Core Design

Tomb Raider.

Developed by Core Design.

Published by Eidos Interactive.

First released on the PlayStation...

And I feel so proud, honored and humbled to be to be being passed the baton, you know, to be the next Lara Croft.

And I also think, wow, that is a huge cultural achievement for, you know, Core Design, who originated her, Crystal Dynamics, who took it on, Flying Wild Hog, who are involved, Amazon, who are involved, you know.

That is a huge...

To have this entity that has survived for so long in the cultural zeitgeist, and also not just that, but who's crossed out of video games.

Growing up with series including Sonic, Metal Gear and especially Tomb Raider, he eventually turned that fascination into his first book, The Making of Tomb Raider, published in 2021.

The book was based on extensive interviews with the original core design team, and his latest work, The Making of Tomb Raider 1997-2000, picks up the story as a new team took control of the series, tracing the creation of 2 Raider 3, The Last Revelation, Chronicles and the expansions, while exploring the punishing annual release cycle and the pressure of sustaining one of gaming's biggest phenomena.

Welcome, Daryl Baxter.

Hey, Simon.

From what I've been told, it could have been something in the reins of the 2013 Tomb Raider game, where she's stuck on an island.

But...

Core Design Eidos was like, no, we need one at the end of the year.

Let's go for it.

I would say if next week you would like to be prepared to listen to the episode, having played the video game we talk about, you should play 1996's Tomb Raider.

Brought to you by the fine folks at Core Design.

As Tomb Raider celebrates its 30th anniversary, and so do we, with the hot ranking yet again.

This is going to be a fun discussion.

But push on and you get an impressive visual feast of weather effects and animated oceans and lots of sprites on screen without any slowdown that you'd normally expect.

Um, Banshee was published by Core Design in 1994 and was available for both the Amiga 1200 and 4000, obviously, the, the, um, AGA chipset machines, but also on the CD32.

Guys, I know it's not the highbrow Dungeon Master, Lord of the Rings stuff you guys get off on in the dead of night, but what do you think of games like Banshee, and specifically games that serve as a showcase of what the AGA Amigas were capable of? Jason?

Uh, I'm sorry, I don't know why you're, uh, accusing me of getting off on Lord of the Rings in the middle of the night.

Good picks, good picks.

What I also like about this story is in the comments of his original Reddit post is a reply by user ElectronicPeanut4912, who says, "Good old Banshee.

I did enjoy working on it back in the day, in my Core Design days." And boom, the blog poster is now in conversation with one of the creators of a game he holds in high regard, and I absolutely love it when this kind of thing happens in the community.

Things like, for me personally, having my Lemmings signed by Mike Dailly at Kickstart in the UK, or having the project lead of the Atari 2600+ comment on me s- comment on me smelling the plastics in my video on YouTube, um, and then talking to me about how they came up with...

no although i now you've said angel i do remember the name i don't remember why it would have derailed anything

right well this was the sixth main tomb raider game sending archaeologist adventurer laura croft through a dark conspiracy driven paris and prague storyline it was intended to relaunch the series in a way with stealth and rpg like mechanics now a few quick facts it was developed by core design as said the sixth mainline game and i looked at metacritic currently the pc uh score is sitting at 49 and the ps2 is sitting at 52 so yeah middle of the

road

Middle of the road, exactly.

reviewers and players both noted it felt like a game pulled from development before it was ready the problem is it wasn't just that this one did review badly it was that people had very high expectations for it so we've spoken recently in last week's uh pulse episode how much you were looking forward to control resident and how it lived up to your expectations

absolutely complete

opposite right so what did it damage though the thing is the fallout was so severe that publisher idos stripped the series creators core design of the franchise entirely handing it to crystal dynamics who rebuilt lara from the ground up with the tomb raider legend in 2006 so tomb raider at that point had become an annual franchise and they they'd actually said themselves as developers that they were putting out a game every year right and did that damage the wider lara croft brand because the knock-on effect also sorry of this game is that paramount executives then blamed the poor reception of this game on the film lara croft tomb raider cradle of life yeah that was nothing to do with the game yeah paramount's distribution president specifically said the film's core audience were gamers who weren't happy with the latest tomb raider game you imagine that happening

with sony spider-man universe and that you know when they did like craven hunter and all these terrible movies and went yeah it was all insomniac's fault that spider-man game was rubbish shit i can't get away with it

like...

Core design gave Lara an aristocratic background.

She is...

The aristocratic daughter of Lord Hinchingleycroft.

The fourth in four years.

We're into 99 now.

Suffering from franchise fatigue, Core Design made the possibly insane choice to just kill off Lara Croft.

Really? Instead of just taking a small break?

This is, um, Chris Shrigley, who we've had on the podcast before, um, legendary Commodore 64 programmer, and, uh, Terry Lloyd as well.

I mean, between them have done stuff like, um, Future Knight, Rick Dangerous as well at Core Design.

Um, the cover art is by Simon Phipps, of course, of, uh, Gremlin Graphics fame.

And, uh, Thomas Danckert has done the, uh, the Sid music in here as well.