Tomb raider

Gavin Rummery was sitting on the stairs within the maze of Core Design’s headquarters when he suddenly realised the gargantuan task that lay in the weeks, months or perhaps years ahead. Next to him was Toby Gard, a 23-year-old who was, at that point, best known for his work as a graphic artist on the kart racing game BC Racers which starred characters from Core’s Chuck Rock series.

“It was my first day and I was told there were two potential games I could work on,” Rummery recalls. “Toby enthusiastically described his vision of one of those games to me, which was more like someone describing a movie pitch than a game design that was possible in 1995.

“I honestly wondered how this young animator had persuaded anyone to let him try to make this thing, but as the new boy I just nodded and smiled whilst inwardly wondering how any of it could be made to work.” That game was Tomb Raider and what Gard had described was like nothing else. It was also about to turn Core Design from a loosely organised group of mainly former Gremlin Graphics employees into one of the biggest and richest developers on the planet.

By the time Gard found himself explaining the concept to Rummery, he had already spent many months developing the game’s lead character. As a huge fan of blockbuster action movies such as Tank Girl and Indiana Jones, he wanted the hero to be athletic, adventurous and smart. The character was originally going to be a man, and Core had already dabbled with such a figure in its Rick Dangerous series. But the makers feared the might of Hollywood because it was looking too close to Indiana Jones – there was even a whip used to climb and lasso things. Jeremy Heath-Smith didn’t fancy taking on LucasArts so the character was switched to a woman and she was named Lara Cruz.

Lara came to life via pencils and paper, Gard’s preferred method of designing. He scanned those that he liked and added colour, but it was a slow process, with lots of drawings hitting the bin before he hit upon the ideal image. Some of the physical attributes were deliberate: Lara’s exaggerated figure made for a more recognisable character, Gard argued, telling the BBC “caricature can often communicate an idea faster and more clearly than a realistic representation can.” Yet he told The Face, her figure was a “slip of the mouse”. “I wanted to expand them 50 per cent and then – whoops, 150 percent. Darn,” he added.

Gard suggested Lara was a “caricature of a feisty attractive woman” and so the facts eventually poured forth: 5ft 9in tall, nine stone, blood type AB negative, born on 14 February 1967 (Valentine’s Day, of course). She was also an educated adventurer, albeit from a wealthy upper-class English family. A former pupil at Gordonstoun in Sc