Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (37 page)

The launch of
Tomb Raider
for the PlayStation was scaled up – now it was to be a landmark event. The press were junketed out to Egypt, even while Heath-Smith and his team were
frantically finishing the PlayStation version in Derby. ‘I didn’t go – I was stuck in the office,’ he says. ‘We worked up to the wire.’ But it was worth it. The
reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and sales were set to follow. ‘We knew we’d got a good game,’ says Heath-Smith, ‘but never realised that we
had a game that was going to be just as phenomenal as it was. Nobody could have.’

On the cusp of one of the biggest successes in the history of British games, Toby Gard quit.

‘It was a disaster,’ says Heath-Smith. ‘I just couldn’t believe it. I remember saying, “Listen, Toby, this game’s going to be huge. You’re on a
commission for this, you’re on a bonus scheme, you’re going to make a fortune, don’t leave. Just sit here for the next two years. Don’t do anything – you’ll make
more money than you’ll ever see in your life.”’

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!”’

T
omb 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.

T
o
m
b 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.’