Tomb Raider is a media franchise consisting of video games, comic books, novels, theme park rides and movies, centring around the adventures of the fictional English archaeologist Lara Croft. Since the release of the original Tomb Raider in 1996, the series developed into a lucrative franchise of related media, and Lara went on to become a major icon of the virtual gaming industry. In 2006, Lara Croft was inducted into the Walk of Game and the Guinness Book of World Records has recognised her as the "Most Successful Human Virtual Game Heroine". The first six games in the series were developed by Core Design, whilst Crystal Dynamics developed the latest four; their fifth game is currently in production. Two movies - Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life - have been produced starring American actress Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, the first of which is still the highest-grossing film adaptation of a video game ever released in US, and third worldwide.
Lara Croft
The central character in Tomb Raider is the English archaeologist Lara Croft, a female adventurer in search of ancient relics. Lara was created by one-time Core designer Toby Gard,[1] and grew out of a number of ideas discarded in early concepts. She appears almost invariably with brown shorts, boots and small backpack, a dark green or blue sleeveless top, holsters on both sides of her hip for dual wielded pistols. Over the course of the series, her 3D model has undergone gradual graphical improvements, as well as enlarged (and later reduced) breast size.
Over the course of time, the Tomb Raider series' canon has undergone various changes or retcons. These changes correspond to the series entering a new medium, such as comic books or film, or being taken over by another game developer. For example, in the first Tomb Raider game manual, Lara Croft is said to have survived a plane crash in the Himalayas at the age of twenty one, and was later disowned by her parents, who are still living.[2] However, in the comics, Lara lost both her parents and her fiancé in the crash. The films make no mention of a plane crash, Lara's mother died when she was too young to remember, and her father died under different circumstances. When development of Tomb Raider was transferred from Core Design to Crystal Dynamics, Lara's biography, was that she and her mother survived a plane crash and later, her mother disappears in the site where they crashed (see Tomb Raider: Legend). She was then left to her father, who did not take part in the crash, and he was later killed by Jaqueline Natla, a recurring character in the series, leaving Lara an orphan. However, in the Lara Croft movie, Lara's father gets killed by the Illuminati (see Tomb Raider).
In addition to the voice actresses who have been responsible for Lara Croft's spoken dialogue during the games, a number of women have taken on the role of Lara for applications outside of the games themselves. Six different women have served as the official Lara Croft model for publicity purposes, including model Nell McAndrew, actress Rhona Mitra, and, most recently, gymnast Alison Carroll, who held the job until 2010. American film star Angelina Jolie portrayed Lara Croft in two feature-length Tomb Raider films, which together grossed nearly US$500 million worldwide, making her role as Lara the most well known and widely seen of any other.
Nearly fifteen years after the release of the original game, Lara is still one of the most famous and recognizable video game characters in the history of the medium. The debate over whether she is an icon of female empowerment or a vessel for male titillation has existed for as long as she has, but the huge effect she has had on both gaming and popular culture in general cannot be denied.
1996–2003: Tomb Raider, II, III, The Last Revelation, Chronicles, and The Angel of Darkness
The original game, titled Tomb Raider, made its debut on the Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and PC. Despite being released on the Saturn first alongside PC,[9][10] it was one of the titles responsible for the PlayStation's success in the mid 1990s. The games present a world in 3D: a series of tombs, and other locations, through which the player must guide Lara. On the way, she must kill dangerous creatures or other humans, while collecting objects and solving puzzles to gain access to an ultimate prize, usually a powerful artifact. The storyline is usually driven by the quest for a powerful artifact, with Lara in a race against a sinister shadow league who want to obtain the relic for their own purposes. These artifacts usually possess mystical powers and may be of supernatural, or even alien, origin. Often in the series, the antagonist uses the artifact or bits of it to create terrifying mystical monsters, creatures, and mutants which Lara must defeat throughout the journey.
Tomb Raider, an early example of the 3D genre, uses third-person shooter mechanics. The player's camera follows her, usually over her shoulder or from behind. Until Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, the game's environments were largely orthogonal, as a result of the creators' decision to extend the 2D platform game genre to a 3D world. This is shown through Tomb Raider's game-play, which is reminiscent of older platform games like Prince of Persia and Flashback that had a heavy focus on timed jumping interspersed with combat. Each game has introduced new weapons and moves; by the fourth game, Lara could back flip off ropes and turn around in mid-air to grab a ledge behind her. Standard moves in Lara's range of abilities include the somersault, a roll, climbing techniques, the ability to swim, a swan dive maneuver, and a handstand. In Tomb Raider III, a sprinting move was introduced that allowed Lara to quickly speed up while a bar in the lower corner of the screen drained her stamina. In Tomb Raider: Chronicles, Lara was able to bar-swing and somersault/roll out of crawl spaces higher than ground level.
Originally, the Tomb Raider games were developed by Core Design, and a game was released annually. However, the pressure grew so much on the team that they decided to kill Lara Croft off at the end of the fourth game. Still, a fifth game was released, which consisted of a series of flashbacks with Lara Croft's funeral serving as framing story for the various tales. The sixth installment Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness revived the character and was to start a trilogy. The game infamously featured a darker more city-based setting and included stealth-elements and also introduced a new playable character for a short time in the game. The game was a failure, thus ending the Core Design era.
In the early 2000s, a series of hand-held titles were released for the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance, which were developed by other developers, neither Core Design (except the second Game Boy game) nor Crystal Dynamics and are therefore not considered canonical.
The basic instrumentation for the Tomb Raider scores is orchestral, though the games adopt different instrumentation and tone with each instalment in the series. Nathan McCree's style when scoring the first Tomb Raider is most similar to Classical music, especially the cues with a fast tempo. Additionally, slow tempo cues are built on a minimalist base using minimalist cells and two to four repeated musical notes. Different instruments like the vibraphone, strings, harp, or woodwinds provide a mysterious setting for the player.
The main theme of the first Tomb Raider game was composed by Nathan McCree. A solo oboe melody orchestrated with choirs and strings, exposing for the first time the four most important musical notes, the signature, the motif of the entire series. These notes are composed in a most conjunct melodic manner possible: G-A-F-G. The original motif is followed immediately after by the sequenced motif with A♯-A-G, giving at the same time the possibility of looping the theme and the feeling of completion. Variations of this tune, especially the G-A-F-G motif has been used throughout all Tomb Raider games, including the second movie, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.
The symphonic sounds of the earlier games composed by Nathan McCree were created using Roland Corporation's Orchestral Expansion board for their JV series modules (JV-1080 Synthesizer Module & SR-JV80-02 Expansion Board[18]).
Stings were used very often to warn the player about an impending danger, or if the player discovers a certain area. As an example, if the player picks up a secret object or, in later games, if an area with that object is discovered, a short vibraphone sound may be heard indicating the player has found a "Secret". The sound has been used in the first five Tomb Raider video games, including Tomb Raider: Anniversary, though it has some minor sound variations.[19][20]
With Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, the composer changes for the first time in the series, Peter Connelly being the next composer to come, he tries to respect Nathan's musical style of the series, keeping the stings and similar orchestration. For the main theme of "The Last Revelation" he sequences with a vibraphone the original motif in a 4 musical note minimalist cell, used from the beginning to the end of the melody.
Angel of Darkness is the first game to bring underscores, previous games using stings and full scores only. Furthermore, as another premier for the series, the score has been performed by a real orchestra (London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Snell)[16]. The basis of the main theme of this 5th game is the ending of the previous game.
Troels Brun Folmann brings with Legend a new kind of music style with underlying beats, just like electronic dance music, that sometimes has small parts of an electronic-like orchestra, but instead of recreating the atmosphere of a real orchestra, Folmann uses a lot of echoes for its sounds. The title track starts off with the first few notes of Lara's original theme used in all the games before this one, being played with slight ornamentation on a Middle-Eastern duduk.
Folmann's work for Anniversary is different from that of Legend, as it has no underlying techno beats or electronic effects, and no underscores. Folmann uses more complex instrumentation and composition in his scoring, acquiring more woodwinds, instrument articulation, and ambience. Folmann leaves somewhat of a trademark in his Anniversary music by adding a significant amount of chimes throughout the score. Folmann composed the music in the style of an electronic orchestra. Some recognisable themes from the first game, composed by Nathan McCree, such as "Time to Run," "Puzzle Theme," and "Puzzle Theme II" have been recreated. The main theme can be described as a celebratory version of the original theme from Tomb Raider, as similar chord and instruments are used in the piece. The song starts off with a heavy crescendo of woodwinds and low strings playing the famous Tomb Raider melody, and then breaks off into an almost playful arc, featuring parts of the harp composition from the Tomb Raider theme. Pizzicato strings, cascading pianos and celeste, chimes, and glass instrumentation are prominent throughout this version, implying the fresh and modern twist that Folmann and Crystal Dynamics have placed in Anniversary.
The music supervisor of Underworld was Troels Brun Folmann, he also composed the main theme, while Colin O'Malley scored the bulk of the music. Underworld's music is purely orchestral in style.[21] There are pieces that do not loop, meaning they only play one time and are triggered on specific events. The score is made more of musical fragments, similar to the first five games of the Tomb Raider series with less constant music than in Legend.[21] The first seconds of the main theme are the well known four-notes of the original Tomb Raider main theme. The end of the it gets louder than the beginning by adding choirs and percussion. It then drops into a solo performance of the same four-notes reminiscent of the Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness main theme.
2010's Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light uses recycled musical cues from Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld by composers Troels Brun Folmann and Colin O'Malley.[17]
The composer for Tomb Raider remains unannounced [22] On 21 December 2010, a podcast was released via the exclusive Game Informer media coverage. As well as featuring an interview with the developers regarding selected publicized fan questions, it also included "a sneak peek at a track from the game itself" composed by Aleksandar Dimitrijevic.[23][24] The music heard introduces piano and guitar layers, purporting darker undertones. This literally and symbolically creates a distinct feel for Tomb Raider; made explicitly separate to the rest of the music of the Tomb Raider franchise which the guitar as an instrument is particularly foreign to. Most similar to music from Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, fully orchestrated strings follow, which are accompanied by percussion. The instruments develop into an inverted minor derivation of the classic Tomb Raider motif composed by Nathan McCree in 1996. However, on the eve of the "Turning Point" CGI Trailer, which debuted on 3 June 2011, Dimitrijevic expressed that "none of the music [he] did for the game or the trailer will be used in Tomb Raider or the upcoming Tomb Raider trailer." A new theme for the trailer was created, currently available as a ringtone from Tomb Raider's official website.
Game
Tomb Raider: Legend is the 7th entry in the core Tomb Raider franchise. Published by Eidos Interactive, this is the first game in the series not to be handled by British-based Core Design, developed instead by British-owned U.S. studio Crystal Dynamics.
The PS2, Windows, Xbox, and Xbox 360 versions were released in Europe on 7 April 2006 and in North America on 11 April 2006. The North American PSP version was released on 20 June 2006, the Nintendo GameCube, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS versions were released during November 2006 and the Mobile version was released in December 2006. The Windows version was released in 2006 and it was also made available for download to GameTap subscribers on 31 May 2007. In 2009, Eidos announced Tomb Raider Legend sold 4.5 million copies[1] making the game the most commercially successful game since Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. A version for the PlayStation 3 is included in The Tomb Raider Trilogy collection released in March 2011.
Story
The plot opens with a flashback sequence showing nine-year-old Lara Croft travelling with her mother, Amelia Croft. The private jet carrying them catches fire and crashes into the Himalayas, apparently leaving them as the only two survivors. After taking shelter in the ruins of an ancient Buddhist monastery, Lara discovers an ornate stone dais holding a sword while searching for firewood. She then activates the ancient artefact by touching the giant stones surrounding the artefact. Very soon after, her mother comes into the room as a giant circle is rising from the floor. When Amelia hears something in the light emitting from the circle, she suddenly gasps and pulls out the sword. The dais explodes and Lara watches in horror as her mother vanishes before her eyes.
Years after the plane crash, Lara, now an adult, travels to the cliffs of Bolivia after one of her friends, Anaya Imanu, mentions a stone dais located in the ruins of Tiwanaku, a pre-Incan civilisation. After climbing the cliffs, following a twisting rocky path, encountering a jaguar, and almost getting run over by a boulder, she runs into a group of mercenaries who are under orders to attack her at sight. After disposing of them, she proceeds to a temple encountering more mercenaries and dangerous native wildlife along the way. On the other side of the temple, she sees the dais mentioned in the call from Anaya and finds James Rutland, a rich American socialite and self-proclaimed adventurer. Rutland, holding an unusual sword fragment, mentions Amanda Evert, a friend of Lara's who supposedly died years before in an excavation that turned into a tragedy. He then orders his mercenaries to kill Lara. She overcomes them and reaches the dais, confirming that it was the same as the Himalayan one.
Lara then returns to her mansion. She then asks her friend and computer specialist, Zip to find out where Rutland will be going next. She plans to confront him later, and hopefully get a hold of that familiar sword fragment.
Lara meets Anaya in a village in Peru, and after yet another battle with Rutland's mercenaries, and a quite exciting motorcycle chase, they reach the tomb in Paraíso, where the tragedy befell them years ago. A flashback sequence shows Lara on an archaeological excavation with her university colleagues, where she and Amanda witness an unknown demonic entity kill the rest of the team. Lara and Amanda run from the unknown monstrous being before being trapped in a large room. The monster gets in and is just about to kill Lara when Amanda pulls a glowing stone, later known as the Wraith Stone from the wall, causing the creature to disappear into it. However, the room then starts to flood, causing several gates to close at the same time and when they try to escape, Amanda's shoe becomes trapped under a pile of rubble. Even though Lara reaches out to keep one of the gates from closing, she still watches desperately as Amanda is being buried alive from the falling cave. Lara still holds on to the door until she runs out of air, swimming away impotently after her failure to save Amanda from her death.
Back in the present, Lara goes down into the caves of the excavation site, the site that contains the tomb of the Queen of Tiwanaku and discovers the artefact she is seeking may be linked to Excalibur – part of the King Arthur legends – and that Amanda may have survived the cave-in and is looking for the sword, which reportedly had been broken into four fragments that are now spread across the globe. Lara, now realising what she is looking for, recalls that one piece is in the 'care' of Yakuza boss Shogo Takamoto, who had it stolen from Waseda University. Lara escapes the excavation site, and finds that the surface of the site is raving with mercenaries. she successfully kills them, and then travels back home to plan a trip to Japan.
When Lara arrives in Japan, she meets her friend in the Japanese media, Toru Nishimura at a party he is hosting. Lara plans to meet Takamoto to negotiate for his sword fragment. When Lara comes out of Nishimura's office, she finds the party guests scrambling to the elevator, and Takamoto's heavily tattooed Yakuza henchmen gesturing for them to go upstairs. Lara starts talking to Takamoto. Takamoto refuses to negotiate, claims he has no idea what she is talking about, and orders his goons to kill Lara. Lara disposes of the goons and chases Takamoto across the rooftops of Tokyo all the way to the roof of his penthouse apartment. Takamoto uses the power of the fragment to attack Lara but she kills him and recovers it. Lara is then picked up in a helicopter by Nishimura, who says Zip has found Rutland, deep in the Ghana rain forest.
Lara proceeds to Ghana and follows a path to a temple site her parents worked on before she was born, where she finds Rutland again, who is also in possession of a sword fragment. She follows him into an ancient temple hidden behind a waterfall. Halfway through the temple, Lara finds a locket. She remembers that her father had bought a new one for her mother because of a locket she lost. This must be the one that she had lost! When she reaches Rutland, he mentions an artefact called the Ghalali Key, believing that Lara's father found it and it is now in Lara's possession. Lara appears to have no knowledge of the key and this frustrates him. Rutland then attacks her using his sword fragment but Lara subdues him and grabs the second fragment. She then receives news from Zip and Alister that Amanda raided Croft Manor looking for the Ghalali Key only moments ago; that explains why she was unable to reach them during her climb. She offers to return to the Manor to see if they are alright, but they persuade her to try and beat Amanda to an abandoned lab in Kazakhstan, the apparent location of the third fragment.
When Lara parachutes into Kazakhstan, she finds soldiers struggling against Rutland's men. After she helps them, two soldiers tell her that their command centre has maps that might help her get to the lab. When Lara get's there, she finds satellite maps that show a train runs past the lab. Lara hurries to the train station, only to find the train leaving, with Amanda's mercenaries aboard. She jumps on a motorcycle, prepared to follow the train. She succeeds, but the train catches fire and explodes in the lab, making her the only survivor. But Amanda was already safe inside. After she has turned on the power from the lab's generator room, she discovers that Rutland's men have taken over the Soviet Union laboratory where experiments on a sword fragment were conducted by the KGB fifty years ago. But the experiment turned into tragedy with an unknown cause. Lara catches up with Amanda, who is still bitter about being left to die in Paraíso. Lara goes after her and finds her conducting experiments on the third sword fragment. Amanda is also using the glowing stone she pulled out of the wall in Paraíso to control the unknown entity that attacked them. Lara avoids the entity since it cannot be defeated yet, while she recovers the third sword fragment, and an eleventh century knight's shield which will supposedly lead her to the next sword fragment.
Following a map on the back of the shield (supposedly Lancelot's) also found in the Soviet lab, Lara's search brings her home to Great Britain. She discovers the real King Arthur's tomb hidden under a tacky and now-derelict King Arthur tourist attraction in Cornwall, along with the final sword fragment. Inside the tomb, Lara discovers that after Arthur's death, four of his knights – Lancelot, Percival, Galahad and Bors – took fragments of the sword to locations around the world (inspiring the myth of the Grail Quest), while the final fragment was left with Arthur by Bedivere in the hope of resurrecting the Once and Future King. After slaying a sea serpent that lives in the underground sub-terrainian lake surrounding the tomb, and a group of mercenaries that have followed her, Lara returns to her home, Croft Manor to figure out how to put the four sword fragments back together.
Lara realizes that the Ghalali Key was in fact a pendant given by her father to her mother to replace the locket that she had lost in Ghana. And her mother had it with her when their plane crashed in the Himalayas. Lara returns to the crash site in Nepal to find the Ghalali Key. After traversing high ledges to reach the ruins of the plane, she finds the key in the wreckage, then narrowly escapes as the plane topples over the edge of a cliff. Lara then proceeds, emotionally shaken, to the temple she and her mother found after the crash. She runs into Rutland's mercenaries, quickly defeats them and enters the temple, using the Ghalali Key to restore Excalibur back to its complete form. She hesitatingly tries to reactivate the dais but it merely collapses when she places the sword in the stone. Knowing where she must now go, Lara escapes the temple as it begins to collapse and departs.
Lara returns to the stone dais in Bolivia, where Amanda, Rutland and their mercenaries await. Lara uses Excalibur to kill the mercenaries and inadvertently kills Rutland as well. Amanda rushes over to him, and he dies in her arms. Lara apologises and tries to patch up the rift with Amanda, suggesting they use the sword together. Amanda angrily refuses and releases the entity again, this time merging with it to become more powerful. With the power of Excalibur, Lara defeats the Amanda-Hybrid creature, destroys the entity, and separates it from Amanda. Lara uses Excalibur on the dais to reopen the portal and discovers what happened to her mother. Lara realizes that the portal spans time and she is seeing her mother moments before she disappears. Amanda gets up and shouts at Lara to pull out the sword or the dais will explode. Lara's mother hears this through the portal, pulls out the sword, and the dais explodes. Amanda berates Lara for her actions: however, Lara is unconcerned, furious at the realisation that Amanda was responsible for the apparent causality loop that claimed Lara's mother. Lara fires a hail of bullets around Amanda and places her gun to Amanda's head, threatening to kill her if she doesn't explain. Amanda states that Lara's mother isn't dead, but in Avalon, the mythical resting place of King Arthur, where Amanda herself wanted to go. She hisses that she is wasting her breath, that Lara will never understand. Lara spares Amanda's life, but settles for knocking Amanda out with her pistol, snarling that "From this moment, your every breath is a gift from me". The game ends as Lara, determined to find answers, tells Zip and Alister they still have much work ahead of them. See also: Tomb Raider: Underworld or Tomb Raider: Anniversary.
Minimum System Requirements
Operating System: Windows 2000/XP
Number of Players: 1 Player
DirectX Version: v9.0c
System: Pentium III 1GHz or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB
Hard Drive Space: 9900 MB
Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium IV 2.0GHZ or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 256 MB
Hard Drive Space: 9900 MB
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