Лара Крофт: История франшизы Tomb Raider

Video game franchise
the video game series

Tomb Raider, known as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider from 2001 to 2008, is a media franchise that originated with an action adventure video game series created by British video game developer Core Design. The franchise is currently owned by CDE Entertainment; it was formerly owned by Eidos Interactive, then by Square Enix Europe after Square Enix's acquisition of Eidos in 2009 until Embracer Group purchased the intellectual property alongside Eidos in 2022. The franchise focuses on the fictional British archaeologist Lara Croft, who travels around the world searching for lost artefacts and infiltrating dangerous tombs and ruins. Gameplay generally focuses on exploration, solving puzzles, navigating hostile environments filled with traps, and fighting enemies. Additional media has been developed for the franchise in the form of film adaptations, comics and novels. Development of the first Tomb Raider began in 1994; it was released two years later. Its critical and commercial success prompted Core Design to develop a new game annually for the next four years, which put a strain on staff. The sixth game, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, faced difficulties during development and was considered a failure at release. This prompted Eidos to switch development duties to Crystal Dynamics, which has been the series' primary developer since. Other developers have contributed to spin off titles and ports of mainline entries. Tomb Raider games have sold over 95 million copies worldwide by 2022. while the entire franchise generated close to $1.2 billion in revenue by 2002. The series has received generally positive reviews from critics, and Lara Croft has become one of the most recognisable video game protagonists, winning accolades and earning places on the Walk of Game and Guinness World Records.

The first six Tomb Raider games were developed by Core Design, a British video game development company owned by Eidos Interactive. After the sixth game in the series was released to a mixed reception in 2003, development was transferred to American studio Crystal Dynamics, who have handled the main series since. was released worldwide on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows in 2018. An arcade game based on this incarnation was released by Bandai Namco Amusement in Europe in 2018. An entry for mobile devices, an endless runner platformer titled Lara Croft: Relic Run, was released in 2015.

After the release of The Angel of Darkness in 2003, Core Design continued working on the franchise for another three years, but both of the projects under development in that period were cancelled. A sequel titled The Lost Dominion was undergoing preliminary development that year, but the negative reception of The Angel of Darkness caused it and a wider trilogy to be scrapped. Eidos requested the project's cancellation. It was suggested by staff that Eidos did not want to let outside developers handle the franchise.

[[File:ClassicLaraCroft. jpg|alt=A computer generated image of a brown haired woman whose body faces to the right while her head is turned down towards the ground, and left hand is placed on her wounded shoulder. She wears a dirty white shirt, ripped green pants and black boots. She has several abrasions covered by cloth. The woman holds a bow in her right hand.|thumb|Various incarnations of Lara Croft in the video game series. Despite multiple revisions to her clothing and general physique, her face and hair have remained generally consistent. of the video game franchise for Amazon. It was also reported that this would involve a tie in video game and film in an interconnected universe, likened to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The circumstances of her first adventures, along with the drive behind her adventures, differ depending on the continuity. In the original continuities, she is on a plane that crashes in the Himalayas: her journey back to civilization against the odds help to begin her journey towards her adult life as an adventuress and treasure hunter. One of the people involved in its creation was Toby Gard, who was mostly responsible for creating the character of Lara Croft. Gard originally envisioned the character as a man: company co founder Jeremy Heath Smith was worried the character would be seen as derivative of Indiana Jones, so Gard changed the character's gender. Her design underwent multiple revisions and redrafts during early development. For this reason, and the feeling that they had exhausted the series' potential, the developers tried to kill the character off. This did not work, and while a fifth game was created, the team stated that they were not fully invested in its development.

After the critical backlash of The Angel of Darkness, Eidos decided to take production of the Tomb Raider series out of Core Design's hands and give it to another subsidiary studio. Production of the next game was given to Crystal Dynamics in 2003, a studio that had made its name with the Legacy of Kain series. After Legend was finished, the team decided to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the series by remaking the original game, rebuilding the environments and redesigning the story to fit in with the events and gameplay of Legend. A sequel, eventually revealed as Rise of the Tomb Raider, was in development a few months after the reboot's release. Shadow was developed by Eidos Montréal as Crystal Dynamics completed Marvel's Avengers, though Crystal would provide secondary support. The game concluded Lara's origin story. A "Definitive Edition", featuring all 7 DLCs for Shadow was released in November 2019.

Following the conclusion of the Survivor trilogy, both Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montréal were busy with Marvel properties, and so there were no further Tomb Raider games for several years. In Crystal Dynamics' case, continued support for Marvel's Avengers lasted until 2023. In 2021, Legendary Television and DJ2 Entertainment announced an anime series set after the events of Shadow of the Tomb Raider for Netflix. The series' title was revealed as Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft and is set for release in 2024. Embracer Group purchased a number of Square Enix Europe assets in May 2022 for $300 million, including Crystal Dynamics and the Tomb Raider franchise. The studio announced the next main Tomb Raider title in 2022 as a game that would "unify the timelines", and combine elements from all three series, including the work of Core Design. In this timeline, Lara would be a seasoned adventurer. This instalment will use Unreal Engine 5, and will be published by Amazon Games. Tomb Raider Reloaded, a mobile game, was published by Square Enix London Mobile in 2023. A collection of remasters of the first three games in the original Core Design Tomb Raider series titled Tomb Raider I–III Remastered was released in February 2024 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

The original Tomb Raider theme was composed by Nathan McCree. He created the original theme music after having discussions with Gard about the character of Lara Croft. Having decided to use Classical English music as an inspiration, he decided to create something simple for the theme song. Its simplicity made rearrangements and orchestrations easy. For his work on the first three Tomb Raider games, he was given fairly minimal briefs, and for Tomb Raider III he was working on the game as a freelancer as he had left the company.

The first Tomb Raider used a custom built game engine, as other equivalent engines available to Core Design at the time were not versatile enough to realise the team's vision. The engine was designed by Paul Douglas, who handled the game's artificial intelligence (AI) and the three dimensional (3D) graphics. The choice of a 3D game was influenced by the team's opinion that the game type was under represented when compared to first person shooters such as Doom. Its 3D style meant multiple elements were difficult to implement, including the AI and camera control. Another noted aspect was the multi layered levels, as compared to equivalent 3D action adventure games of the time which were limited to a flat floor system. Lara's movements were hand animated and coordinated rather than created using motion capture. The reason for this was that the team wanted uniformity in her movement, which was not possible with motion capture technology of the time.

Both the character of Lara Croft and the concepts behind the Tomb Raider franchise have evolved thematically and in popularity since the first game's release in 1996. The 2013 reboot sold 11 million units, becoming the most commercially successful Tomb Raider title to date. In addition to the games' success, the 2001 film adaptation grossed $275 million, making it the highest grossing video game adaptation until being overtaken in 2010 by Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. and the 2001 film adaptation had the biggest opening weekend (US$47.7m) for an action film with a female lead since Aliens in 1986. In 2020, Tomb Raider featured on a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail to celebrate classic UK video games. The character of Lara Croft has similarly enjoyed popularity, standing out during her initial appearance in the male dominated video game market, and continuing to stand out throughout the series' history.