It’s remarkable the battles that can still rage on Twitter decades later around Tomb Raider and whether it was a good thing for women in games. There are strong views about its heroine Lara Croft. Her Barbie-proportioned design was entirely to make sure that people could see she was a woman, apparently. Some suggest that Eidos’s exploitative approach to her body in advertising, particularly later on, can be separated out from the game itself. It’s valid to raise a distinction, though when Tomb Raider’s MTV-Cribs-style tutorial section ends with Lara climbing out of her pool and saying “Right, now I’d better take off these wet clothes” it’s difficult to imagine that no intention to titillate was involved.
Much of the reason Tomb Raider’s approach to representation was such fraught territory is because it was so rare. If you hardly ever get to see yourself reflected back in a medium, then it’s hardly surprising to care more about the few times you do. #1 games are a slightly arbitrary way to slice through history, especially when dealing with the kind of information gaps Super Chart Island has, but they do present a picture of the popular. When I started this project I didn’t know for sure if there would any popular games earlier than Tomb Raider with only a female protagonist, but I assumed that at least one would show up that I didn’t know. Here we are at entry #153, though, and Lara Croft is the first solo female lead. Only three previous games have forced the player to play as a female character for even part of the time, and one of those wasn’t even human.
Lara Croft was made to stand for women in games in a way in which Willy, Mugsy, Sabreman, Isvar, Monty the Mole, Super Joe, Oolong, Bomb Jack, Batman, Arthur, Dirk the Daring, Paperboy, Learic, Daley Thompson, Armakuni, Roy Adams, Robocop, Indiana Jones, Tony Gibson, Bub and Bob, Dizzy, Freddy Hardest, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello, Zool, Sonic, Lee, Mario, Aladdin, Robert Foster, Sam and Max, Colonel Blair, Simba, Kyle Katarn, Rincewind, Ben, Keil Fluge, Doomguy, and Ranger never had to individually stand for men in games. Whatever her merits, there is almost no winning when contending with that uneven context.
The attention on her gender neatly shifts focus from other aspects of the lead of Tomb Raider. Before the first cutscene finishes, you watch the lead gun down some animals. The lead is a posh Brit who lives in a mansion and whose whole outlook is rather backwards looking. Going around the world, poking around in other cultures’ historical sites and making off with their treasure is quite the colonial hangover. Even the detail of the lead’s navy blue passport in the menus looks back — in 1996 it wasn’t yet a nostalgic totem for those wanting out of the EU, but the new burgundy design had already been in place for eight years. In most aspects, Tomb Raider’s lead is barely any more developed than Sabreman battling animals in the jungle in the ‘80s. The concept was already stale, and yet one simple, far too unusual decision was enough to make her an icon.
As someone who had pretty much never played Tomb Raider until now, I found that for all the time you spend looking at Lara walking and jumping and diving and everything else, she was far from the centre of the game’s appeal. The experience surprised me in many ways, a lot of which can be summarised in saying I was surprised how much it reminded me of 2002’s critically-loved adventure game Ico. That’s admittedly a little bit “I had never watched Laputa: Castle in the Sky before and I was surprised how much it reminded me of Final Fantasy VII!” (also me) or, like, “I had never heard Radiohead before and I was surprised how much they reminded me of Alt-J!”. Tomb Raider was a crucial moment in moving into 3D and helped define much of a genre. Of course other games that involve jumping around 3D spaces and pushing switches and boxes take after it in how they go about that.
What I hadn’t considered, though, was that Tomb Raider already had so much of the same heavy feeling of solitude that Ico revels in. Lara Croft goes on a series of treks through carefully designed places which, despite being made mostly of cubes, are weighed down with a sense of history and of absent humanity. The switches and mechanisms which exist for the purpose of its puzzles take on a surprising kind of ineffable wonder. Battles are rare and done quickly. If you get into a gunfight in a big cave then inevitably you will soon be standing alone in a big cave again, just with some wolf corpses for decoration. Just like Ico, much of the game plays out in near silence and the very sparingly used bits of music are fantastic for the atmosphere. Without overdoing it, they bring an emotional gravity at surprising moments, not playing up the creepiness of the game’s locations but just their desolation.
Tomb Raider does some things with the camera that weren’t common yet — right at the beginning of the game you walk along a natural passage past some rocks you need to climb up and your view veers over towards them to make sure you notice. I found myself uselessly thumbing at the right stick on my PS3 controller to try to take charge of which way I was looking a few times (the original PlayStation controller didn’t have a stick there). For the most part, though, the camera functions well and unobtrusively and means you take in the scenery in a way which is controlled without being confined. Outside of the stark beauty, there is also a wide streak of dark humour in the level design. The swinging death-blades and the situations like falling into water, swimming through a passageway and coming up in a pool with a bear prowling round it have a lovely comic timing to their endless ‘and another thing…’. The camera tricks make clear a heavy cinematic influence, but Tomb Raider has a very different rhythm which works in anticipating the way that players will interact rather than just having them press buttons to move forward a film.
With the design’s humour, purpose, and surprise, it’s playing the game and finding a way through its locations that provides the most of its personality. In time, though, it begins to reflect back into the largely silent Lara. The lack of the remarkable about her is disguised by the fact that it being her is remarkable, but also because there is much that is remarkable and wonderful that you get to experience through her.
