Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Over the years.

Lara Croft Tomb Raider has been a staple in the gaming scene for a long time now. This incredible fictional has changed a lot with each delivery in the series and trilogies. However, she has remained a mind-blowing, courageous woman. She is even considered as a fictional role model around the world. The recent games have positively given her personality more profundity, and the series in general has made some amazing progress.

The series has been around since 1996. It has had different reboots, storylines, changes in the character herself and even films based on the heroine, Lara Croft. A few games have been getting more exceptional reviews than others, but with engaging investigation and experience subjects, the series has consistently had fans returning endlessly once more. All in all, exactly how many Tomb Raider games are there? It may be shocking, but there are a staggering 25 games, ready to play and to explore her most wonderful, yet terrifying adventures.

The first Tomb Raider game was delivered in October 1996, playable on PlayStation and PC. It was about Lara's journey to secure the Scion of Atlantis, a pendant containing power beyond that believed to be held by God. It was divided into three pieces and held by the three rulers of Atlantis, but its power was abused by Jaqueline Natla, a baffling mysterious businesswoman, that resulted in her cryonic freezing. She was also the owner of Natla technologies and hired Lara Croft to seek for the Scion of Atlantis. After she woke up, she tried to relocate the pieces of the Scion to bring a new age, but was stopped by Lara Croft, who was one step ahead of her. Lara then destroyed the Scion and kept the remains in her vault. The scion was considered to have greater powers than the creator himself. The game was a basic achievement, or so the creators thought. "Not one of us realized it would be in any way such a massive success." says Gavin, one of the creators. A genuine buzz was working around Tomb Raider, which is no surprise. It was also one of the first 3D games ever created. Ian Livingstone, the president Chief of Tomb Raider distributer, Eidos, reviewed that they planned on 100,000 units being sold, which was part of the financial plan. They were shocked to find out that they had over 7,000,000 units that was sold!

Lara was the success of the game and the marketability of the product. She was a character that won the hearts of both male and female gamers. The game was so more than the character itself.

Remotely, Lara Croft was turning into a hybrid star, a reality which brought the progress of the primary game. The team had a lot of press and television interviews. The Face highlighted a main story on the person and her prevalence. Rhona Mitra, a live action model, was earning respect as the 'genuine' Lara Croft, and she was at that point teaming up with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics on music to be delivered under Lara's name, and Sony took advantage by signing a deal with Eidos, guaranteeing that PlayStation was the main control centre to get it. People were waiting anxiously for Tomb Raider 2, but there were some difficulties they encountered, like her ponytail. Back then, they only got to work with so many polygons, so they tried to make her hair look realistic, but with her acrobatic moves, her hair whipped around like an electric eel. Luckily, they got a way to get it up and working and they were pleased with the results.

And then came along Tomb Raider II, which was another critical and commercial success, surpassing the sales of the first game. Plans were set into motion for Tomb Raider III, but this time most of the original team moved onto a new project. The team wanted at least two years to develop Tomb Raider 3 to really move it on, but the producers wanted it done in a year. For those who had done that for two consecutive years already was just too much. Luckily, the expansion of the team during Tomb Raider II provided new blood to carry the franchise forward.

Upon its release in 1998, Tomb Raider III didn't fare as well as the first two, but remained a high-performing game, selling well over six million copies, meaning that another sequel was guaranteed for 1999. The game had much more new things, like the grenade launcher Lara Croft could equip, and new aerobic moves. The addition of the sprint button was useful to run faster from enemies, and new enemy AI allowed for the bad guys to call for reinforcements and shut off certain areas, necessitating a stealthier approach to eliminate them, which made the game more enjoyable. It made the game more difficult, but allowed you think strategically, which made it more interesting. Meanwhile, dangerous terrains were added, including quicksand and water with deadly currents. The other big change was the addition of a non-linear structure.

Thus, came along Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. The Last Revelation introduced more of Lara Croft's history through a chapter showing a younger version of herself on an adventure with mentor/rival Werner Von Croy. She never had the skills as her older self had. She was new in the archaeologist world. Though it had a slightly more positive reception than its predecessor, The Last Revelation was perhaps the first real indicator of interest in the series that was wanted. It was the lowest sales for a Tomb Raider game so far despite the addition of the Dreamcast as a third platform which gamers could play on. However, the team was concerned about The Last Revelation for an entirely different reason.

As the fourth release in four years, it was inevitable that fatigue had set in during Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. However, the way it was expressed was a shock to players around the world. Looking at Lara's avatar all day every day for two years was about as much as some of them could take. Management were pretty hands off, so for two weeks, they developed a plan to kill Lara, and followed it through. The game ends with Lara entombed under a collapsed pyramid entrance, a dramatic and perhaps poetic end for the adventurer. A lot thought that this was the end of the Tomb Raider franchise, but they weren’t going to get away with killing the company's golden goose. When Jeremy Heath-Smith, the CEO of Core Design, founded out that the team had killed her and it was too far gone to reverse it, he was furious. He called the team into his office and yelled at them for making such an impulsive decision. So, the team had to come with a drastic solution to basically bring Lara Croft back to life.

Lara Croft Chronicles was then born. Lara managed to get out of the rubble and saw that Verner Von Croy left her to die. Instead of focusing on a single adventure, the game was themed around Lara Croft's funeral. Mourners gathered and talked, or rather relived tales of her past adventures. By this point few additions were made. Lara gained access to a grappling hook, as well as walking on tightrope and the ability to swing from horizontal bars.

When Tomb Raider Chronicles arrived in 2000, it was the least enthusiastic critical response so far, and sales were drastically lower than those of The Last Revelation. The game only sold one and a half million copies. Having to push out five games in five years, burnt out the team, and it's fair to say that the first and original Tomb Raider had been well and truly exhausted…

However, from the outside the games couldn't have seemed to be in a better position. Angelina Jolie had starred as Lara Croft in a Tomb Raider movie, and there was a new hope for the games around the corner in the form of the PlayStation 2. With new technology, the team would have a chance to reconstruct the gameplay of the series. Stealth and hand-to-hand combat would play a big part in the new adventure, as would the new playable character, Kurtis Trent in the brand-new Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness game.

Along with new technology, came new staff. And they came with hunger to work on such a huge project. Initially, things seemed to be going well. But unfortunately, the combination of a large team, an over-ambitious design and a management structure not equipped enough to deal with the task quickly drove the project off the rails.

The project was not properly envisioned by anyone at Core at that time and there was too much pressure. Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness arrived in 2003 (3 years after Tomb Raider Chronicles) with much more designing and development to be done that had been left out. Despite selling only two and a half million copies, it had a critical kicking and is considered the lowest point in the series. There was a lot of dissatisfaction amongst fans and shareholders, so Eidos decided to take drastic action and removed Tomb Raider from Core design. The board of directors did not take the decision lightly. Core design did an incredible job during 1996 and 2000. But PlayStation 2 came along with its new tech challenges which Core Design struggled with for too long. Instead of it being another hit in the series, Angel of Darkness was not far short of a disaster when it came out in 2003. Sales were below expectation. Development of Tomb Raider was moved to Crystal Dynamics. For a UK company, moving the development was a big decision to make but, as it turned out, was absolutely the right one to make. But from an outsider's perspective, it seemed like a harsh decision, especially as Core Design had only produced one bad Tomb Raider game. The tens of millions of sales it had generated surely could’ve given Core another chance to save the game. Many on the development team at Core design had enough. Some were burned out and exhausted. They wanted to work on new games because everything was about Lara Croft. Some were tired of her and everything that revolved around it. It was definitely time for change. But nobody should ever take away or blur the contribution that Core Design made in not just creating Tomb Raider but making it an iconic franchise. An iconic franchise millions of gamers admire today.

Over at Crystal Dynamics, the team had been working on the well-regarded Legacy of Kain 3D action-adventure games for some time, but then they got a brand-new project…. A new and improved Tomb Raider game. The team at Crystal Dynamics were shocked. It was a sense of ‘Oh my gosh!' Tomb Raider was such a big franchise with so many fans. “If we wanted to take something as big as that on, we would have to do it so right, so it felt very much like a high-stakes proposition" recalls Noah Hughes, creative director at Crystal Dynamics. But it came up more as an opportunity, with Eidos saying, ‘Hey, would you guys be interested in working with this character?' From that perspective it was exciting, as it fit comfortably with their desire to create experiences that consisted of a lot of stuff, like environmental exploration, combat, puzzle-solving and surviving.

When developing Tomb Raider: Legend, the first game of the Crystal Dynamics era, it was important for the team to choose which aspects of the existing games they wished to retain. They wanted to keep both of Lara's intellect and puzzle-solving skills, as well as her combat and aerobic skills. They felt that traversal and exploration were important, but how could they provide a traversal toolset to make the world a jungle gym?

The sense that around each corner could be a surprise, even the less noticeable corners could hold a secret. Also, a combat system of sorts, the dual pistols is a part of Lara's iconography, but also focused on a brute-force flavour of combat. The manager of Crystal Dynamics enjoyed the fluidity in combat as well as the acrobatics. That's something that Crystal Dynamics pushed as a way to differentiate itself from Core and to leave its mark on the franchise. Moving towards very fluid traversal, fluid combat, was something they were very impressed with.

The results backed up the decision to go with Crystal Dynamics. The critics, reviews, and sales of Tomb Raider: Legend were a marked improvement over the last couple of games, with four-and-a-half-million copies sold. That success ensured that two follow-up titles went into production, and Crystal Dynamics began to focus on the past, present, and future of Tomb Raider. Lara Croft's reinvention was going to become important.

After finishing Legend, the team split, and a small team took Tomb Raider: Anniversary and another took Tomb Raider: Underworld. Tomb Raider Anniversary marked the 10-year celebration since the franchise begun. So, they revamped the first game with better graphics, special effects, and voice artists to make the game more enjoyable. The storyline stayed the same, although new weapons were added, and they took the same aerobics from Legend and pasted it in Anniversary. So, they started working on that, but they had to think about the future of the franchise. They knew that after the next game, Tomb Raider Underworld, which would be considered the end of a trilogy, that something massive needed to be done. Tomb Raider couldn’t end there. They recognised after a while of exploration that an origin story made the most sense, and that letting the players see those moments where Lara was forged into the Tomb Raider would make her more relatable. Gamers would understand where she came from, and what made her the badass we know and love today. Of course, this reboot was still many years away, and the two other projects would arrive sooner. 2 years apart to be precise.

The team took the goal of not only evolving the gameplay and invigorating her character story tells, but also making sure that on top of all of that, that they were recreating a relationship between the character and the audience to love the Lara Croft we all once knew. Not that there was anything wrong with the character itself, but rather the storyline and how some of the games were put out there.

For the first time, we saw Lara Croft not as an adventurer, but as a newcomer to exploration whose experiences would test her very will to survive. Someone who had to build herself up to become a survivor and to learn the combat, aerobics and all other factors we once knew she had. Part of the unrelatability of Lara was that because she had a lot of money. Croft Manor was clear evidence of the money she and her family had. They were also well known even in the first game of the franchise. This was just a whole new turn that showed us her life from another perspective. She learned to be so skilled, so of course she was going to win. They felt that they had to place her in a situation where she had to earn her success, and isolate her from the support that she had, to make us believe that there could be a chance that she could lose a battle." This led to the introduction of new survival mechanics, as well as character development through an experienced system.

The reboot, simply named ‘Tomb Raider’ that came out in 2013, managed to take turns from popular action-adventure games, like the Uncharted series, while retaining the feel of a classic Lara Croft adventure. You got the opportunity to craft weapons by campfires that were also the checkpoints throughout the games. So many new things were added that gamers founded attractive. The approach worked well, as the game earned fantastic reviews. The reboot became the bestselling game in the series since 1996, with over eight-and-a-half million copies sold.

A follow-up was inevitable, and the pressure was on following the previous game's high sales. They wanted to uphold the game’s success, but it was terrifying to know that it would be very difficult. It was seen as a challenge on how to figure out how to improve on that. In Tomb Raider, you look at Lara's transition from being an explorer interested in the world to someone forced to kill, uncover the truth and most important of all, to survive. The game is set on Yamatai, a fictional lost island in the Dragon's Triangle off the coast of Japan. The island and the kingdom that once existed there is destroyed in mystery, given its reputation for fearsome storms and shipwrecks on the coastline. Yamatai was once ruled by queen Himiko, known as the "Sun Queen", who, according to legend, was blessed with shamanistic powers that enabled her to control the weather. Very little is known about Yamatai's history in the time since Himiko's death. At the start of the game, the island is populated by the Solarii Brotherhood, a violent cult of criminals and shipwreck survivors. The Solarii Brotherhood has established its own society based on the worship of Himiko, complete with a social structure and laws, with a purpose of being explored throughout the story.

Lara Croft, a young and ambitious archaeology graduate whose theories on the location of the lost kingdom of Yamatai have convinced to get a fund for an expedition in search of the kingdom. The expedition is led by Doctor James Whitman, a celebrity archaeologist who has fallen on desperation to avoid bankruptcy, and is accompanied by Conrad Roth, a Marine turned into an adventurer and close friend of the Croft family who is a mentor to Lara. Next is Samantha "Sam" Nishimura, Lara's friend and a representative of the Nishimura family who films the expedition for a documentary. Then comes Joslyn Reyes, a sceptical and temperamental mechanic and single mother. Jonah Maiava, one of Lara’s closest friends, is a fisherman who is willing to believe in the existence of the paranormal and esoteric, because of Lara’s obsession to prove everyone wrong who never believed her father. The obsession is what killed him. Angus "Grim" Grimaldi, a helmsman of the Endurance joins them and lastly, Alex Weiss, a goofy electronics specialist.

Because of the success of the game, it was clear that another reboot was needed. So ‘Rise of The Tomb Raider’ was born. We all saw her choice to continue the adventure to find more answers, so her character continued to evolve.

One year after the events of Tomb Raider, archaeologist Lara Croft is struggling with the experience of the supernatural on Yamatai and is experiencing posttraumatic stress disorder. Looking for answers, she turns to her late father Lord Croft's research on the lost city of Kitezh and the promise of immortality. Ana, Lord Croft's partner, warns Lara that her father's obsession drove him to ruin and suicide. Lara ignores her and organizes an expedition to the Forgotten Cities in northwestern Syria, hoping to uncover the tomb of the Prophet of Constantinople, a key in the Kitezh legend. The tomb is empty, and Lara is interrupted by Trinity; an ancient order of knights t organization investigating the supernatural, and their task force leader, Konstantin. As she flees, Lara discovers a symbol etched into the tomb, which she links to a book on Russian religious history in her father's study at Croft Manor. She learns of an artifact called the Divine Source, said to be capable of granting immortality. After arguing with her friend Jonah Maiava, they go on to a quest to find more answers. Massive plot twists and shocking truths reveals, with an amazing gameplay, beautiful graphics, gorgeous areas and upgraded combat skills awaits.

One of the things that the team was more than aware of, was the need to include more tombs for players to explore. Finding a little artifact in a corner of a cave you were supposed to be in wasn’t enough. They added Tombs none of us were aware, unless we got near them. You would get a message stating ‘Tomb nearby’ and you would use your survival instincts to find it. It kept the game more alive and interesting. And with the completion progress of the game, you would be motivated to find every artifact and tomb to get that progress percentage up to a 100%. They did fill the setting with a lot of history in Tomb Raider 2013, but those layers were, for example, World War II, so they told stories a week before Lara got there, 50 years before Lara got there, and hundreds of years before she got there. It was precisely that history from long ago that Lara was after to uncover the truth she needed in the present to save the world or something else. But what they found was that because they weren't ancient places with ancient secrets, they weren't scratching that itch entirely." Rise Of The Tomb Raider initially launched on Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC in 2015, and has launched on PlayStation 4 a while later. It had a very positive critical reception that narrowly edged that of the 2013 reboot.

Then the last game so far up to date, was the Shadow of The Tomb Raider. Set roughly a year after the events of Rise of the Tomb Raider, its story follows Lara Croft as she ventures through the tropical regions of the America to the legendary city Paititi, battling the organization Trinity and racing to stop a Mayan apocalypse she accidentally has unleashed. Lara must traverse the environment and combat enemies with firearms and stealth as she explores semi-open hubs. In these hubs she can raid challenge tombs, and side missions were introduced to make the game feel longer and more enjoyable so that the storyline made more sense and scavenge for resources which can be used to craft useful materials. It was also concluded the end of the Trilogy…

And till then, we all are waiting for the brand-new Tomb Raider game set to release in middle 2024.

In many ways, Lara Croft's transformation into a survivalist and archaeologist is a fine way to represent Tomb Raider's journey. The fact that both her parents died when she was young, encouraged her to become the best survivalist. From a starting point of fame and fortune, the series has had to adapt to survive against a backdrop of sweeping changes in game design and consumer tastes, as well as misfortune. Against all of that, the people behind Tomb Raider have reinvented it over the course of two decades to remain one of the world's most beloved brands, and Lara Croft stands alone as the icon representing that monumental effort.

It's fair to say that Lara Croft is just as popular as she ever was. Lara has transcended gaming in a way that I believe no other character has, because of the movies and that she was considered a virtual model for a while. Lara Croft does hold a unique place in gaming history that I don't know if any other character could compete with, and we can’t wait to see what the future holds for her…

NOTE: Out of the 25 Lara Croft games, these mentioned are the most well-known and deserves to be talked about, since they gained most attraction with awards over the years.