“They were afraid players would reject her. Instead, she became distinctive. I suppose some wanted to protect her. But I want to believe many saw her as powerful, cool,” says Paula Sáez Pérez, author of the book La última exploradora: un recorrido por la saga Tomb Raider (The Last Explorer: A Journey through the Tomb Raider Saga).
“She helped ensure we no longer question that in video games today,” adds Miguel Aguerralde, author of Tomb Raider: el viaje de Lara Croft (Tomb Raider: The Journey of Lara Croft).
Gradually, she also made clear she hadn’t come to be wed to anyone or anything — except exploration. Facing freezing temperatures in tiny shorts and a tank top hardly helped the mission. “They weren’t thinking about female players, but about boys. Still, it was welcome that she was so self-assured and there were no developed romance arcs [and the fictional Lara even has a birthday on Valentine’s Day]. The idea that she was overly sexualized is a bit simplistic: for the time she wasn’t that bad, and characters then weren’t very deep. Although things like the infamous ‘pyramidal breasts’ or marketing with suggestive images are fair criticisms,” Sáez says.
In any case, while she toured about 30 countries — from the Colosseum to Kilimanjaro, from Antarctica to Yucatán — the adventurer began another journey: moving away from being a sexual object toward iconic status. The two new video games in development and the television series in production are meant to cement that from 2027. For now, among her many Guinness records, she already holds the title of the most versatile female digital character ever.
“When she appeared on the scene, video games had heroes, and female mascots,” Sáez Pérez sums up. The origins of the work achieved another feat: it came out of three years’ work by a team of six people. A handful by the standards of the time, and even fewer given the game’s scale: it pioneered building a three-dimensional environment to move through freely. The person responsible for designing those levels was Heather Gibson, the team’s only woman, although Lara Croft’s creator was developer Toby Gard.
Gard’s idea changed several times: to avoid the Indiana Jones homage becoming a copy, he chose a woman. He drew inspiration from the punk heroine Tank Girl, from Jamie Hewlett’s comics, and from singer Neneh Cherry. Initially, he thought of Lara Cruz, a South American mercenary. But developer Core Design wanted her to be British: the surname came from among the most common entries in the phone book. Early sketches show Lara in military uniform and holding a bouquet made of severed heads. In the end, she was made more elegant: a millionaire daughter of aristocrats. It’s not for nothing that she carries the title Countess of Abingdon.
It was an immediate hit. “There are photos of team members sleeping under desks; after the success they released a game a year,” Sáez Pérez recalls. “It also worked because of the concept itself — adventure and action, an immersion in a movie — when the norm was platformers like Sonic and Mario or fighting games like Street Fighter. Another hook was the high difficulty level,” Aguerralde emphasizes. Sales continued to skyrocket with the second installment in 1997 and the third, 12 months later, which added another milestone: it was among the first video games to offer multiple routes to complete the same level.
By 1999, three years after its launch, Tomb Raider had become a phenomenon. Lara Croft appeared on clothing, deodorants, scooters, luxury pens, and playing cards. She was dressed in Gucci or Alexander McQueen, turned up at U2 concerts, and energy drink Lucozade temporarily renamed itself Larazade.
