from Hacker News

Tomb Raider

by barryvan on 6/3/23, 12:15 AM with 114 comments

• by teddyh on 6/3/23, 7:58 AM

  Any discussion of classic Tomb Raider is incomplete without mentioning that the first Tomb Raider games are essentially exact copies of the original Prince of Persia game, translated to 3D. Not the level layout or story, but the control scheme – very distinct and not used by any other games – is identical. Also the standard traps are replicated, like collapsing tiles and spikes emerging from tiles.

  Tomb Raider does add some flourishes, like the swan dive and hand standing ascent, and some necessary additions for 3D, like the ability to turn and jump sideways, but the rest is straight up Prince of Persia (the original 1989 one).

• by cubefox on 6/3/23, 5:22 AM

  My problem with the Tomb Raider design is that they swapped out Lara Croft for someone else.

  Lara used to have the same consistent design till Tomb Raider 6 (The Angel of Darkness). Her iconic face, known from countless magazine covers, posters, ads, and even music videos (in German speaking countries she appeared in a Die Ärzte music video which topped the charts for weeks [1]). Her trade mark braid hair style, too. It was never just the boobs.

  Unfortunately Tomb Raider 6 was a medium flop (due to poor gameplay). The next title, Legend, was a reboot, and they decided to change Lara's face. In subsequent titles they changed her more and more. By the time of Tomb Raider (2013) she was replaced with a completely different person. Not even her signature braid was preserved. It was just some generic looking woman of a similar age.

  That's like Nintendo deciding, after the 6th Super Mario title, that Mario should now look like a more realistic man and lose his big nose and his outdated hat. Or as if Capcom had decided, for Metal Gear Solid 3, to swap out Solid Snake for some other guy with the same name.

  I would have been okay with changing Lara Croft's not-very-realistic body proportions to something which fits the zeitgeist better. If it is so important for those people who love to complain about such stuff. Though I suspect most of the people complaining about her proportions didn't even play the games themselves. But please at least keep her face and don't change her into a completely different person.

  (And in my opinion, keep her braid. No other character has it. Without it she is like Mario without hat, or Sonic without his red/white shoes.)

  [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=404oPn6tudE

• by jmorenoamor on 6/3/23, 6:56 AM

  For those who played Tomb Raider when it was released, you know it was a hit because the game was great, movement was smooth and the sense of freedom felt amazing.

  Lara as a sex symbol was the cherry on top and free marketing for the game, all the media talked about the game and made more or less obvious jokes about Lara's chest (90s jokes, you know).

• by userbinator on 6/3/23, 2:02 AM

  I suspect Lara also started the previous trend of advertising GPUs with 3D-rendered fantasy females.

  https://playkey.medium.com/nvidia-and-amd-queens-how-virtual...

• by mcphage on 6/3/23, 2:54 AM

  The first Tomb Raider game really was that good. Just this morning I watched someone on YouTube walking through the levels (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiToc0SYkds), and it was impressive how memorable they were. Even the ones that I didn't remember before watching, once I saw them on the screen I was like "oh yeah, that place!".

• by magpi3 on 6/3/23, 12:57 PM

  The quote from Charles Ardai bugs me. The original was a fun game. Women in video games were at that time (and still are? I don't play anymore) consistently over-sexualized, but it was never why I played a game, and I really don't think most gamers buy games just because because of the size of the main character's chest. Yes, the main character has to be cool and interesting, and Lara Croft is. They gave her an interesting backstory, and the rich British angle made her a cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones (and maybe a little bit of Batman).

  Maybe it is just me, but the implication that my buying decision are based on something so puerile is just so damn insulting.

• by x3874 on 6/3/23, 2:28 AM

  Love this guys' posts. If only he would spice them up with diagrams, more screenshots, etc., so typically i read these during travel hours.

  Edit: Any idea how his (WP-based?) site's TOC works? Having a hard time continuosly reading associated posts if you don't use his links he inserts in the footer, but instead try to search f.e. for 'Lucasarts'.

• by imiric on 6/3/23, 11:03 AM

  Loved the article, and replying again as a top-level comment to point out something else I just learned about.

  The last TR game after Shadow of the TR was a mobile one: TR Reloaded[1]. It looks like a lazy cash grab infested with microtransactions. It's a damn shame seeing yet another franchise tarnished like this.

  It's great when an IP experiments with different game genres and mechanics. Guardian of Light and Temple of Osiris were beautifully done, and there should be more of that. But these lazy mobile ports do a disservice to the IP.

  I'm looking forward to the next proper release in the franchise. We need a good current-gen title to fill the void of Uncharted. :)

  [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsoVCxbxTN0

• by IshKebab on 6/3/23, 7:13 AM

  > But how many copies of Tomb Raider do you think they’d have sold if they’d made Lara Croft flat-chested?

  Probably lots? It helped with publicity for sure, so they would have sold fewer but it was successful because it was a great game, not because of triangular boobs.

• by raspyberr on 6/3/23, 1:43 AM

  Felt like the ending might've had a bit more oomph if the newest games were any good and not just generic Ubishit.

• by qingcharles on 6/3/23, 1:24 PM

  Anyone from Core want to tell the story of what happened when Angelina Jolie dropped in for a tour of the studio? I can't tell it, it's TFT classified.

• by rgoulter on 6/3/23, 3:37 AM

  Related to "the 2013 Lara Croft is more feminist than the old Lara Croft", I liked Liana Kerzner's discussion on the topic (with a cute pseudo-dialectic at about 11:00 in). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJMj3B1BFko

• by lowbloodsugar on 6/3/23, 4:43 PM

  Also super sad that Rhona Mitra didn’t get the role in the movies having played the live action model for years. I’m sure they needed the star power of Angelina Jolie to sell the movie but her English accent was painful.

• by phkahler on 6/3/23, 12:50 PM

  Why do I recall seeing pictures of an actual human female model posing for the artists at the studio? I swear there was one, thought they had quotes from her back in Game Developer or somewhere.

• by siddiqi123 on 6/3/23, 3:28 AM

  These were rather direct descendants of 8-bit games like Bounder: fast-paced, colorful, modest in size and ambition […]”

  Whoa… I could call “Corporation ” many things… a proto-FPS, a quasi-RPG, a precursory attempt at something like System Shock… But it definitely wasn’t your typical run-of-the-mill platformer or standard action title. It may have failed at what it set out to do, but it definitely was very ambitious!

• by billfruit on 6/3/23, 5:09 AM

  Also Lara Croft Relic Run, is one of the better infinite runner games on mobile, with smooth controls and graphics.

• by Animats on 6/3/23, 1:29 AM

  Well, it made Angelina Jolie a superstar. Few remember her films before Tomb Raider. Who sees "Gia" or "Pushing Tin" any more?

• by cornfutes on 6/3/23, 11:13 AM

  > 100 million copies combined and three feature films whose box-office receipts approach $1 billion, everybody not living under a proverbial rock has heard of Lara Croft.

  Meh, that’s only a small percentage of the world population. There’s a lot of first world Western bias here.