Creating a true smash-hit success is a feeling unlike anything else in the world. You struggle and toil away at something, much of the process taking place well away from the public gaze, and suddenly all eyes are on the thing you created. Tomb Raider was a cultural phenomenon from the very first outing, an enormous achievement for a small band of coders in Derby whose best-known creation before that was a caveman with a name that described his abilities, ‘Large Stone Thrower’ or something like that. [Do you mean Chuck Rock? – Ed] But having the eyes of the world on you is a double-edged sword. In 1996, the team at Core Design would have been happy with a magazine cover or two – in 1997, Lara Croft could even make the cover of non-gaming magazines. Everybody knew that a Tomb Raider sequel was on the way, and expectations were sky high.
The original Tomb Raider had set a new standard for 3D action adventure games, and there are two schools of thought when it comes to following up a revolutionary game like that. Some developers seek to replicate the impact of the original, others look to quickly serve an improved second helping to a hungry audience, and both approaches have risks. Taking the former approach can be both expensive and more importantly time-consuming, potentially allowing other developers to catch up and the players shifting their attention elsewhere. Go for the latter and it’s possible that your improvements will fall short of expectations, leading to accusations that you’ve served up more of the same.
“We mainly wanted to make a worthy sequel that kept what was good about the original but enhanced the experience,”. “Design discussions about the sequel started immediately after the original shipped, but development didn’t start in earnest until the new year as some of us were still finishing up language versions and demo disks for on the run up to Christmas. Then we had about ten months to get the sequel built.” An iterative sequel was the only choice with that kind of time frame. Toby Gard, the lead artist and concept creator for the original, and Paul Douglas, the lead programmer of the first game, famously did not return for the sequel, but most of the team did so the foundations were solid.
