Lara Croft was "losing relevance"

By Fred Dutton Published 18 July, 2011

Developer justifies Tomb Raider reboot.

Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics decided to reboot the Tomb Raider franchise because heroine Lara Croft was starting to lose relevance, so says brand director Karl Stewart.

In a Rock Paper Shotgun interview, Stewart argued that gamers were struggling to relate to the invincible, infallible old Lara. Conversely, the revised take on the gaming icon will be more more grounded and accessible.

"I think Lara's a beloved character and Crystal has really enjoyed their time they've been able to spend with her," explained Stewart.

"We felt she was losing some relevance in the gaming world, that she was a little too hard and removed. We wanted to make her more approachable and relatable.

"I think she became an icon," he added. "When you do, you remove yourself from relatability. We wanted to bring her to a place where she didn’t have all those skills, she wasn’t perfect. The modern gamer can relate to that, they want a complex hero."

Stewart noted that another factor in the decision to go back to square one was that the studio had run out of new stories it could tell with the original Lara.

"I think Lara had done all the growing she could. We'd taken her to a great place, to somewhere she had some closure. There weren’t really many more stories we could have told. So we feel like with this new place we have fertile ground and there’s a lot of places we can go."

The last entry proper in the long-running adventure franchise was the sturdy Tomb Raider: Underworld back in 2008, with an excellent top down spin-off, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, hitting download services last year.

The new look Tomb Raider is scheduled to launch on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in Autumn 2012.

Picture of Fred.

About Fred Dutton

Fred Dutton is Eurogamer's US news editor, based in Washington DC.

Read more articles from Fred by visiting the Fred Dutton archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (36) Latest comment 10 months ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • braydee89 #1 10 months ago

    I agree with this, if ever there were an IP which required a reboot, this is it. Keep doing the DLC shooters though!

  • liquid-s #2 10 months ago

    It's nice to see a developer talking some honest sense. I have been a huge TR fan for a long time and bought all the games and even though I've enjoyed them all it was starting to feel a little stale imho. I have big hopes for this reboot and think it could rekindle my love for Lara. Looking forward to more information and gameplay videos that hopefully won't shatter that hope.
    Edited by liquid-s at 18/07/11 @ 17:13

  • telboy007 #3 10 months ago

    Jailbait Lara was exactly what this IP needs.

  • karooo #4 10 months ago

    So we make it more cinematic like Uncharted!

  • DilutedDante #5 10 months ago

    Every single Crystal Dynamics game has been a reboot of sorts. Still they're wrong though, Tomb Raider is as relevant as it's ever been since it was taken off Core. Underworld was a cracking title.

    As for this nonsense: "I think she became an icon," he added. "When you do, you remove yourself from relatability. We wanted to bring her to a place where she didn’t have all those skills, she wasn’t perfect. The modern gamer can relate to that, they want a complex hero."

    Frankly, I couldn't disagree more. Lara Croft is Indiana Jones with boobs. She was a wealthy member of the establishment, which enabled her to go running around the world robbing precious artifacts from the locals. That's it. I don't need to relate to her. If you don't feel that you can do any more with her, start a new bloody series and stop messing up my favorite ones.

  • KRBM #6 10 months ago

    This is exactly the reason why I stopped playing Mario games. As a plumber, I found Mario very relatable. But then he started stomping on Goomba's and stuff, and I lost all incentive to play those games.

  • Subdominator #7 10 months ago

    Or maybe changing Lara was the reason why it became less relevant? They started it with TR Legend, they gave her more realistic proportions to better suit the female crowd. However they forgot one thing: There is no female crowd. They're all over Wii and WoW and DS, but they are a very small minority on PS360 and PC. You can't just build an icon for teenage boys and then decide that you want to appeal more to the girls. Just like we like to play with Lara they prefer guys over gals.

    First time TR was sunk was when they made five games in five years. Second time TR was sunk when they tried to appeal to female gamers. Third time TR will be sunk (and sadly for good) is when they release a game to appeal to the CoD/Uncharted fans. The constant reboot of the franchise sucks. Right now we have Classic Lara, Angelina Jolie Lara, three model Laras (for conventions and stuff), Angel of Darkness Lara, Crystal Dynamics Lara, Young Lara and Crystal Dynamics Lara 2. There's a reason why no game of the franchise ever came close to the numbers that the original Tomb Raider sold: Big tits plus groundbreaking graphics (PSX plus Voodoo Graphics). They seem to be on a good way regarding graphics but they will totally mess up the big tits part.

  • Quickstick4 #8 10 months ago

    Sounds like the opinion of a focus group to me...

  • Mister-Wario #9 10 months ago

    I can't help but feel: why even make it a Tomb Raider game? If you've done all you can with that person, why even reboot them? Why not make a completely new franchise? How much is this game like the originals? It sounds like a survival game: how many tombs does Lara raid? Still, I suppose a familiar name sells more than an unfamiliar one.

  • danjfor #10 10 months ago

    @Subdominator: I think you're incorrect to say they've removed the bits that appeal to teenage boys. Have you seen the E3 gameplay videos? If anything it's sexier. Tomb Raider used to be a sexy woman jumping about tombs; now it's a sexy woman tumbling about tombs and getting all muddy and wet and going UNNNGHHH OHHHH MMMFF UUHHH. It's got the vague-realism gloss that we expect from modern AAA action-adventure-type games these days, but it's the same kind of entertainment at its core. Looks alright, though.

  • Khosrau #11 10 months ago

    "When you do, you remove yourself from relatability. We wanted to bring her to a place where she didn’t have all those skills, she wasn’t perfect. The modern gamer can relate to that, they want a complex hero."

    I think this is true. For me, at least.

    And the new Lara is looking better than ever.

  • MasterOfTheStick #12 10 months ago

    Just bought tomb raider underworld for a fiver. It's shit. It's not the shit. It's just shit. And boring.

  • Timotei #13 10 months ago

    Should have bought Legend like I just have, it's pretty great.

  • darkmorgado #14 10 months ago

    "Was"? Was?

    She lost relevance to most gamers about the same time as the millennium bug. She hasn't been relevant for over a decade really.

  • Kanjin #15 10 months ago

    Hey as long as she doesn't state the blindingly obvious all the time it's all good.

  • DilutedDante #16 10 months ago

    Subdominator, Tomb Raider has a huge female fanbase, and always has. The 360/PS3 gender ownership isn't really relevant, since every game that has been released on those formats also came out on PS2. The last 2 games have been on the Wii as well, where as you point out there are a lot of female gamers.

    Crystal Dynamics have yet to make a Tomb Raider game as good as Core Design managed, but Angel of Darkness aside, they've been pretty good. Underworld was critically acclaimed, and has sold at least 2.6 million copies (since that info is from Feb 2009 probably more since), so it's really not like it was a disaster. I just don't get the reasoning for this reboot nonsense. I'd love to have been the chap who won the Euromillions so I could buy the rights to this game.

  • Doctor_What #17 10 months ago

    It might have helped if they'd had a decent writer on any of the more recent games. They had dialogue that sounded like it was written in the 1990s by a teenager on work-experience.

  • MiY4MOTO #18 10 months ago

    "Pick up the key you big-titted bitch!"

    /grins

  • WinterSnowblind #19 10 months ago

    @DilutedDante
    Spot on about the female fans.. but I couldn't agree less with your opinion of Core. After the first game, they completely lost track of everything that made the original great and each one only got worse and worse. As far as I'm concerned, Legend was TR2.

    It was handled the way it should have been all those years back, with less of a focus on the mindless action and without trying to play up the sex appeal so blatantly.

  • Peter_LIAR_Molyneux #20 10 months ago

    Hopefully Crystal Dynamics is able to show Lara in a more vulnerable light much better than Team Ninja did when they botched a similar task when they made Metroid: Other M.

  • God_Octo #21 10 months ago

    I totally agree, and I think the reboot is a step in the right direction. Compared to modern games, such as Uncharted and the like, Lara's characterisation was totally flat. You couldn't really describe her as anything other than posh, a little bitchy and trigger happy. Crystal's move towards making her more human is definitely one is am looking forward too- their previous games placed a cartoon-ish Lara in a realistic world, and it just didn't mesh. I'm really looking forward to this game.

  • metalangel #22 10 months ago

    Fuck it, they're given her the reality TV treatment, because they think we're so stupid we can't use our imaginations any more to help make a connection with something even slightly unfamiliar. Not that being a huge breasted posh bint who goes around grunting and screaming is something I can relate to either. I don't want to pretend to be "me" almost getting killed on some stupid adventure. I want to be the badass soldier/adventurer/warrior who shrugs off the danger!

    This is another case of a mandate from head office: relaunch the Tomb Raider franchise somehow. The same reason the Spider-man movies are being rebooted again.

  • Neil__ #23 10 months ago

    @MasterOfTheStick

    "Just bought tomb raider underworld for a fiver. It's shit. It's not the shit. It's just shit. And boring. "

    If you had just come here to troll the forums in the first place you could have saved yourself £5.
    Your problem is, trolls aren't too smart.

  • King_Edward #24 10 months ago

    Devs don't half talk a lot of bollocks.

  • liquid-s #25 10 months ago

    @MasterOfTheStick

    Care to expand on why ? or maybe its as simple as its not a twitch shooter and a little to complex.

  • Ashcroft #26 10 months ago

    The entire series peaked with the T-Rex fight in the first game, and has been circling the drain ever since.

    If this hadn't been one of the first games of it's type, and had big triangular tits in it, the series could never have survived so many shoddy sequels.

    Hopefully the reboot is good, but that distracted child reading lines from a poster style of voice acting doesn't bode well.

  • layleeloo #27 10 months ago

    It lost relevance after the first one

  • GozuTennai #28 10 months ago

    If they want it relevant in this gen they need to make it first person and also as generic as possible.

  • DilutedDante #29 10 months ago

    @WinterSnowblind

    Well, TR2 is my favourite, so that would make Legend pretty damn good then.

    As as for the characterisation, Lara doesn't need to be a character, or vulnerable. She just needs to be Lara Croft, with the flimsiest of backstories, running around well designed platform spaces with the odd thing to shoot. And perhaps throw in a T-Rex without screwing it up by making it a QTE.

  • Spekingur #30 10 months ago

    I guess 'relating to' is 'making her more human' here.

  • layleeloo #31 10 months ago

    I with these Japs would fuck right off with their spam and shite, fake goods!

  • Murton #32 10 months ago

    I welcome the reboot but I don't think Lara is any less relevant than she as ever been. If anything is making her and the Tomb Raider games appear less relevant it's the fact that Uncharted delivers better gameplay with less issues and a stronger and more relatable character, does that take anything away from Tomb Raider? I don't think so, as much as I love and even prefer Uncharted, it doesn't have the history that makes Tomb Raider special, I have more than enough affection to split between the two.

  • kule #33 10 months ago

    The reboot gameplay looked cool; not sure it really looked like a Tomb Raider game but hey we'll have to wait and see. The thing which I think gets missed is that essentially it's a puzzle platformer with some amazing scenery. The shooting/action is (and imo) should always be secondary to that goal in Tomb Raider. What always made the games great was the quiet exploration; running around a corner of a cave or working your way up a cliff to suddenly see an absolutely stunning vista that left your jaw hanging. That and having a heart attack when a well placed wolf suddenly jumps out with a load growl when you least expected it :) However that only works because of the quiet exploration parts which let you relax into feeling like you are completely alone.

  • panathatube #34 10 months ago

    This is a gamble. Lara had been a sex symbol for years, the new Lara looks too realistic for me and not all that sexy.

  • panathatube #35 10 months ago

    I think that after Max Payne (a bald fat guy urghh) they are messing up with Lara as well...

  • Kaminari #36 10 months ago

    Enough of reboots. Leave Lara alone and start a brand new IP.