In the beginning....

A lot can happen in 10 years, and believe me it really did.  The Tomb Raider series went from strength to strength starting out as a series of games which later developed into two smash hit movies starring Angelina Jolie as the character we had grown to love.  But how did it all begin?  Well, the answer begins here, in 1988 when a small Derby based design company by the name of Core Design was first assembled by Mr. Jeremy Heath Smith.

The company focused on quality over quantity, slowly expanding their personnel and output of titles as the years passed.  Core's first game was seen in 1989.  It was a 2D adventure game with a male lead "Rick Dangerous".  Rick was an archaeologist who explored the deadly tombs of a Mayan Temple.  Battling with baddies to win the prize artefact... Sound familiar?

A few years later with the increase of technology making bigger and better games possible Jeremy called a meeting with his staff upon hearing news of a brand new games console - The Sony Playstation.  The team sat down and started thinking of possible games that could make use of this "miracle machine".  Toby Gard was one of the employees with a suggestion... A game called Tomb Raider was what he wanted to see on this new console.  Gard had produced drawings of what he felt the game should look like, he explains how some of the other employees thought he was a bit crazy, however that's where the phenomenon known as Tomb Raider started.

"Toby stood up and said I've got this idea about doing a game based on pyramids", Says Jeremy Heath-Smith.  "I've always wanted to do a game based around pyramids to.  For some reason I really fancied this idea about pyramids with a Pharaoh, and having to go tunnel under the pyramids.  It was just as silly as that.  It didn't have characters, it was more just conceptually let's do a game based on pyramids".

1993 arrives and so does Tomb Raider...
 
Tomb Raider made its way to the drawing board in 1993.  The design brief was for a cinematic adventure with elements of exploration, action and puzzle solving.  All held together with a strong storyline.  Gard decided that he didn't want the series to go down the route of other popular games at the time such as Doom.  After all Tomb Raider isn't a shoot 'em up.  This meant that the view was switched from 1st person to 3rd person allowing the player to see the character and what they do.  Unfortunately the series stumbled at the very first hurdle.  "Although Jeremy liked the idea, there were no programmers that would touch it.  They all thought it was too difficult because at the time no one had done anything like it.  Nobody in the company had done anything 3D.  The whole idea was just terrifying to programmers".  The project then faced another major hurdle... Who was the lead going to be?

Weeks of design work followed, but each design was always too similar to Indiana Jones.  "The male lead was in for a few weeks.  He didn't have a name but as soon as I saw him he got binned" says Jeremy.  Gard started toying with the idea of the lead being a female character.  "It wasn't necessarily going to be a female character, I designed a couple of characters.  One was a girl and the other a bloke.  My argument was always from watching people play Virtual Fighter.  In an all bloke office nearly everyone was playing one of the female characters.  It seemed to me that people were missing something if people weren't making characters female."   

Toby and Core were taking a huge risk having the lead character of the Tomb Raider series a female one.  It had been considered as commercial suicide.  "There weren't any girls in videogames at all then.  Sure there were a few single women figures but still no games that revolved completely around a heroine" says Jeremy.  Deciding to take the dangerous option the Core team pressed the delete button on the male hero of Tomb Raider and focused on the female role.