The initial concept for
Tomb Raider was created by
Toby Gard, who worked for
Core Design, a game development studio based in
Derby,
England, that had established itself developing titles for home computers and
Sega consoles. The team wanted to mix the adventuring style of
Ultima Underworld and the 3D characters shown off in
Virtua Fighter. The team kept the project deliberately simple and comparatively modest in scope, with its development budget being approximately £440,000. The production atmosphere was fairly informal. Development began in 1994 and lasted eighteen months. The team endured excessive overtime and
crunch during the last stages. During production, Core Design was sold to CentreGold, which in turn was purchased by
Eidos Interactive in May 1996, who became publisher for the title. When Gard first presented the idea for the game, the concept art featured a male lead who strongly resembled
Indiana Jones. Heath-Smith asked for a change for legal reasons. When Gard created the initial design document, he decided to give the player a choice of genders and created a female adventurer alongside the male character. Once he realized creating and animating two playable characters would require double the design work, he decided to slim back down to one. The female character, originally named Laura Cruz, was his favorite, so he discarded the male character before development work began. After Eidos became the game's publisher, they unsuccessfully lobbied for a selectable male lead. Speaking about his approach to the concept, Gard noted that he deliberately went against publisher trends when designing both the character and the gameplay. Laura went through several changes before the developers settled on the final version, including a name change to Lara Croft after Eidos executives in the United States objected to the original name. The inspirations for the character of Lara Croft included the character
Tank Girl, the
Indiana Jones series' titular lead, and the John Woo film
Hard Boiled. Lara's notably exaggerated physical proportions were a deliberate choice by Gard, as he wanted a caricatured personification of women who could be an action icon for the younger generation. From the game's earliest stages, the team wanted the title to involve tombs and pyramids. In the early story draft, Lara would be confronted by a rival group called the "Chaos Raiders". During the Greece levels, Lara and Pierre were to have been less hostile rivals, helping each other with puzzles in the first level. Larson evolved from an Afrikaans character called Lars Kruger, who shared a similar role in the original plot. The script itself was written by Vicky Arnold, who joined in 1995 and would work on later
Tomb Raider titles. Gard and Douglas created the basic story draft alongside the initial game design, then Arnold turned it into a script after joining the project. It was Arnold's job to write the dialogue, and create a cohesive narrative around the locations selected by the team members. While Lara's character design and Gard's initial concept were present, much of the additional detail was worked out by Arnold. The platforming design drew extensively from
Prince of Persia, with the Doppelgänger enemy during the Atlantis section being an homage to the Shadow Prince from that game. The high number of animal enemies was meant to ground players in the world before the more fantastical elements appeared, in addition to being easier to animate and program than human enemies. The staff were also uncomfortable with Lara killing that many humans. The initial concept gave combat prominence, but as production began the focus shifted to platforming and puzzle-solving. A plan that made it into the final product was using enemy placement to shift the atmosphere from pure action-adventure to a
horror-like tone. The harder areas, including the Palace Midas levels, and instant death traps have been attributed to Boyd. The team consciously set the story in real archaeological locations representing several cultures. Boyd and Gibson immersed themselves in literature and history about each culture for the first three areas, respectively inspired by the
Inca Empire,
Classical Greece and
Ancient Egypt. The Greece levels were put in after planned levels in
Angkor Wat,
Cambodia were dropped. The Croft Manor training level was built by Gard over a weekend. Its design was based on pictures of Georgian manor houses taken from an unspecified reference book.
Design and platforms The title was developed for
Sega Saturn,
MS-DOS personal computers (PC), and PlayStation, with all three versions in development simultaneously. Gosling led programming for the Saturn version. Douglas described the game code for each title as identical, with an additional layer of specific coding to tailor the game for each platform. While Sony Europe approved the game early on, making
Tomb Raider one of the earliest approved third-party products for the PlayStation, Sony America initially rejected the game's concept and asked for more and better content. Douglas blamed the response on Core Design submitting
Tomb Raider too early in production. In response the development team made several changes to the game design documentation and produced a version on Sony hardware which would lead to worldwide approval by Sony. For the Saturn version, Sega negotiated a timed exclusivity deal in Europe, meaning the Saturn version was released in that region ahead of other versions. Core Design and Sega made the deal during the last few months of development, so the team had to finish up the Saturn version six weeks earlier than they had planned, forcing them to work even longer hours. Following the release of the Saturn version, a number of bugs were discovered that affected all versions of the game; because of the timed exclusivity, the development team fixed these bugs for the PlayStation and PC versions. Two notable surviving bugs in all versions were the "corner bug", which allowed players to scale architecture by jumping repeatedly against a corner; and a bug which caused the game not to recognise the collection of a secret in the final level. In 1997 Core Design opened negotiations with
Nintendo to release a
Nintendo 64 version of the game and started work on the port in anticipation of the negotiations being successful. The planning took place between 1996 and 1997, with Douglas wanting to redesign the game mechanics to incorporate the platform's analogue stick controls. The team never received Nintendo 64 development kits, and the port was scrapped when Sony finalised a deal to keep subsequent
Tomb Raider games exclusive to PlayStation until the year 2000. A third-person 3D action-adventure like
Tomb Raider was unprecedented at the time, and the development team took several months to find a way to make Gard's vision for the game work on the hardware of the time, in particular getting the player character to interact with freeform environments.
Tomb Raider used a custom-built game engine, as did many games of the era. The engine was designed and built by Douglas with assistance from Rummery. Rummery created the level editor, which allowed for "seamless" creation of levels. According to Rummery, the decision to build the game levels on a grid was the key breakthrough in making the game possible. It is Core Design's contention that, prior to the development of
Tomb Raider, they were "struggling somewhat" with
32-bit development. 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. The level editor program was designed so that developers could make rapid adjustments to specific areas with ease. Another noted aspect was the multi-layered levels, as compared to equivalent 3D action-adventure games of the time which were mostly limited to a flat-floor system with little verticality. The interlinking room design was inspired by Egyptian multi-roomed tombs, particularly the
tomb of Tutankhamun. The grid-based pattern was a necessity due to the
d-pad-based tank controls and the Saturn's quad polygon-based rendering technology. Levels were first designed using a wireframe construction, with each area at this stage having only links to other areas of a level and walls. The team then added architecture and gameplay elements like traps and enemies, then implemented the different lighting values. Due to time and technical limitations, planned outdoor areas had to be cut. The choice of a third-person perspective was influenced by the team's opinion that the game type was under-represented when compared to
first-person shooters such as
Doom. The third-person view meant multiple elements were difficult to implement, including the character and camera control. The camera had four pre-set angles, which seamlessly switched depending on the character's position and the level progress. For standard navigation and combat, the camera was fixed on a particular point and oriented around Lara while focusing on that object. Lara's twin pistol set-up was in place from the early prototypes. The aiming system was designed so that each gun arm had an aiming axis, with a shared "sweetspot" where both guns fired at the same target. For underwater environments, the effects were created using
gouraud shading to create real-time ripple and lighting effects.
Audio The music for
Tomb Raider was composed by
Nathan McCree, who at the time was an in-house composer for Core Design. The main inspiration behind the score for McCree was English Classical music. This approach was directly influenced by his conversations with Gard about Lara's character. Based on this, he kept the main theme simple and melodic. The main theme used a four-note motif, which continues to appear through the series. The piece "Where The Depths Unfold", used when Lara is swimming underwater, was a choral work. They did not have the space or budget for live music recording, which was challenging for McCree as he needed to create the whole thing using synthesisers. To make the choir sound realistic, he inserted recordings of himself breathing at the right points so it sounded like an actual choir. For each track, McCree got a basic description of where the music would be used, then was left to create it. There was no time for rewrites, so each track was included in the game as first composed. Unlike most other games of the time, there was not a musical track playing constantly throughout the game; instead, limited musical cues would play only during specially-selected moments to produce a dramatic effect. For the majority of the game, the only audio heard is action-based effects, atmospheric sounds, and Lara's own grunts and sighs, all of which were enhanced because they did not have to compete with music. According to McCree, the game was scored this way because he was allotted very little time for the job, forcing him to quickly write pieces without any thought to where they would go in the game. When the soundtrack was finally applied, the developers found that the tunes worked best when applied to specific places. The symphonic sounds were created using
Roland Corporation's Orchestral Expansion board for their JV series keyboards. English voice actress
Shelley Blond provided the voice of Lara. She was given the job after her agent called and had her record some audition lines onto tape. She felt under a lot of pressure at the time, as Core Design had spent three months searching for the right voice. She recalled: "I was asked to perform her voice in a very plain non-emotive manner and in a 'female
Bond' type of way. I would have added more inflection, tone and emotion to my voice but they wanted to keep it how they felt it should sound, which was quite right. My job was to bring their character to life". According to Blond, she spent four to five hours recording the voice for Lara including the grunts, cries and other effort and death sounds. A different account attributes these sounds to Gibson, Core Design's PR Manager Suzie Hamilton, and sound designer Martin Iveson whose voice pitch was made higher. Blond would not return for any subsequent entries. In a 2011 interview Blond stated that her departure was due to disagreeing with "some things" within Core Design and Eidos, but five years later she said that she was asked to reprise her role but had to decline due to other commitments. She gave permission for her effort voice work to be reused while the character's dialogue would be voiced by Judith Gibbins. ==Release and versions==