Lara Croft first appeared in a crossover in Sara Pezzini's Witchblade , and later starred in her own comic book series in The stories were unrelated to the video games until issue 32 of the Tomb Raider series, which adapted Angel of Darkness's plot.
The series ran for 50 issues in addition to special issues. The web series is a collection of ten short animated films that features re-imagined versions of Croft by well-known animators, comic book artists, and writers, including Jim Lee, Warren Ellis, and Peter Chung. Episodes ranged from five to seven and half minutes in length, featuring Minnie Driver as Croft. The creative staff was given considerable freedom to re-interpret the character; they did not consult the video game designers, but were given a guide listing acceptable and unacceptable practices.
Core Design, a subsidiary of Eidos, created Lara Croft as the lead protagonist of its video game Tomb Raider , which began development in Lead graphic artist Toby Gard went through about five designs before arriving at the character's final appearance. He initially envisioned a male lead character with a whip and a hat.
Core Design co-founder Jeremy Smith characterized the design as derivative of Indiana Jones, and asked for more originality. Gard decided that a female character would work better from a design standpoint. He also claimed a desire to counter stereotypical female characters, which he has characterized as "bimbos" or "dominatrix" types. Smith was sceptical of a female lead at first because few contemporary games featured them.
He came to regard a female lead as a great hook and put faith in Gard's idea. Inspired by pop artist Neneh Cherry and comic book character Tank Girl, Gard experimented with different designs, including a muscular woman and a Nazi-like militant.
He settled on a tough South American woman with a braid named Laura Cruz. Eidos management preferred a more "UK friendly" name, and selected Lara Croft from similar-sounding British names found in an English telephone directory.
Along with the name change, the character's backstory was altered to incorporate a British origin. Gard was keen to animate the character realistically, an aspect he felt the industry at the time had disregarded. He sacrificed quick animations in favour of more fluid movement, believing that players would empathize with the character more easily. In the first Tomb Raider , Croft's three-dimensional 3D character model is made of around polygons. The graphical limits at the time required the removal of the character's braid from the model; it was added to the model for subsequent iterations.
While adjusting the character model, Gard accidentally increased the breasts' dimensions by percent. After seeing the increase, the rest of the creative team argued to keep the change. Core Design hired Shelley Blond to voice Croft after the game entered the beta phase of development.
Gard left Core Design after completing Tomb Raider , citing a lack of creative freedom and control over marketing decisions related to the ideas he developed especially Lara Croft. Core Design improved and modified the character with each instalment.
Developers for Tomb Raider II increased the number of polygons in the character's model and added more realistic curves to its design. Other changes included new outfits and manoeuvres. Core Design planned to implement crawling as a new gameplay option, but did not follow through until Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation.
For the third game, the developers increased the number of polygons in Croft's 3D model to about , and introduced more abilities to the gameplay. For Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation , the developers wanted to reintroduce the character to players and included a flashback scenario with a younger Lara.
Core Design expanded the character's set of moves threefold to allow more interaction with the environment, like swinging on ropes and kicking open doors.
The character model was altered to feature more realistic proportions, and Jonell Elliott replaced Gibbins as the voice of Lara Croft. By the time development for The Last Revelation began, Core Design had worked on the series constantly for four years and the staff felt they had exhausted their creativeness.
Feeling the series lacked innovation, Core Design decided to kill the character and depicted Croft trapped by a cave-in during the final scenes of the game. The game introduced stealth attacks, which would carry over to the next game, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.
While the original development team worked on Chronicles , Core Design assigned a new team to develop Angel of Darkness for the PlayStation 2. Anticipating innovative changes from next generation consoles, Adrian Smith—co-founder of Core Design—wanted to reinvent the character to keep pace with the updated technology.
Core Design conducted market research, including fan polls, to aid in Angel of Darkness's development. The development team felt they could not alter the character and instead opted to place her in a situation different from previous games. The PlayStation 2 hardware allowed for more manoeuvres and a more detailed character model; the number of polygons in Croft's model increased to 4, The team sought to add more melee manoeuvres to better match Lara Croft's portrayal as an expert fighter in her backstory.
Movement control was switched from the directional pad to the analog control stick to provide more precision. After the original team finished Chronicles , they joined the development of Angel of Darkness.
Excess content, missed production deadlines, and Eidos's desire to time the game's launch to coincide with the release of the Tomb Raider film resulted in a poorly designed game; Croft was brought back to life without explanation and the character controls lacked precision. Angel of Darkness was received poorly, prompting Eidos—fearing financial troubles from another unsuccessful game—to give development duties for future titles to Crystal Dynamics, another Eidos subsidiary.
The development team reassessed the brand value of the franchise and its protagonist. Chip Blundell, Eidos's vice-president of brand management, commented that the designers understood that fans saw the character and brand as their own, rather than Eidos's.
With that in mind, the team retooled the franchise and character to emphasize aspects of the original game that made them unique. The storyline intended for a trilogy of games that started with Angel of Darkness was abandoned and a new plot was created for Legend. Crystal Dynamics focused on believability rather than realism to re-develop the character, posing decisions around the question, "What could Lara do? They updated Lara Croft's move set to make her movements appear more fluid and continuous.
The animations were also updated so the character could better interact with environmental objects. The developers introduced a feature that causes the character's skin and clothing to appear wet after swimming and dirty after rolling on the ground. Responding to criticism directed at the character controls in Angel of Darkness , Crystal Dynamics redesigned the character's control scheme to provide what they felt was the best third-person action experience.
The developers also introduced close-quarter melee manoeuvres. Crystal Dynamics updated the character model to add more realism, but retained past design elements. The polygon count increased to over 9, More attention was paid to the character's lip syncing and facial expressions to allow for dynamic emotional responses to in-game events. In redesigning the character's appearance, Crystal Dynamics updated Croft's hairstyle, wardrobe, and accessories.
Her shirt was changed to a V-neck, her body was given more muscle tone, and her hair braid was switched to a pony tail. The voice actor for Lara Croft was initially rumoured to be Rachel Weisz, but the role was eventually given to Keeley Hawes. Crystal Dynamics retained the design changes for the next game, Tomb Raider: Anniversary , a remake of the first game The designers aimed to aimed to portray Croft with more emotional depth, and focused on the character's desire to achieve the end goal of the game, culminating in killing one of the antagonists.
The developers used the death to evoke guilt in Croft afterward and illustrate that shooting a person should be a difficult choice. Tomb Raider: Underworld continued the plot line established in Legend.
Crystal Dynamics used new technology to improve the character for seventh generation consoles, focusing on improving realism. The dirt accumulation and water cleansing mechanic from Legend was altered to be a real-time mechanic that can involve the entire game environment. To achieve a more natural appearance, the developers added spherical harmonics to provide indirect lighting to in-game objects like Lara Croft.
Crystal Dynamics made the character model more complex and detailed than previous instalments, featuring more texture layers that determine the appearance of shadows and reflective light on it, and using skeletal animation to portray believable movement. The number of polygons in the model increased to 32, The developers enhanced Croft's facial model by increasing the number of polygons, bones used in the animation skeleton, and graphical shaders in the face to add more detail and expressive capabilities.
The hair was created as a real-time cloth simulation to further add realism to its shape and movement. The developers kept Croft's hair tied back because they felt a real person would not want it flying around while performing dangerous manoeuvres. The character's body size was increased and breast size reduced to portray more realistic proportions. The developers tried to redefine Lara Croft's actions by questioning what they felt the character was capable of. While previous games used hand-animated movement for the character, Underworld introduced motion capture-based animation to display more fluid, realistic movement and facial expressions.
Stuntwoman and Olympic Gold medalist Heidi Moneymaker was the motion capture actor, and advised the designers on practical movements. Animators adjusted and blended the recorded animation to create seamless transitions between the separate moves and their simultaneous combinations The blends and additional animations give the character more flexible movement. Actions were overlapped to allow for multitasking, such as aiming at two separate targets and shooting with one hand while the other holds an object collected from the environment.
Other additions include more melee attacks, as well as contextual offensive and climbing manoeuvres. Crystal Dynamics sought to make the visual appearance of the Xbox and PlayStation 3 versions identical, although the systems use different techniques to achieve this. In response to Underworld's lackluster sales figures, Eidos reportedly considered altering the character's appearance to appeal more to female fans.
Crystal Dynamics remained the developer of the Tomb Raider games. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light introduced co-operative gameplay to the series, a move that brand director Karl Stewart said was meant to "show [Lara] as a more humanistic character" by placing her in a situation that differed from previous installments. The game used the same technology featured in the studio's past Tomb Raider games. Despite the changes implemented in the titles, Crystal Dynamics believed that the series required further reinvention to stay relevant.
In late , Square Enix announced a franchise reboot titled Tomb Raider ; the new Lara Croft would be a darker, grittier reimagining of the character. In examining the character, Crystal Dynamics concluded that Croft's largest failing was her "Teflon coating", and that it needed a more human version that players would care about.
The studio is seeking a new voice actress, trialling dozens of relatively unknown performers. The second reboot focuses on the origin of the character, and as a result, changes the previous back story.
Staff opted to first work on the character's biography rather than cosmetic aspects. Crystal Dynamics sought to avoid the embellished physique of past renditions and pushed for realistic proportions. In redesigning the character's appearance, the designers began with simple concepts and added features that it felt made Lara Croft iconic: a ponytail, "M-shaped" lips, and the spatial relationship between her eyes, mouth, and nose. The company also changed the character's wardrobe, focusing on what it believed was more functional and practical.
In designing the outfits, staff aimed to create a look that was "relevant" and "youthful", but not too "trendy" or "hip". To gauge the redesign, Crystal Dynamics conducted eye tracking studies on subjects who viewed the new version and previous ones.
Similar to Underworld , the new Tomb Raider will feature motion capture-based animation. In an effort to present realism and emotion in the character, Crystal Dynamics captured face and voice performances to accompany the body performances.
The company plans to revamp Croft's in-game combat abilities. Crystal Dynamics aims to make the "combat fresh to the franchise, competitive amongst [similar games], and relevant to the story. The studio reasoned that such a system would cause players to be more invested in the action by fostering a "raw, brutal, and desperate" style.
Global brand director Karl Stewart stated that such desperation relates to the updated character's inexperience with violence. When Robins understood that Lara Croft was turning into Camilla Luddington, he and the team-leaders got to work unmaking the current build and restructuring her. It was, he understood, an issue that had been created by technology and would need to be solved the same way. We wanted to make Lara as believable as possible and a solid way of doing that is bringing more of our actor to our model so that we could fully convey the emotion Camilla brings.
But the art team thought she looked "too real," meaning that she looked like Luddington. This was the point at which they decided to bring back Croft. Croft is now being made for vastly more powerful consoles than in the past. Her parameters have changed. After iterating and testing each set of shapes on new base meshes we were able to give Lara her own identity and individual movement while preserving the great performances provided by Camilla.
Video games have long suffered from uncanny valley representations of weird-looking people, eyeballs swiveling like marbles in a milky shot glass. In Rise of the Tomb Raider , Lara Croft is often placed in moments of peril generating scenes during which she needs to look scared, troubled, determined.
All good screen actors understand that the trick is in the eyes. Recreating this artistic magic in digital, technological form is extremely tough. You have to get the look of the eye right, the wetness and the micro-details within the eye. The surrounding tissue has to move just so, as the expressions enter the character. Her eyes look a little bit different depending on where you look at them from. Those small details are very important. A lot of focus has gone into the connectivity of the body and face, the interplay of how one thing connects with another.
Notable is Rise of the Tomb Raider 's snow, which builds in drifts and can be an impediment for the player. It can also be used to track prey, or to hide from enemies. All the little micro-facets catch the light at different times. You actually see the contact between the player and the snow.
Most game leads are men and they are usually past the first flush of youth. They are often grizzled and wartorn. Their faces are naturally lined. It looks just fine," says Horton. When you put those harsher emotions on her, it tends to make her look different or strange.
Their faces are inherently softer. On older men you have more latitude for that. She can hold her own. While the reboot featured a single crafting resource, Rise of the Tomb Raider tasks Croft with collecting multiple items in order to create and upgrade weapons and ammo. Players can choose to grab guns and use those to defeat enemies, but ammo is limited and guns are noisy. It speaks to her resourcefulness and intelligence.
Many resources are gathered by hunting animals. Fan feedback has also influenced other gameplay changes. With this Lara, I wanted to bring her down to earth a little bit more, and think about her as an average London student just out of university who paid her way through and worked bar jobs — someone more in line with young women in London today.
Pratchett's goal was to reintroduce Croft as relatable to the droves of young women who'd flocked to video games in recent years. We wanted to explore that kind of growing with the character. Following in Jolie's footsteps is fellow Oscar winner Alicia Vikander The Danish Girl , in an origin story loosely adapted from the game that sees Croft venturing to the fictional island of Yamatai in search of her long-lost father.
That's the kind of strength I want Lara to have, and it was very empowering to change and feel like I could pump up my own weight. That made me feel like I could create a character people will hopefully believe in. Tomb Raider : The evolution of Lara Croft. Joey Nolfi. Save FB Tweet More. Pinterest Email Send Text Message.
Tomb Raider video game - Original game. Tomb Raider 2. Continued on next slide. Tomb Raider II video game - Credit: Moby Games. Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation video game - Screen Shot at Credit: Everett Collection. Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness video game - Tomb Raider: Legend video game - Tomb Raider: Underworld video game - Credit: Square Enix.
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