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Without much direct oversight, teams tended to fall into scheduling disarray. "What we would normally do on a project, is we would spend six months crunching 'til about two or three in the morning every night—and at that age we could still do it—and then we'd spend about four months pissing around [just relaxing and doing research for the next game]," recalls Sandham. Reflecting on what happened on the 20th anniversary of Tomb Raider, Jeremy Heath-Smith believes the studio's undoing was that it failed to move with the times. But perhaps Eidos, with dollar signs in the eyes of its shareholders, got too greedy.
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It is an uplifting story of how a British company changed the video game world. It is a story of a certain time and place, unlikely to ever be repeated. And it is a story of 90s game development crunch and corporate greed that ended in inevitable disaster.
“It felt like robbery”: Tomb Raider and the fall of Core Design
"But then I virtually lived at work anyway, so it was no big deal. It was having to deal with the pressure of working on the game and sorting a divorce out. That's life. You have your life planned out and it can just come to a halt." Core delivered Tomb Raider 2 for Eidos on time, and it was another smash hit. But the exhausted team of developers were left broken. The developers say Tomb Raider 2 was a constant crunch even more brutal than what had preceded it, despite the fact the process of development was smoother because the groundwork had been laid with the first game. With a deadline set in stone and player expectations through the roof, the handful of staff nearly killed themselves to get it out the door.
Tomb Raider Apocalypse
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For the new Tomb Raider development team, the crunch hit hard. Tomb Raider 3, which had to come out in time for Christmas 1998, was made it just eight months, just like its predecessor. Neal Boyd moved out of his house and into a small flat.
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Heath-Smith remembers a meeting in America with Eidos executives who continued to ramp up sales expectations for the Tomb Raider games even when enthusiasm for the series had faltered - just to keep the City happy. The hope was that Core would be "leaner and meaner" in a post Lara Croft world. "They asked, has anyone got any new ideas for games?" Rummery remembers. As work on The Last Revelation ended, work on next Christmas' game, Chronicles, began.
It's very helpful to do exercises and assignments instead of just watching free YouTube videos. Use the timeless principles used by all design masters to create stunning work. Complete a small design project at the beginning of the course. Redesign it at the end.Be amazed by how much you’ve grown as a designer. While the atmosphere was often loose and casual, it could also be highly stressful. "I saw several people walking out of that building looking very grey from not having slept for 72 hours and feeling rather ill," McCree says.
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Eidos had budgeted for launch sales of 100,000 units. After those sold out, shops called for hundreds of thousands more copies. Toward the end of the project, the developers were stuck to their desks pretty much around the clock. Testers would walk into the Tomb Raider room throughout the night with a list of bugs to fix, and the developers had to sort them out. An updated version of the game would be printed onto a CD, then the whole process would begin again.
Beyond our commitment to quality service at a fair cost, we have the experience and tools to solve design challenges for projects of varying scope. Dodds Engineers built their own office building off of 148th Avenue in Bellevue. The firm remains focused on valued relationships with clients, jurisdictions, and industry partners. If you have a project in mind of any scale, the professionals of Core Design are interested in learning how they can help your vision become reality. I learned a lot and received valuable feedback from Ran's team.
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Jeremy Heath-Smith, a businessman at heart, left the Tomb Raider development team to get on with it, and the team credit him with keeping publisher Eidos at bay as they worked on the game. There were loose guidelines, the developers say, but no design document the team stuck to. Sometimes there were heated discussion (such as one to determine where Lara's health bar would appear on-screen), but the team of six gelled. And as Neal Boyd says, "it all just seemed to slot into place". Here, we talk to those who were there when Tomb Raider was little more than a room filled with blocks. We talk to those who watched Lara Croft creator Toby Gard walk out on Core Design after just one game, leaving hundreds of thousands of pounds in royalties behind.
"He said to me and Heather, I've got these Americans interested in offering us a publishing deal, are you interested?" Rummery says. "It was like, um, no Toby, I'm not, actually, right at the moment. It seems crazy to be leaving the company right at this moment." "It's really weird when you see a character of yours doing these things. You can't believe it. You think, 'She can't do that!' I've spent my life drawing pictures of things and they're mine, you know?' They belong to me." "He'd done poster designs that were meant to look like a movie poster," Rummery says.
Rummery joined the team and took his place inside the Tomb Raider room. Toby Gard got together with programmer Paul Douglas to begin work inside one of the ground floor rooms of the Core house. Enthused, Heath-Smith gave Gard the greenlight to begin work on Tomb Raider - but only after his work on BC Racers came to an end. During the company-wide meeting, Heath-Smith declared the PlayStation "the future".
"But politically it made more sense for them to build it. Their trump card was, hey, we can do 10th anniversary across Xbox 360 and things like that, which we couldn't do at all because we didn't have that kind of capability. Rummery found SCi more receptive to the idea of a 10th Anniversary Tomb Raider, and got the go-ahead. "So off we went and started really going for it. The guys on it were really into it. It was meant to be a celebration for the original Tomb Raider. We were really going for it with the graphics." Those who'd worked on Tomb Raider at Core were sad that Lara Croft had been taken away from them, but there was a surprising sense of relief. Most had grown sick and tired of Tomb Raider, anyway. "We had to take the decision, even though it was a horrendous decision at the time," Ian Livingstone remembers.
It truly was the company's cash cow, its golden goose. "In real terms, Tomb Raider was cheap to develop, because we owned Core," Heath-Smith says. "So it was only royalties we paid the guys and to me." With Heath-Smith out the door, Eidos assumed full control over Tomb Raider and Lara Croft. Its first move was to tear the franchise away from Core and put it into the hands of Crystal Dynamics, the Californian developer of the Legacy of Kain series.
Core Design has practiced for nearly seventy years in the greater Seattle area. With locations in Bothell and Fircrest, the company can serve clients and projects across Washington State and surrounding areas. "I could see so many elements of Tomb Raider in it," Heather Stevens says. "Watching the character climbing walls inside a cave, I thought, crikey, if he'd had just stayed for Tomb Raider 2 and implemented those ideas and put together some of our ideas for transport for Lara, we'd have been probably four or five games ahead.
Heath-Smith insisted Gard was walking away from being set up for life, "but he wouldn't have it". Heath-Smith called for ideas for 3D games that would sit well on the PS1, and Toby Gard piped up with his idea for a third-person game in which the player would raid mysterious tombs deep under pyramids. 3D gaming was established on PC at the time with the likes of Doom, but these games were first-person. Toby Gard's game would let the player see the character running about. CORE Design Group is an industry leader providing full-service architectural design for residential, commercial and industrial buildings.
Toby Gard is described by those who worked with him as an enigmatic genius. They describe the animator as a quiet, intense character who would work late into the night on perfecting the way Lara Croft moved in Tomb Raider. They describe someone who cared deeply about his job and obsessed about the game he had created, fussing over everything from the way she was portrayed in the press to the clothes she wore in adverts plastered on the side of buses. Looking back at Lara Croft's first incarnation now, it's easy to sneer at her hyper-sexualised design.
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