Set wisely destroyed the Armour before Horus could be summoned, forcing Lara into a hasty Plan B. She used the amulet to seal Set inside Horus’ temple, and ran. Badly wounded, she almost made it out before the sight of a repentant Voy Croy made her hesitate, and the famous Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, was buried in her own tomb.
The Depths
Eidos wasn’t so willing to let their girl stay dead. Tomb Raider scripts circulated wildly in Hollywood, a trio of hand-held games bounced around the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance, and diminishing returns were still returns. Core, despite their best efforts, went back into the crunch. Tomb Raider Chronicles arrived as predicted, in November 2000.
The story picked up with three of Lara’s friends – led by Winston, her long-suffering butler – eulogizing Lady Croft with untold tales of past exploits. In death, Lara got a new grappling hook that she never had in life. Long dead enemies made appearances. The episodic format let Core jump from high-tech New York to a haunted isle off the Irish coast to a sunken German U-boat.
It was staggeringly dull. The innovative game engine and its grid-based system from 1995, recycled and optimized for a seventh time, now looked horribly out of date. PC ports carried game-defeating bugs. Common gameplay advances were ignored. Four years after her celebrated debut broke ground and shattered boundaries, Lara hadn’t changed so much as she’d gotten old.
Core insisted Chronicles was only designed as a patch while an entirely new team went to work on a next-gen effort for the PlayStation 2, sporting an entirely new game engine. Writer Murti Schofield came in to draft an epic, multi-game arc that took the series in dark directions. Lara herself was redesigned and, long portrayed as a superb fighter, finally got some hand-to-hand moves and dedicated Splinter Cell-like stealth options. They introduced a second playable character, Kurtis Trent, hoping to springboard a new franchise. In fact, every gaming trend that had passed Lara by, every idea management came up with, all of it went in. Eidos let fans and doubters know that Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness brought Lara well into the 21st Century, back to being a super-badass adventurer, in the most ambitious Tomb Raider ever conceived.
When the experienced Raider crew turned in Chronicles, they moved over to the Angel production team and found a full-speed disaster in progress.
Moving from PS1 to PS2 didn’t go as smoothly as planned, and what did make it across didn’t make any sense. Management’s committed feature set was too much. Deadlines fell away unmet, one after another. Hollywood, not known for its speed, put two Tomb Raider movies in the can as Core struggled on one unwieldy mess.
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