riding this unbelievable wave of euphoria,’ says Jeremy Heath-Smith of the tide of merchandising. ‘This was like the golden goose; you don’t think it’s ever going to stop laying. Everything we touched turned to gold. Popmart, cult movies, on the front of The Face magazine. It was a just a phenomenon.’
It’s a word that comes up time and again. ‘We realised we had a phenomenon on our hands,’ says Ian Livingstone. As the presence of the game grew, he throttled back the merchandising. ‘We wanted to make sure we controlled the IP, so that nobody ran off with it into a space where we didn’t want it to go. But we also limited the amount of merchandise that we actually put out. We said no to an awful lot of produce, so we didn’t dilute the equity in the franchise.’ Some licences were rejected simply to protect the brand. ‘I think there was some choice underwear that was proposed,’ Livingstone remembers.
Core had developed Lara, but Eidos was in charge of her. Jeremy Heath-Smith joined the Eidos board, but remained Core’s managing director, responsible for Tomb Raider’s sequel. The brand could hardly have been more leveraged and a great deal was depending upon a successful second outing. ‘At that stage it was being driven by Eidos. We had to hit deadlines, we had to get the game out,’ says Heath-Smith. And Sony was keen to tie their hands yet tighter. It had seen the effect of Tomb Raider on the PlayStation’s sales, and sought complete exclusivity over Sega for the follow-up. As part of the deal, it would pay for the marketing.
The launch date was set for the anniversary of the first game, a painfully tight deadline that would have to be met without the lead designer. ‘We spun a game around in ten months,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘There wasn’t a lot you could do. You could tidy up the technology, you could change the animations, you could tweak the camera and the control. But fundamentally, there’s not a lot you could do.’
Core managed to get the follow-up game, now about hunting dragons in Venice and capsized ships, ready for Christmas. It was bigger and more complicated, and had a smattering of new features, in particular vehicles for Lara Croft to ride. But it was still all rather familiar and it looked as if the buzz of the first title might have dampened. In Britain, much attention was focussed on the review in Official PlayStation Magazine, which with a circulation of half a million copies, was seen as extremely influential. There was talk in the industry that a middling score might burst the franchise bubble, but Tomb Raider II was given an unambiguous 10/10, sales surpassed those of its predecessor, and the brand crystallised around the new game.
But for some players, there was the hint of something amiss in Lara Croft’s world. The disturbingly enigmatic animals were supplemented by mute gun-toting goons, in whom similar behavioural routines seemed brainless and cheap. And as the sequels progressed, Lara’s image was moving away from determined adventuring and towards coy looks and provocative poses. As a
fashion model she was eternally compliant, and Eidos released increasingly racy images of her: in a cocktail dress, a bikini, and eventually, but for a well-placed bed sheet, naked. Lara was becoming less pop culture, and more pin up.
As if to illustrate this change, Tomb Raider III was endorsed by a range of products with Marks & Spencer, right down to gentleman’s boxer shorts. This acceptance of Lara echoed a broader trend – the PlayStation’s success had led to wider acceptance of computer games, which were pushing ever further into the mainstream. And the Tomb Raider series was visually appealing even to non-gamers. Traditional games could drive casual observers insensible with boredom, but Tomb Raider’s exotic locations and Lara Croft’s acrobatics were a pleasure to watch. Parents might even play it for themselves.
The PlayStation was attracting a new wave of customers to computer games, and all the signs indicated that 1998 would be the industry’s most important year yet. Again Eidos wanted a Tomb Raider game for Christmas release, and Core aimed to avoid repetition by splitting the third game into sections with very different styles. After a classic opening in India, there was urban fighting in London and high-tech infiltration in Area 51. Each scenario was good, but the franchise seemed increasingly distant from the lone adventurer in ancient ruins who had been the soul of the first game.
But that didn’t matter. The game had sold well and Eidos was getting a reputation for delivering decent earnings in the notoriously fickle entertainment software industry, albeit from a single franchise. For all its reach, though, the success of the brand depended on a fan base whose devotion was being tested. Long-term gamers found Tomb Raider III over-familiar, and with the series becoming more difficult and less focussed, it failed to turn casual new consumers into enthusiasts. By the spring, there were plenty of cheap copies to be found in second-hand shops.
And Lara Croft’s star was fading, too. She was still on the cover of games magazines, but trend-chasing editors and rock stars had moved on. Models who had earned some fame portraying Lara at press launches were now spending it by taking jobs as TV presenters and lad-mag celebrities. Lara Croft had never been better known, but her ‘imperial phase’ was passing.
But Core barely slowed down to look. Its Tomb Raider team was now eighty strong, and the company was even larger. ‘It was like a locomotive, almost running out of control,’ says Heath-Smith. And with another year came another game, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. This time, Core reverted to the original concept of a lone adventurer in an Egyptian ruin in a game that was clever, tightly designed and very brown. Perhaps the developers were burnt out, or felt they had written a masterpiece, but at the end of the game they left Lara for dead. The assumption was that they had bought themselves some breathing space to regenerate the franchise.
Sales for Tomb Raider fell away, and the brand appeared to have passed its zenith just as the PlayStation platform was reaching maturity. It was a shame, because The Last Revelation was a pleasure to play, but the fourth game was still using the same ideas, and almost the same technology, as the first. In the rapidly evolving games market, Tomb Raider looked tired.
It was around this time that Eidos’s share price peaked. It declined throughout 2000, and it made little sense to the decision-makers to leave the most valuable asset on its balance sheet unleveraged for a year. ‘The desire from Eidos to get the product out, out and out was immense,’ says Heath-Smith.
Once again, a title was released for Christmas. Tomb Raider: Chronicles was a piecemeal creation, an episodic portmanteau told in flashback, with an unsatisfying half resolution to the previous title’s cliffhanger. It sold poorly for a Tomb Raider game and, although the franchise was obviously tired, Chronicles was probably more ignored than harmful to the brand. Was it a hasty, commercial release? ‘Absolutely,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘And that’s what happens, that the commercial aspect takes over the creative, because creativity takes time. And when you’re launching something commercially, you don’t have time. That is the harsh reality.’ It was the last game of the series for the original PlayStation, and a relief. ‘For five years we sold our soul.’
Tomb Raider’s mainstream credentials were confirmed when it was made into a blockbuster summer movie. Discussions started in 1997, as part of the franchise’s early gold rush, but as is common in film development, it wasn’t until 2001 that audiences saw Lara Croft: Tomb Raider on screen. Ian Livingstone was keen to keep the story faithful to the heart of the game, so Heath-Smith became an executive producer. It was an eye-opening experience for the British developer, playing at producing, choosing actors, but he didn’t get diverted. ‘I always treated them as 120 million dollar adverts, to be honest,’ he says. ‘I never wanted to make a game of the movie in case the movie was bad. Fundamentally, we still had a very strong franchise.’
As it was, the film came out at the start of Tomb Raider’s longest hiatus. After six years, Sony was finally preparing to launch a successor to the ageing PlayStation hardware. The PlayStation 2 was powerful but complicated to develop for, and mastering it was crippling the schedules of developers around the world. Core was no longer under an exclusive deal with Sony, but as the makers of a tent-pole franchise, the company was given early sight of Sony’s new technology.
This early knowledge proved to be a curse as much as a blessing. Core assigned a team of a hundred developers to the next Tomb Raider game, and they spent twelve months devising the technology that would be the basis of their release for the unseen system. But late on, Sony changed the architecture for the PlayStation 2, and much of Core’s work was rendered worthless. It was the start of a long run of trouble for Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.
Jeremy Heath-Smith ascribes a lot of the problems to pressure from within Eidos. ‘We wanted to essentially do Tomb Raider 1 on PS2 – but they wouldn’t have it,’ he says. ‘We listened to the marketing people, who wanted it to change. They wanted conversation, they wanted interaction.’ A huge amount of time was devoted to developing technology for features that were sidelines to the main game. It deprived Core of one of its easier options: buying some working PlayStation 2 technology ‘off the shelf’ from a third party, and concentrating on the gameplay the team understood. ‘Developing our own technology caused delay after delay after delay,’ says Heath-Smith. He often felt it would be better to abandon their first attempt at the game’s mechanics and simply start again.
But Eidos had little scope to accommodate delays – the public limited company was in turmoil. At its peak, during the fervour of the dot-com bubble of the late nineties, Eidos had been valued at more than half a billion pounds. But the fall from favour of technology stocks had coincided with a lull in the earnings from Eidos’s most reliable asset, and the business was in desperate need of funds. ‘Eidos had built its company on Tomb Raider,’ says Heath-Smith, ‘and 2,000 people around the world were relying on Lara feeding them.’
To shore up Eidos’s share price and its prospects, Heath-Smith and the rest of the board invested in a rights issue. Even though he could see the shaky state the game was in, Heath-Smith personally put up a small fortune. ‘You become blind when you’re so close to something,’ he says. ‘I put half a million pounds of my own money into the rights issue to show confidence. I always thought as a team we would pull it off.’
In 2003, after three years of public postponements and an unimaginable amount of managerial heartache, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was released around the world. Lara Croft was still recognised, but it had been years since she had been the face of the industry. The game itself had been plagued with problems until the very last moment and, despite a final development rush, its release missed a key financial reporting deadline. Millions of copies had been pressed by Sony when Core found a ‘crash bug’, an error in the coding that could freeze the game. Heath-Smith tried a final desperate salvage job. ‘We wanted Sony to launch it with that bug,’ he says, ‘and they wouldn’t. Funnily enough.’
Even now, for all its agonising
gestation, Heath-Smith is proud of The Angel of Darkness. ‘That game truly was phenomenal, the depth was incredible. And, sadly, it never reached its potential.’ The game’s play-shattering flaw was that the control system, the heart and joy of the original franchise, was imprecise and horribly unpredictable. This fatally compromised whatever strengths Angel of Darkness possessed: the athletic elegance with which the player could once tackle devious architectural trials was lost in frustration, flailing and unfair failure. It was a shortcoming that attacked the very heart of the franchise; the player had lost their grip on their character. The essential bond of empathy with Lara Croft had been shattered.
‘As soon as the game was boxed, we knew that it was off the mark,’ admits Heath-Smith. Reaching nearly two million sales, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness didn’t perform dreadfully. But Eidos had been projecting three to five million units, and for them the shortfall was disastrous. And it’s hard to believe that those gamers who did buy the game made much headway with it. For Heath-Smith, that’s the real tragedy. ‘Graphically, design wise, I think it was the best work that we’ve done. There are some mind-blowing bits in Tomb Raider on PlayStation 2, just mind-blowing. But we always knew that the camera and control system weren’t right. We just knew.’
Lara Croft slipped away from her British creators. Eidos, financially trampled by the sales performance of Angel of Darkness, took the Tomb Raider franchise away from Core Design and passed it to Crystal Dynamics, a Californian developer that it owned. Heath-Smith also left. ‘I got canned, which was fine. It was my turn to put my head above the trenches.’
Both Lara and her publisher are still British. They both come from Wimbledon, but they are both becoming more international. Lara’s adventures since leaving Derby have been well received – the new games didn’t include any of the diversionary features that Eidos’s marketing department had demanded from Angel of Darkness, and Crystal Dynamics perfected an updated control system. Lara’s now settled in to her Californian home, although the player wouldn’t know it unless they checked the box. And Eidos itself is now the British arm of a multinational publisher. A year after Angel of Darkness was released, Eidos put itself up for sale. There was plenty of interest in the owners of Lara Croft: one bid came from a consortium which included U2’s lead singer, Bono. A sale was completed in 2005, and after a couple of name changes and resales, Eidos became SquareEnix Europe, a subsidiary of a Japanese giant.
Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders Page 28