The 30th anniversary of Tomb Raider is this month, and a new book delves into its late-1990s heyday. The Making of Tomb Raider: 1997-2000 by Daryl Baxter covers a difficult development period for the series.
The below edited extract from the book centres on the development of Tomb Raider Chronicles, which was released on the original PlayStation in 2000. The team had thought they would be working on a PS2 Tomb Raider title after the release of 1999’s Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, but the higher-ups at Core Design and Eidos had other plans – and the idea of creating a fifth game so close to the launch of the PlayStation 2 didn’t sound appealing to many involved.
By the end of 1999, the franchise seemed to be reaching its peak. The fifth main-line title was about to start development at Core Design. By now, the engine and the team were well-oiled to have a new game ready in nine months. But the wheels were slowly coming off, whether some saw this happening or not.
Andrea Cordella (level designer): “The deal with Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation (TR4) was that it was meant to be the last one on PS1, and then that’s it. We turn the page, and then it’s going to be another thing. That was the team’s understanding.”
Phil Chapman (animator): “We thought we were going to bring her back in the next-gen version, which would have been on PlayStation 2. That’s where the team’s focus was, so we were looking at doing that.”
However, publisher Eidos Interactive’s need to keep Tomb Raider in the public consciousness required a game to be out by the end of 2000, something that the team simply weren’t keen on doing.
AC: “Basically, Tomb Raider was really important for Eidos financially. Every year, it made the balance sheet a lot better, so they were always counting on it. So they didn’t want to skip a year, which led to a mandate from Eidos to get another one done, and then we can do TR6.”
Richard Morton (story/level designer): “We started designing elements of the new game concerning Lara’s skills. We wanted some narrative choices. In fact, I did have some early design documents for how we were going to do it. It was very much to do with being able to strengthen various skills by, for instance, if you did a lot of hanging, you would have stronger arms, effectively, which would allow you access to various different areas.
“It was almost a Metroidvania, really. Then I was working on a branching narrative system, but we realised that, obviously, you had to branch it and bring it back onto a main critical path narrative-wise, otherwise you’d have 75 billion options. We were all fiddling with that, and then we got assigned TR5 because I think we were the only people who could really do it.”
Tom Scutt (AI programmer): “I reckon Eidos thought that it couldn’t afford that massive gap between TR4’s release and the next-gen TR coming out. So I think they decided that a Tomb Raider 5 was needed to fill that gap and earn some money in the interim.”
The team says no
Del Gilchrist (programmer): “We all said no. Everybody said no.”
Martin Gibbins (programmer): “I think it might have been the PlayStation Official Magazine where one journalist asked me, ‘What were your initial thoughts about being asked to do Tomb Raider 5?’ And I said, ‘I was really f****** pissed off.’ And it made it into print. That was the general consensus, wasn’t it? ‘F*** off, we’re not doing that.'”
PC: “Eidos insisted they wanted Tomb Raider 5. So we said, ‘Put another team on it then. We want to do the next-gen stuff, we’ve earned it.’ And they said, ‘No, we want the same team doing it because you know what you’re doing. And it’s got to be out next year.'”
TS: “I mean, in retrospect, we got the chance to work on another Tomb Raider game. You’d be crazy to turn that down. I think we were just so burnt out, too. We were so done with it, and just the idea of going through it again, because we knew it would be the same again, as it was going to end up being nine months yet again to make a AAA game. So we knew that it wasn’t going to be easy this time.”
RM: “Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was meant to be the last Tomb Raider game on the PS1. We had a plan in place that we thought would work well, leaving TR4 on a cliffhanger that would be resolved in the PS2 game, showing how Lara was saved by a character called the Shaman. It helped make sense of the upgrade system and why she couldn’t perform many of her moves in that title to begin with. Essentially, she was damaged at the start of TR6, so she was relearning everything she once knew.”
Pete Duncan (story/level designer): “We were offered a choice: to work on that or try and work on the new TR on PlayStation 2. I opted for that rather than doing another one, I think, because I had become slightly burnt out doing the same thing twice in a row, and I didn’t want to do it again. So I went for the option of working on the PlayStation 2, which wasn’t that great in the end. It didn’t pan out too well.”
Word seemingly reached Jeremy Heath-Smith, the executive director of Eidos, which led to everyone in the TR4 team being sent to his office, one by one, to ask if they would work on TR5.
DG: “They started picking us off one by one, being called to Jeremy’s office, trying to break us individually. ‘You’ll work on it, won’t you? You’ll work on it, won’t you?’ And I just remember saying no.”
Andy Sandham (story/level designer): “Well, I think Jeremy was terrifying. I mean, retrospectively, he was actually in many ways a really nice boss, and certainly knowing what I know now, I do regret being annoyed at some of the things he did because he was in such a difficult position. He had these terrifying shark eyes. If he was angry in a meeting and he stared at you, you would just think, ‘Shit, this man’s going to kill me.’ He was proper scary.”
With what seemed like a stalemate between the team and Jeremy, a deal was reached that was too tempting to say no to, financially.
PC: “They started to convince us from the monetary side of things. But even with that, the team still didn’t want to do it. We really wanted to go on to the next gen, even though it was going to have a nice bonus and stuff. We would rather have spent two to three years doing the next-gen version and seeing what we could do with that than moving on to the fifth one.”
AS: “It was almost like we had a meeting beforehand where we had pretty much agreed that we’re all going to be in solidarity. We’re all going to say that we’re not doing it. But we were persuaded.”
DG: “Eventually, they just bribed us all, and we ended up doing it. The deal was, we do Tomb Raider 5, then we go on to PS2 to do next-gen.”
AS: “I think Jeremy got quite pissed off with us about making demands. It’s almost like a situation where we held them to ransom, really. It wasn’t great, but it was a very small percentage of a multimillion-pound industry. And essentially, this time anyway, most of us couldn’t have done it unless we had a carrot at the end. Genuinely, we couldn’t have done TR5 otherwise.”
Once development began on Chronicles, the mood and the camaraderie that were there before felt different.
AS: “I remember going into work, and everyone was just sitting with their headphones on, not really talking, and just getting on with it. We were just burnt out. And regardless of the deal we cut with Jeremy, you can’t just keep doing it. It was five years, effectively, of heavy-duty working until stupid hours. And yeah, we were still a team and nobody argued, but we were all in a mood.
“We all shut ourselves off a bit. A lot of us perceive this as a dark period.”
TS: “Yeah, it wasn’t a happy place, really, going into TR5. It was more like going in with a sense of resignation. It felt like we’d done it all and told the story we wanted to tell.”
RM: “TR5 was born from the need to make the company money. It was difficult for us to think of anything that didn’t undo our plans for PS2 Tomb Raider. So we came up with Lara’s closest friends coming together to reminisce about stories of her. It was okay, but far from essential to the whole Tomb Raider series.”
Watching the PS2 disaster
Although TR5 was about to start thanks to the deal Jeremy had made with the team, another team was working on an early version of TR6, then called Tomb Raider Next Generation.
MG: “As it turns out, the whole ‘Go on to next gen after Tomb Raider 5’ thing – in the year that we were doing Tomb Raider 5, they’d made a thousand-polygon tree and a completely broken engine, which got completely scrapped. The project began again, and then it took another four years from then. So yeah, it was a complete disaster. And it was shit.”
AC: “Everybody was excited about working on TR6. It felt like working on TR5 was dragging the whole thing down. But then they tell you, ‘No, you have to spend nine more months on another PS1.’ So everybody felt deflated.”
RM: “Just from my point of view, it was easy not to be disappointed about not going on TR6 after TR4. But I felt, for the other team members, it must have been even harder because I’m sure the programmers really wanted to do TR6. They wanted to test themselves with the new possibilities. And they were struggling every day to squeeze every little bit of memory that they could from the PS1 instead.”
AS: “We were holding it together while the other team went off and started doing the new Tomb Raider. And we could see all of us getting really concerned with that because it was being over-scoped. We were watching this monstrosity that was about to crash through the top of the building because it was such a massive project. And obviously, experience dictates that you have to scope things correctly for the machine that they’re on. And the PlayStation 2 wasn’t 795 terabytes.”
TS: “I think each of us, in turn, went to Jeremy and told him that next-gen Tomb Raider was shit, and they needed to do something about it in one way or another. And I’m sure he just ignored it. In retrospect, I can see why he ignored us because I don’t know if he could do anything about it at the time; perhaps it was out of his hands by that stage. But I think we all tried to point out that it was just a nightmare. Basically, it was just awful around then.”
RM: “I really wanted to be working on PS2, as we already had development kits in the office.”
DG: “That was the deal. And then they broke their word.”
The Making of Tomb Raider: 1997-2000 is available from October 30 via Pen and Sword, Amazon, and others.