That was the 10-year anniversary, and we wanted to do a remake of the first game, and we generally retold that story, and we did it with Toby Gard. There were a couple things leading up to the reboot that fueled our passion, one being Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Can you talk a bit about the evolution of the character since 2006? You basically undertook another reboot of the character and the franchise with the 2013 Tomb Raider game. So we’re considered now in the “third era” of Lara Croft. And one of the goals there was to rationalize, “If an audience came to the TR experience from the movie or from the Core games, let’s make sure that the canon is supportive.” Also, the movies had gained some popularity at that point, so in terms of canon, there were some changes to Lara’s backstory. So we were ultimately very anxious to learn from what Core had done. But what’s easy to overlook is that it was such a giant franchise with such a huge install base that we came at it with a certain sense of humility. And so I think that’s why they were looking at us. My first experience was having this great opportunity from Eidos, who said, “We’ve got this franchise that we could really use another developer taking a look at.” And we had done some of the games I’d mentioned, but Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, being one of the most specific ones relevant to TR, was a very narrative-driven action-adventure combining elements of platforming and combat. We released a game called Project: Snowblind, which I worked heavily on the multiplayer side, and essentially had moved into a studio-level role. I worked on an Xbox launch title called Mad Dash Racing, and then we released a platformer called Whiplash. So how did you first get involved in the Tomb Raider series at Crystal Dynamics? So it was this shot across the bow in terms of unifying the very game-y early days with trying to bring some of those Hollywood aesthetics in ways that didn’t contradict the values of the medium. And, but at the time it almost felt real compared to the Marios of the world. And I think in ’96, Tomb Raider stepped into that and said, “We’re going to give the same platforming promise of clambering across these vast landscapes as Mario does, but we’re going to try to deliver that Hollywood aesthetic of an Indiana Jones movie and that high adventure and that fantasy fulfillment and we’re going to do that in a way that’s less abstract. You also had an influx of Hollywood at that time, and their intent was to take the potential of these great, gameplay-centric experiences but start to bring them to more of a mass-media–consuming audience. At that time - and to maybe put it in the context of Tomb Raider a little bit - you had a fairly robust expression of video games as skill challenge, as platformers with some amount of abstraction and some amount of realism.
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