20 Years Celebration Spotlight: Tomb Raider I

As announced last week, ROTTR Web will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Lara Croft and Tomb Raider by (among other things) walking down the Tomb Raider memory lane with you! In the spotlight today: Tomb Raider I!

Introduction:
Tomb Raider I was developed by Core Design and published by Eidos Interactive. It was originally released in 1996 for Sega Saturn, MS-DOS, and PlayStation. The game was extremely successful, selling around 7.5 million copies worldwide and earning a 91 aggregate score according to Metacritic. You might remember that Lara was hunting pieces of a lost talisman, the Scion, in Tomb Raider I.

Music:
The music for Tomb Raider was composed by Nathan McCree (Core Design). And now close your eyes and listen to the full OST below!

Did you know..? Trivia facts:
– The main character was initially going to be a South American woman named Laura Cruz. Due to British people’s pronunciation issues, Lara Croft’s name was picked from a phone book for sounding “UK friendly”.
– Originally conceived with a male lead character; changed to a female character in order to reduce similarities with Indiana Jones.
– Lara’s famous breast size was in actuality brought about by accident. Toby Gard was fudging around with the computer character model when he accidentally blew up Lara’s bosom to 150% of what he intended it to be. As he was resizing it back to normal, the other designers saw what he was working on and told him they loved it and that he should keep the double size.
– The first real 3D interactive exploratory adventure video game.
– The nuclear explosion featured in the game’s intro was the Trinity nuclear test. It was the first test of technology for a nuclear weapon conducted by the U.S. on July 16, 1945. The fireball of the blast was about 200 meters (600 ft) wide.
– Croft Manor in the training level was designed by Toby Gard himself. It took him a whole weekend to complete it and it was modeled after the front of the Derby Studios building where Core Design worked on the game.
– The character Lara Croft was prominently featured in the popular media outside the realm of video gaming, for instance on the cover of cutting-edge pop culture magazine The Face in June 1997.
– The character of Lara Croft was awarded a Guinness World Record in 2006 recognizing her as the “most successful human video game heroine.”

HD conceptual artworks: