Although most of these games were made available for MS-DOS among other platforms, few of them had much in common with the high-concept adventure games, CRPGs, and strategy games that dominated among American developers at the time. But the little studio had a knack for squeezing out a solid seller whenever one was really needed, such as Rick Dangerous and Chuck Rock. Over the year that followed, Core had its ups and downs: Heath-Smith bought out Holmes in 1990 and Norburn in 1992, both under circumstances that weren’t entirely amicable. They set up shop under the name of Core Design in 1988.
(Such was the way of things in the topsy-turvy world of early British game development, when sober business expertise was not an overly plentiful commodity.) Rather than close the Derby branch they had barely had time to open, three Gremlin insiders - a sales executive named Jeremy Heath-Smith, the current manager of the Derby studio Greg Holmes, and the original Gremlin co-founder Kevin Norburn - cooked up a deal to take it over and run it themselves as an independent entity. But not long after giving the four a real office to work in, the folks at Gremlin’s Sheffield headquarters began to realize that they should have looked before they leaped - that they couldn’t actually afford to be funding outside studios with their current revenue stream. This applies not least to Lara Croft, that most iconic woman in the history of British gaming.Ĭore Design, the studio that made her, was formed in 1986 as Gremlin Derby, around the talents of four young men from the same town who had just created the hit game Bounder using the Commodore 64s in their bedrooms. Gremlin went on to become the Kevin Bacon of British game development: seemingly everybody who was anybody over the ensuing decades was associated with them at one time or another, or at the very least worked with someone who had been.
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In 1984, in the midst of this boom, Ian Stewart and Kevin Norburn founded the publisher Gremlin Graphics - later Gremlin Interactive - in the back room of a Sheffield software shop. Lara’s roots reach back to the first wave of computer gaming in Britain, to the era when Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s were the hottest machines on the market. Love her or hate her, she has become one of us in a way that none of her peers can match. After twenty games that have sold almost 100 million copies combined and three feature films whose box-office receipts approach $1 billion, everybody not living under a proverbial rock has heard of Lara Croft. Mention Solid Snake, Cloud, or Gordon Freeman to them and you’ll get nothing. Nevertheless, for all the cultural inroads that gaming has made in recent decades, most people who don’t play games will still give you a blank stare if you try to talk to them about any of our similarly well-rounded videogame characters. Of course, Lara is by no means alone in any of these things among videogame stars. Lara, on the other hand, has a home, a reasonably coherent personal chronology, a reasonably fleshed-out personality - heck, she even has a last name! But they aren’t so much characters as eternal mascots, archetypes out of time in the way of Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny. Her only obvious competition comes from the Nintendo stable - from Super Mario and Pac-Man and all the rest.
It strikes me that Lara Croft must be the most famous videogame character in history if you take the word “character” literally. But how many copies of Tomb Raider do you think they’d have sold if they’d made Lara Croft flat-chested?
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She takes care of herself, and she knows how to handle a gun. Even if I was performing tasks that were a bit unrealistic… I still felt like, hey, this is a representation of me, as myself, as a woman.
There was something refreshing about looking at the screen and seeing myself as a woman. If you have to stare at someone’s bum, it’s far better to look at a nice female bum than a bloke’s bum!
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