[I recently discovered that I had missed out a large number of #1 games earlier in the ’90s. The list is here if you want to see if you are interested in writing about any of them! I’m catching up on one each Wednesday.]
There are different ways to make sequels to gameplay-focused games. Do something different, do the same again but with a twist, or just make it more difficult from the start. Tomb Raider II is the last option. There is a new plot, some Orientalist bullshit involving Tibetan monks and a magical ancient Chinese knife, but it’s barely more than an excuse to get Lara Croft doing some Bond-esque wisecracks between levels spread around the world. The real focus is on the gameplay. And there isn’t a lot of change.
Lara, upgraded to a ‘starring’ credit on the cover, is also upgraded in appearance but barely in moveset. There is a chance to ride some vehicles in a couple of sequences. And there are flares to light your way in the dark, which Tomb Raider II is not generous with the supply of, meaning more dark sections where the challenge comes from not being able to see anything. Plus there are just lots more enemies to shoot, lots more being menaced by men with dogs and by spiders, losing much of the solitude that was one of the originals’ most striking features.
There are a couple of concessions. You can now save anywhere, rather than just at fixed points, although the length of time taken to load your game again on the PlayStation still acts as a strong punishment for failure. There is also something of a concession in having only one level in the first location (the Great Wall in China) before moving on to Venice, making it much easier to get far enough to see a couple of different places at least.
Before this project I hadn’t played Tomb Raider. Except, in a way, I had. Back in 1989, developers Core Design made a game called Rick Dangerous, and I played the Commodore 64 version and its sequel quite a bit. In Rick Dangerous, you play as an Indiana Jones-inspired adventurer, platforming, puzzle-solving and gunning your way through a variety of exotic locations and trying to negotiate a range of different traps and enemies. Being 1989, it was of course ludicrously difficult, throwing unfair death at you everywhere and relying on painstaking rote learning of precision jumps and shots.
Over on his Super Chart Island predecessor, Martin at anaccidentalman wrote about Rick Dangerous and ended by implying the link to Tomb Raider. I thought it was a cute bit of coincidental symmetry, especially given that it seems like none of the people who worked on Rick Dangerous worked on Tomb Raider. The more I play Tomb Raider II, though, the more I think that it is Rick Dangerous. With few new ideas and stripped of much of the atmosphere of the first game, its legion of unfair traps and painstaking trial and error comes ever more to the fore. Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise, given that it was less than a decade since the 2D predecessor. That’s shorter than the length of time between Tomb Raider and its first reboot. Rick Dangerous was hardly ancient history but representative of the kind of game that many of Tomb Raider‘s players would have grown up on.
I think that familiarity is actually key to the success of Tomb Raider and how it burned so brightly as well as how soon it burned out (though getting the same people to make a new one every year is a big factor there too). Core took a well-established and conservative hero archetype and changed nothing about it… apart from the one huge change that was changing the gender. And they took a well-established old school approach to making a game and changed nothing about it, apart from the one huge change that was reproducing it in three dimensions. Between those decisions, they constructed a massive audience that included lots of people attracted to the fresh aspects, without scaring off the audience for its predecessors. Tomb Raider II feels more firmly fixed back in 1997 than almost anything else from that year I’ve played, probably because it was already so grounded in looking further back still.
