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Killing Lara Croft

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Andy Sandham says the Tomb Raider developers never really knew how big Lara Croft was. They worked tight timeframes and had virtually no contact with marketing. Core didn’t even hear much from its fans save for the occasional abusive postcard.

But the developers knew enough, by the time of Tomb Raider IV — now titled Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation — to find it funny that anyone would entrust the franchise to the sort of people who’d wipe their ass on the company towels. “It felt like taking the piss that we were in charge of Lara,” Sandham says. “[But] we loved the feeling of power, I suppose. That we were in charge of this world famous character.”

The team was on board with the idea of killing Lara at the end of Last Revelation. Not as a publicity stunt or a cheap cliffhanger to be undone later: really killing her, for good. They planned to compound that act of defiance by refusing to work on any sequel. The standard slog of game development hardly dissuaded them from their plan: the last few weeks, the team regularly finished work at four in the morning.

“Some days I can stare at Lara and really hate her,” said designer Richard Morton, while promoting Last Revelation. “Lara was obviously the figurehead of our irritation with having to churn out a game each year,” Sandham agrees. “We were creative people and we wanted to do something new.”

Heath-Smith still didn’t know about Lara’s death, and obviously, the team knew he wouldn’t be thrilled. But just the thought of being done with Lara invigorated them, and they were excited about getting away with it.

Lara’s death scene fell to Sandham to write. “Originally,” he remembers, “we talked about things like having her visibly decapitated, but then we thought that [Heath-Smith] would kill us. And we always had a fondness for Lara, we were just sick of her, really. We were buying houses because of Lara. Because of Toby, in hindsight. I don’t think we actually wanted to do anything brutal to her.”

The team landed on a simple, elegant answer: Lara Croft, tomb raider, would die in a tomb.

In her past adventures, Lara had saved the world by foiling the fiendish plans of the queen of Atlantis, a Mafioso who turned into a dragon, and a cosmetics executive. This time would be different. Lara would screw up, and fall victim to her own ambition.

In Last Revelation, Lara’s in Egypt, raiding tombs until she finds her prize, the Amulet of Horus. But taking the magic amulet releases, from god prison, the ancient Egyptian deity Set. Set’s mad, and raises an army of the dead to kill everybody. Lara must put things right. Which she does, over the course of the game, by fighting demons and mercenaries through Alexandria and Cairo, reclaiming both the amulet and all the fabled pieces of the mystical Armor of Horus, summoning the power of Horus in the Great Pyramid of Giza under the light of the Millennial Constellation, and finally locking Set away once more.

It’s interesting to note that in Egyptian mythology, Horus defeats Set by smearing his own semen on some lettuce that Set then eats. The gods declare that Horus, by doing this, has “dominated” his rival. It seems unfair — and frankly smacks of gender — that Lara Croft has to embark upon a whole cross-country hero’s journey when a man can just masturbate on a salad and call it a day.

Sandham, by the way, says it’s coincidence that Last Revelation is about how chasing after fortune sometimes leads to unleashing an immortal, insatiable tormentor upon the world — then having to sacrifice yourself in penance.

In the end, Lara defeats Set. She’s redeemed herself, she’s the hero again, but it’s all taken its toll. As the Great Pyramid collapses around her, she limps toward the exit, clutching her stomach. Just feet away from daylight, the floor gives in, and she grabs the ledge. Then everything comes down on her — tons of rubble — and the door caves in. She’s buried. There’s no post-credits hand stirring in the debris; that’s it, she’s done, she’s dead.

“I remember almost crying,” says Sandham, when he watched that cutscene for the first time. “[It was] hugely cathartic. [Catharsis] was the reason, I think, subconsciously, we had to do it.”

That was when Heath-Smith first learned that Lara died — “when they showed me the bloody cutscene! I’m going, ‘Well, what the fuck happens now?’ They all sort of smiled.”

But Heath-Smith wasn’t too bothered about Lara dying. Nor, when the game was released in October 1999, was anybody else. The game was another hit, and Core never caught any flak for killing Lara Croft. Deep down, Sandham knew the reason why, and he always had.

It didn’t matter at all.

Of course you couldn’t kill Lara Croft, of course you couldn’t stop making Tomb Raider. “The team never wanted to kill her off,” Heath-Smith says. “Why would you want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg? I think it was more of a kind of statement.

Sandham agrees. “We absolutely knew it was a foregone conclusion, that [Heath-Smith] was going to tell us to somehow bring her back. Obviously we knew that we couldn’t do it. [But] for a period, I think about two weeks, we thought, hilariously, that it was great, and we were going to get away with it. It gave us the feeling of freedom for those few weeks.”

“Catharsis was the reason, subconsciously, we had to do it.”

Nothing had changed at Core. There would be a Tomb Raider V, right on schedule — which had to meet its deadline, because there was already a team working on Tomb Raider VI. That one, Angel of Darkness, needed a longer lead time as it would be the first in the series developed for the new PlayStation 2. The Angel of Darkness team were already proceeding on the assumption that Lara Croft was alive and well, and always had been.

The team still went ahead and told Heath-Smith they didn’t want to work on Tomb RaiderV. Sandham remembers that setting him off. “I suspect,” Heath-Smith says, “[I said] something along the lines of ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid. You’re going to make an awful lot of money for this and it’s seven months of your life. You’ve got a lot of living to do yet.’”

Heath-Smith told the team that if they did work on it, they could expect about a hundred thousand pounds each for doing so. They thought about that, and thought about how they’d feel about seeing another team reap the benefits of being on Tomb Raider.

So they did it.

It went badly.

“We sat there with our headphones on and sulked, like spoiled kids, really,” Sandham remembers. “Nobody would really speak to each other. I think some of us were actually depressed.”

“[I’m] not too happy,” said Richard Morton, in an interview with the official PlayStation magazine promoting the game. Programmer Martin Gibbins agreed he was “extremely pissed off…. The team before us did the first two and said [they] couldn’t possibly do another one. So we’ve done another two, really stretched ourselves and to be told we’ve got to do another one was a nightmare.”

Fan feedback. (Image courtesy Andy Sandham.)

The hours were still bad. People would sleep in their cars for three hours a night, feet sticking out of gull-wing doors. And all they’d done by killing Lara Croft was to give themselves the headache of figuring out how to bring her back.

“It was interesting to watch the way that people would interact with [Lara],” Toby Gard observed in 2012.“There was an urge to protect her, but then there was this other curious urge that I was seeing in other people… which is they just loved killing her. It was a very strange thing that people would constantly take her to the highest places and throw her off head first.

“There was a strange power thing that people were experiencing over this virtual character. I think part of it was… the fact that she was a very strong character, she was super tough… and I think people really got a god complex off playing with her.”


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