DUBAI: If video game characters were Hollywood celebrities, Lara Croft would top the A-list.
It’s been 20 years since the iconic heroine first somersaulted her way across our consoles and screens. Two films - in which she was portrayed by A-lister Angelina Jolie - animated cartoons, comic books and a slew of video game portrayals have followed.
Each of those incarnations has brought a slightly different twist to the heroine.
Crystal Dynamics senior community manager Meagan Marie knows all Lara’s incarnations. Not only has she played the games since the first incarnation, she’s the author of the forthcoming book 20 Years of Tomb Raider, an encyclopaedic full-colour guide to all things Croft due to be released on October 26.
Gulf News caught up with her at a preview event for the PlayStation launch of Lara’s latest outing in Rise of the Tomb Raider, the second of Crystal Dynamics’ rebooted versions of the saga (and, incidentally, our 2015 Game of the Year based on its Xbox release).
In a pre-interview chat, she nails her geek colours to the mast. As a long-time Tomb Raider fan, she’s lived with Lara for many years – in fact, it’s fair to say she owes her current job to a reference from Lady Croft, though in this case, it was her cover story on the adventuress in an earlier role as a video games journalist that won her the role – at least, that’s the story according to her author profile on Amazon.
And during a brief discussion of what we saw of Croft Manor in which game, she laughs when I admit I’ve mixed up the interior and exterior sections. She’s recently replayed the original games, making notes, for the book.
And she’s proud of her 100 per cent completion result for Rise. Clearing all the side-tombs, all the caves, takes perseverance. She concedes that my piddling 94 per cent clearance is “really quite good”.
While Rise of the Tomb Raider has been out on the Xbox One for a year under a time-limited exclusivity deal, the upcoming PlayStation 4 and PC release comes packed with extra goodies, including a tour of the current incarnation of Croft Manor – dilapidated, with areas blocked off by builders’ barriers. It’s a sequence packed with memories.
Those who have the PS4’s virtual reality rig even get to experience Lara’s home in VR.
“In Rise, the gameplay and the settings and so on, there’s a lot of throwbacks,” she said. “It feels more like a nostalgic adventure. In the 20-year celebration content in Croft Manor, those Easter eggs are a lot more explicit.”
The Easter eggs are indeed there, from letters from Lara’s old butler, Winston, to the layout of the manor. Marie is particularly pleased with the ancient gramophone, which at her suggestion to game developers, plays a snatch of music from the original trilogy.
“In the main game, though, we really wanted to capture the spirit of what Tomb Raider is, and a lot of times that is exploring these ancient spaces in this isolated environment,” she says. “It’s as dangerous as it is beautiful.”
Crystal Dynamics’ 2013 reboot of the series, just called Tomb Raider, got some flak for introducing an uncertain, vulnerable Lara Croft on her first adventure, a far cry from the original 1996 game, which introduced the heroine with a cover of the fictitious Adventurer! magazine proclaiming ‘Lara Stamps Out Bigfoot’.
Risking the ire of dedicated fans, which at first seemed like hubris, now seems visionary. The Lara of Rise of the Tomb Raider is even more impressive because we’ve seen how she started.
Marie points to a moment in Rise when Lara’s ally tells her she can’t go on alone, she needs his help, and she says, “You don’t know how far I’ve come.”
“That line to me was gold,” Marie says. “She’s come so far, she’s grown so much, she knows what she’s capable of.”
Players too, know what Lara is capable of at that point, because we’ve controlled her as she’s done it - and we’ve undoubtedly seen her pay the penalty of failure, watching her die before the reload screen loads up.
The difference between the old Lara lies deeper than heroic vulnerability, though. The original trilogy presented a Lara flush with cash, a daredevil thrill-seeker with a cartoon-like appearance. The reboot is altogether more gritty - a noble heiress, to be sure, but one who is perpetually short of money, adventuring not for kicks but for her father’s reputation and her rights to his estate. Old Lara told arch-rival Jacqueline Natla, “I only play for sport.” New Lara is no sportswoman.
“For us, it was just feeling we were at a point of time in the franchise that it needed a fresh take and that we wanted to make her a bit more relevant to modern gaming audiences in terms of making a very nuanced character.
“You will never hear me knock Classic Lara. I love Classic Lara - her boldness and brashness inspired me so much as a teenager. She inspired me to be bold and brave and so on. But we wanted to have that nuance in the character.
“I get the pleasure of sending the studio notes from fans, and we hear this all that time, that Lara is now a character because she’s flawed, because she’s vulnerable, she doesn’t have all the answers, but she perseveres, she comes out on top... and that makes people feel like they can accomplish great things despite their flaws and despite their weaknesses.
“I like the line that you can’t have bravery without fear - it has more value if there’s a struggle in it.”
As someone who’s been inspired by Lara, who dressed up as Lara as a teenager and who still occasionally dresses as Lara in her other life as a cosplayer, Marie laughs when asked if Crystal Dynamics can better the presentation in Rise.
“I think that the team has come to an incredible understanding of what makes Lara great, and I think they really good understanding of where her character is and where it’s going to go. I think the main thing with the reboot franchise at this point is that her character arc is leading the adventure, and as long as that arc continues that we’re going to continue to have these incredible moments of capturing the magic, capturing the spirit again.”
Part of the magic is the settings. The original games – 16-bit graphics as they were – managed to instil a sense of awe. Whether it were Incan art in a lost tomb, an underground Egyptian city in all its glory, the Great Wall of China or modern day Venice, Tomb Raider always provided exotic locations and familiar myths – Atlantis, El Dorado and the like.
The 2013 reboot went a step further. Search the internet for its subject, and you’ll find a real myth, virtually unknown outside Japan. Rise’s first major continues that theme with its Russian folklore – albeit one fairly well known to aficionados of Dungeons & Dragons: the witch Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged hut.
“The team likes to do what we call Google-able myths. So, there’s things like El Dorado, very well-known myths; the team wants to find myths that you may not have heard about but if you Google it you’ll get a quick basis of the myth. We want something that feels fresh to people.”
