###“It felt like robbery”: Tomb Raider and the fall of Core Design
The house that built Tomb Raider sat on top of the world in 1998. Fresh from two gang-busting chart toppers that eventually amassed roughly 15 million in sales between them, Core Design and its parent company Eidos prepared to release a third adventure for starlet Lara Croft—a video game character so immensely and immediately popular that she was a household name within a year of her introduction. Croft quickly became an icon not just of the burgeoning, maturing games industry, but also of popular culture. She was on the covers of magazines such as Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Time. And she later found her way onto the silver screen, portrayed by Angelina Jolie in two blockbuster films. Ms. Croft seemed to be everywhere.
Tomb Raider developer Core Design appeared untouchable with Lara in tow, and it was thanks to the franchise’s immense success that publisher Eidos had just been named the fastest-growing company in the world at the 1998 World Economic Forum. But the studio’s creative origins clashed with the publicly traded Eidos’ year-in, year-out reliance on the Tomb Raider brand as a money-making machine. By the end of 2003—the year that the disastrous, hellishly developed sixth Tomb Raider in seven years was forced out unfinished—they were laughing stocks of the entertainment world.
Embarrassed at losing face, Eidos put Core Design co-founder and CEO Jeremy Heath-Smith on gardening leave (suspension with pay) for a year and yanked the Tomb Raider franchise from its home. The British heroine was packed off to Legacy of Kain developer Crystal Dynamics in the US, where she has arguably flourished without the pressures of annualized sequels.
Core soon split in two, with Heath-Smith and his brother Adrian—who was second in command—taking around 30 employees with them to new venture Circle Studio. Eidos sent in its own people as interim management, and many wondered if the studio—its reputation in tatters and its identity lost—would live through another year.
Tomb Raider was the testing ground for an approach to mass market game franchises that lives on to this day. It was where annualized sequels became de rigueur for big games owned by big publishers. And it shares more than a few parallels with the likes of Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, and Halo, each of which have seen similar growing pains in the last few years.
The staggering amounts of money being spent on marketing and development in AAA game development makes it a risk-averse and hit-driven business on a colossal scale. “The AAAs now have got to fulfill delivery dates because of their marketing campaigns,” says Sandham. “That started happening with us. But now with something like Assassin’s Creed Unity there’s something like 27 billion pounds spent on marketing, and so consequently they have to hit their delivery dates or their milestones or gold masters.”
Marketing plans on AAA games are rigged down to the day and set up months or years in advance, so games that aren’t finished on time ship with major bugs and flaws—as in the case of much talked-about trifecta Driveclub, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Each was eviscerated by players and critics unwilling to accept their shaky launches.
Aggressive release schedules across multiple platforms are damaging to both developers and brands. If Core had been given room to breathe, Tomb Raider III would have been a PlayStation 2 exclusive launched alongside the system, and Tomb Raider VI would have likely not emerged until early in the PlayStation 3 era. Would it have kept Lara exciting and relevant, perhaps taking the wind out of Nathan Drake’s sails? We’ll never know because Eidos, much as the likes of Activision and Ubisoft are doing today, prioritized short-term profits over long-term resilience. Annualized sequels may seem safe, but Tomb Raider—or, if we look to Hollywood, the multitudes of Marvel/DC Comics films and Michael Bay’s Transformers—is proof that they could be risky in the extreme.
I don’t see any end in sight with the big budget games, but I do see only the biggest games really keeping up steam if they don’t refocus. “Indie” games have really taken off, not because of lack of polish (quite the opposite in fact) but mainly because the focus on gameplay and story over graphics.
It is a great time to be a gamer, but at the same time it sucks. The games we grew up with weren’t perfect, but at the time they captured something raw that really doesn’t exist in AAA studios anymore. I hope things can change, but with that said I don’t see any doom and gloom really for the CEOs and those on top. Just for the working class game developers.