Tomb Raider and the many faces of Lara Croft

For more than 25 years, the face of the Tomb Raider franchise transformed seemingly endlessly in both video games and films as a series of creators put their spin on the beloved character.

For more than 25 years, the face of the Tomb Raider franchise transformed seemingly endlessly in both video games and films as a series of creators put their spin on the beloved character.

Those transformations turned her into a walking contradiction. She was a rare example of a strong female protagonist in gaming who spent her time not as some damsel in distress but as a hero scouring tombs and shooting dinosaurs—while also being oversexualized simply for existing as a woman. She was a character known by audiences for her singular presence and appearance despite her identity and backstory being in a state of constant flux.

While Lara Croft is many things to many people, there is one unifying constant: She’s one of the most recognizable characters in video game history and a pop culture icon.

Now, the original Tomb Raider trilogy that introduced the character into the world is back in an all-new remastered package: Tomb Raider I-III Remastered. Despite being some of the earliest examples of 3D puzzle adventure games at a time of great experimentation, these titles hold up today as arresting and entertaining retro romps.

Yet to merely play these games in a vacuum in 2024 makes it easy to forget the immediate and lasting impact they had on pop culture and the perception of gaming upon their release in the ‘90s, or the way Lara Croft was almost instantly catapulted from an idea by a small group of developers in the UK to an international superstar.

The voice

While the franchise is one of the most recognizable in gaming today, the original Tomb Raider was a risky proposition during its initial development. 3D gaming was in its infancy, with platforming and complex puzzle exploration still a relative rarity. And female protagonists were not a common occurrence in gaming at the time. Even the original voice actor tasked with bringing the character to life was relatively inexperienced in the world of voice acting.

Prior to taking on the role of Lara Croft, Shelley Blond’s career had been focused on TV and stage. When it became time to audition for the role of Lara Croft, she had just dipped her toes into the field, and the audition was more for gaining experience than it was about expecting to land the gig.

It wasn’t just Blond who was inexperienced with voice acting—so was the team behind the game.

“I was 25 or 26 when I did Tomb Raider,” Blond said. “I left drama school at 19, and from then I was doing shows, doing tours, and some very rock-and-roll musicals with the likes of Bill Kenwright. He was my producer in my years in the West End doing things like Only the Lonely and Elvis: The Musical, where I got to sing a few numbers. Through that, I got onto TV [in the UK] as a presenter on Trouble TV and CITV. I did commercials, then I moved into voice acting.

“[At the time,] my agent said that she’d been asked to give some names they felt could do a female character for a game and wondered if I’d like to have a go. She heard there probably wouldn’t be much luck in me getting the role because they’d been searching for six to nine months, but that it would be a good chance to experience the audition since I was new to things. I recorded a few lines on cassette, put them in the post, then I was asked to do a conference call with some people in Derby and some in London where we had a chat and they asked me to do the lines again. By the end of the call, they told me I got the job!”

Blond said the team wasn’t sure how well Tomb Raider would do, especially because it was a game with a “female protagonist.”

“The team was very protective over ensuring ‘their baby’ was introduced into the world exactly as they envisioned it, in a process with little space for deviation from the mold,” she said. “I had no say in the character.

“I would at times let my own personality come in and was asked to pull back, to not make it too vulgar or too sexy. I’m not saying my character was sexy, just that she looked very sexy to me, so at times I wanted her to not be so direct, but it was all about finding that balance.”

In the end, Blond only voiced the character for the first Tomb Raider due to scheduling conflicts, with select clips being reused through the second and third entries in the original trilogy. Judith Gibbins took over the role for additional voicing to round out the original trilogy before Jonell Elliott and, later, Keeley Hawes became Croft’s voice in subsequent installments.

Cultural zeitgeist

The franchise’s instant success propelled Lara Croft into the cultural mainstream, garnering attention far beyond the medium of games as an icon in a growing industry. While the games’ entertainment factor certainly contributed to her popularity, it helped that Croft was a character unlike any other in gaming at the time. She was mysterious, an intrepid explorer in the vein of Indiana Jones, but someone many male gamers became enamored by. For many of those young boys, she was their sexual awakening.

This latter point certainly was a diminishing attribute that obscured other qualities of the character in place of an exploitative visage of misogyny and lust. But it was this very flattening of Lara Croft’s character that helped propel her into the cultural zeitgeist of the ‘90s. She was everywhere, plastered across gaming magazines as a “babe” whose triangular breasts were an “asset,” and it wasn’t long before even the marketing leaned into this sex appeal as a selling point for the franchise. 

In reality, Croft was far more than something to ogle. Many female players saw feminist power in her strength and independence taking on dangerous adventures, a rarity for the time. Yet it can’t be ignored that her character’s reduction to a lustful shell dominated the conversation to such an extent that even the developers were forced to step in. The threat of a lawsuit was necessary to prevent the character from being portrayed nude across the pages of Playboy.

No matter the circumstances, Tomb Raider was a hit. Sequels soon followed, the first launching just one year after the original. With each new tale, Croft’s story grew, and as years passed by, we began to learn more about the character’s past. We got new interpretations that transformed this avatar into someone of depth and weight. Even if her image remained unchanged, the fluidity and ever-changing nature of her backstory made her a canvas begging to be explored and reinterpreted, an inspiration that audiences of all ages could relate to.

Hollywood treatment

In 2001, a major Hollywood adaptation of the series was released starring Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. Unlike in the original games, this Lara became an orphan at the age of 13 after her father passed away, with her mother dying when she was only young. The discovery of a ticking clock with ties to her father sends her on a journey to find answers about his mysterious death as she challenges Manfred Powell and the Illuminati in the search for a once-lost relic.

While a somewhat thin justification for adventure, it was more than the series had explored to that point while retaining the image and feel of the original games. Indeed, as blond recalls being told by a friend, Jolie even mentioned considering the intonation and approach of her performance when tackling the character in the film, even if this Lara was a distinctly different character due to her more expanded backstory.

“I knew a friend [who] was working on the film, and he went over and said how it was a pleasure to meet her. You’ve got to say something to Angelina Jolie’s face, so they told her that their friend was me, which she said was cool. She told them she listened to my voice over and over again to get the right tone for the role. Is that true? Who knows, she might have just been acting very lovely and sweet knowing the story would get back to me. But I think she was perfect casting.”

Multiple reboots

The 2001 film was far from the only attempt to evolve or reboot the character of Lara Croft. The games received their first reboot in the mid-2000s as development shifted from Core Design to Crystal Dynamics. Gone was the blue lycra shirt for a shade of brown, and her tomb plundering ways were given more purpose as she underwent a search for her mother. Lara and her mother were the only survivors of a plane crash in the Himalayas, although her mother soon mysteriously disappeared inside the Nepalese temple the pair took shelter in. She gained her adventuring skills from her father, but he too disappeared when she was 16, with Lara becoming an archaeologist to find answers.

Lara Croft underwent a further reboot in 2013, which portrayed Lara as less of a willing plunderer and more of a gritty survivor, with the gameplay experience elevated from adventure platformer to something more akin to other big-budget, character-driven blockbuster action titles from that generation of gaming. It’s a far more cinematic experience, making it no surprise that this interpretation of the character (portrayed by Camilla Luddington) was the template chosen as inspiration for the 2018 film reboot starring Alicia Vikander.

With each new performer and juncture, the character evolved, still unmistakably Croft but vastly different to fit with the changing standards of the time. By the mid-2000s, the anomaly of her existence as a female protagonist was wearing thin as the success of her games proved that a market existed for characters like her, paving the way for the all-female main cast of Final Fantasy X-2, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil, and many more. As beloved as Lara was, her character lacked the depth being found elsewhere, an issue later corrected with a retooling handled with intimate involvement from her original co-creator, Toby Gard.

By 2013, the entire industry had shifted. The Uncharted franchise, itself heavily inspired by the Tomb Raider franchise and many of its same influences as Indiana Jones, had shifted player expectations as we heralded the HD era of gaming with a clamoring for so-called cinematic storytelling. So, by the time publisher Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics took on the task of reimagining Lara Croft once again for this new generation, we gained a greater insight into her mind than ever before. Rather than merely completing the task as the player guides her to the next area, we see the psychological impact of her survival throughout the game’s events more intimately than ever before. 

The tonal shift from earlier titles was stark. Even Blond admitted struggling to see the resemblance between her Croft and the other incarnations.

“Do I see myself in my Croft? Yes. In other ones? Not at all,” Blond said. “The minute it’s got another voice, it takes on a completely different life, but I appreciate that people love that.” 

Blond also recognized that, for different players, each take on Croft could be the one they associate with most. “Some people only came in with number two, some only came in when it got more filmic with Camilla Luddington, and my game won’t be the one they most associate with the character.”

Yet without that initial characterization by Core Design and Blond, the franchise or its many later incarnations may not exist today. For all their changes, this is still Lara Croft, derived from the same character who shot to mainstream stardom. 

If you were alive in the 1990s, you knew Lara Croft. Blond even reminisced on how the character’s popularity was so omnipresent that it felt inevitable her TV presenting and voice acting worlds would eventually collide—as it did when, in her role for Trouble TV, she participated in a home renovations kids TV program segment lovingly titled Room Raider.

Remastered trilogy

While times have changed and games have advanced far beyond the primitive, tentative steps into 3D taken by Tomb Raider and its peers in the 1990s, there’s an undeniable charm for this era of games that resonates both with players who experienced it and even younger generations curious to experience what came before.

Yet making these titles accessible to all audiences while retaining the classic feel that older players will remember is no simple task. For the team at Aspyr in charge of remastering the first three Tomb Raider games for a new generation, they took an approach that simplified the game for newcomers without removing the quirks that define the experience for many diehard fans.

“A core pillar [of our decision-making] is to preserve the magic [while] resolving pain points,” explained Chris Bashaar, Director of Product at Aspyr. “For Tomb Raider Remastered, we wanted to find a way to modernize the graphics while also letting players choose between the original tank controls and the new controls. For our updated controls, we drew inspiration from the Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld eras of Tomb Raider and are felt mostly in the way Lara moves: The right stick has full camera control, and Lara moves directionally based on camera position.”

Those who wish to use the original tank controls inherent to the classic experience can choose to do so, while players more used to the modern era of dual analog sticks have the option to stick to a more familiar experience. A similar approach was taken with the game’s visuals, remastered with modern techniques while retaining the original intent, Bashaar explained. 

“We worked hand in hand with Crystal Dynamics to add baked and real-time lighting effects, along with new models, environments, and enemies. Every change was based on direct side-by-side comparisons to match that original vision of each asset. We kept the same geometry to ensure the feel of Tomb Raider didn’t get compromised in exchange for art improvements.”

Thanks to this, a classic experience that to many felt inaccessible, whether due to compatibility issues with modern hardware or the clunky controls of the original, is available to an all-new generation. The original trilogy of Tomb Raider games not only holds up today as entertaining adventure experiences, it’s a piece of pop culture history that must be preserved and remembered. Gaming—or indeed, pop culture—would not be the same without the many faces of Lara Croft.

“There was a Disney documentary series recently about everything that happened in the 1990s, and there was an episode called Girl Power where they wanted to interview me about Lara,” noted Blond as we wound down our conversation. “They wanted to interview me when they’re also featuring the Spice Girls! That’s quite incredible, but it shows she had that impact, that she meant something.

“It’s just fabulous, isn’t it, all these years later, what Lara did.”

Thanks to Epic Games