Lara Croft wasn't supposed to be a woman. Originally, Toby Gard, the lead graphic artist at Core Design back in the mid-90s, envisioned a male protagonist—a generic Indiana Jones clone with a whip and a hat. But the team realized that if you're going to spend forty hours looking at a character's backside while they climb walls, maybe a different design would work better. That single pivot birthed Tomb Raider, a franchise that didn't just sell millions of copies; it fundamentally shifted how we view digital protagonists and 3D space.
It’s weird looking back.
In 1996, the original game felt like magic. You were stuck in these blocky, silent Peruvian caves with nothing but the sound of your own footsteps and the occasional growl of a wolf. It was lonely. It was terrifying. It was brilliant. Today, we’ve got the "Survivor Trilogy" and a literal Netflix series, but the DNA of the series remains stuck in that tension between isolation and discovery. Honestly, most people forget that the first Tomb Raider wasn't really an action game. It was a puzzle game where the environment was your primary antagonist.
The Grid System and the Geometry of Fear
The original Tomb Raider was built on a rigid grid. Every jump was a calculation. If you were two squares away from a ledge, you needed a running jump. If you were one square away, a standing jump sufficed. This sounds clunky by modern standards where Lara moves like a fluid gymnast, but it created a specific kind of "platforming anxiety" that modern games have largely traded for cinematic spectacle.
When you missed a jump in 1996, it was your fault. You miscalculated the geometry.
Toby Gard and the team at Core Design were working with incredibly limited hardware on the Sega Saturn and PlayStation 1. They couldn't render sprawling jungles with individual leaves, so they built cathedrals of blocks. This limitation became an aesthetic. The sense of scale in the St. Francis Folly level—a vertical tower that feels like it goes on forever—still holds up because of how it makes the player feel small. It’s a trick of perspective.
That Infamous Marketing Problem
We have to talk about the "Nude Raider" myth and the hyper-sexualization of the late 90s. It’s the elephant in the room. Eidos, the publisher at the time, leaned hard into Lara as a pin-up model. They hired real-life models like Nell McAndrew and Rhona Mitra to tour trade shows. They pushed the "Lara as a sex symbol" angle so aggressively that Toby Gard actually left the company. He felt his character was being stripped of her dignity.
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The irony? The actual games were rarely about that.
Inside the software, Lara was a cold, occasionally ruthless archeologist who didn't care about anything but the artifact. She was posh, highly educated, and took zero nonsense from anyone. There’s a disconnect between how the public perceived her—thanks to those Lucozade commercials and bikini-clad renders—and who she actually was in the narrative. She was more of a "female James Bond" than a "digital Barbie," yet the marketing blurred those lines for a decade.
The Shift to the Survivor Era
By the time 2013 rolled around, the franchise was in a weird spot. Tomb Raider: Underworld was fine, but it felt like a relic. Crystal Dynamics decided to tear the whole thing down. They gave us a Lara who cried, bled, and felt "human."
This "Survivor" Lara was controversial.
Some fans loved the grit. Others missed the confident, dual-pistol-wielding superhero who did backflips off T-Rex heads. The 2013 reboot, followed by Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, moved the needle toward "Ludonarrative Dissonance." That's a fancy way of saying the story tells you Lara is a scared survivor, but the gameplay has you headshotting fifty mercenaries in twenty minutes. It’s a tough balance to strike.
Rhianna Pratchett, the lead writer for the 2013 reboot, has spoken at length about trying to ground Lara’s origins. The goal wasn't to make her weak, but to show the cost of becoming the Tomb Raider. You see this most clearly in Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018), where the game finally asks: "Wait, is Lara actually the villain here?" She triggers an apocalypse by stealing an artifact. The game tries to reckon with the colonialist roots of archeology, though whether it succeeds is still a heated debate in gaming forums.
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Why the Level Design Still Wins
If you play a modern Naughty Dog game like Uncharted, you’re basically on a rollercoaster. It’s beautiful, but you’re mostly along for the ride. Tomb Raider, specifically the recent trilogy, kept a bit more of the "Metroidvania" spirit alive. You get a piece of gear—like climbing axes or a grapple—and suddenly the map opens up.
- Paititi in Shadow of the Tomb Raider: A massive, living hub that felt more like an RPG than a linear action game.
- The Glacial Caverns in Rise: Pure visual storytelling through ice and wreckage.
- The Radio Tower in 2013: A masterclass in building vertical tension.
The series has always been at its best when it stops trying to be a shooter. When the guns go away and you're just trying to figure out how to raise a water level using a series of pulleys, that's when it feels like Tomb Raider.
The Cultural Footprint
You can't overstate how much this franchise paved the way. Without Lara, do we get Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn? Do we get Ellie from The Last of Us? Probably, eventually, but Lara broke the door down in a way that was loud and impossible to ignore. She was the first female gaming protagonist to become a genuine household name.
Angelina Jolie’s portrayal in the early 2000s films cemented that. Even if the movies were "popcorn flick" quality, they proved that a female-led gaming IP could carry a summer blockbuster. Then Alicia Vikander took a crack at it in 2018, bringing a more athletic, grounded take that mirrored the rebooted games.
The brand is currently in a state of "Unification." Amazon is working on a series, and Crystal Dynamics is working on a new game that supposedly merges the timelines of the original "Badass Lara" and the "Survivor Lara." It’s an ambitious move. How do you take the woman who kills gods and the girl who just survived a shipwreck and make them the same person?
Misconceptions and Technical Truths
One of the biggest lies told about the original games is that they were "clumsy." They weren't. They were deliberate.
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The tank controls (using the D-pad to rotate and move) were a necessity for the fixed-camera angles and grid-based platforming. If you try to play the Tomb Raider I-III Remastered (released in 2024) with modern stick controls, you actually might find it harder because the levels weren't designed for 360-degree fluid movement. The "clunk" was actually "precision."
Another thing people get wrong: Lara isn't a "hero."
In the original games, she was basically a mercenary. She did it for the sport. She was wealthy, bored, and dangerous. The shift toward her being a "protector of the world" is a modern invention. The classic Lara Croft would probably find the modern Lara Croft a bit too sensitive.
How to Experience the Best of the Series Today
If you’re looking to dive back in, don’t just grab the newest one. Start with the Tomb Raider I-III Remastered collection. It lets you toggle between the original "polygonal mess" graphics and a smoothed-out modern look. It’s a history lesson in game design.
For the modern experience, Rise of the Tomb Raider is generally considered the peak of the Survivor Trilogy. It has the best balance of exploration, combat, and tomb-raiding. Shadow has better tombs, but the pacing is a bit wonky.
Next Steps for the Budding Raider:
- Play the Remastered Classics: Use the tank controls. Seriously. Give them an hour to "click" in your brain. You'll see the logic in the level design.
- Explore the Challenge Tombs: In the modern trilogy, the main story is often combat-heavy. The "Challenge Tombs" (often marked by yellow symbols or wind chimes) are where the real gameplay is hidden.
- Watch the Documentaries: Search for "The Making of Tomb Raider" features from the 90s. Seeing how a small team in Derby, England, created a global icon is fascinating.
- Check Out the Fan Community: Sites like Tomb Raider Chronicles have been documenting every patch, mod, and piece of lore for over twenty years.
The series is currently transitioning into a new era under the Embracer Group and Amazon. We’re likely going to see a Lara Croft who is more experienced, less "vulnerable," and back to her roots as a world-traveling adventurer. Whether she keeps the bow or goes back to the dual pistols is the big question for the fans. But either way, the core appeal—a lone figure standing against a massive, ancient, and crumbling world—isn't going anywhere. It's a formula that worked in 1996 and, surprisingly, still works in 2026.
Keep an eye on the upcoming Netflix anime, Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. It’s intended to bridge the gap between the 2018 game and the original 1996 title. This is the first official attempt to fix the messy timeline and give us a "Definitive Lara." If you want to understand where the franchise is going, that’s your starting point.