Tomb Raider turns a game character into a magazine cover star

What happened

The design put the camera behind the character rather than in her eyes, which made climbing, jumping and hanging from ledges legible in a way first-person movement could not manage. Levels were enormous and largely empty of other people, built as puzzles of geometry and timing inside flooded cisterns, Egyptian tombs and Peruvian caves. Combat existed, but the game was mostly about reading a space and working out how to cross it, a form the studio in Derby assembled from parts nobody had combined that way before.

Lara Croft then did something no game character had done at that scale. She appeared on the covers of style and music magazines, in television advertising for products unrelated to games, and on the video screens of a stadium tour. Publishers had spent years trying to manufacture mascots; this one was adopted by a media culture that had previously filed games under children's entertainment. The design of the character, and the way she was marketed, also drew sustained criticism that has followed the series through every reinvention.

Commercially it ranked among the largest hits of the period, and it ran on both the new disc consoles and personal computers, which was still unusual for a game of that ambition. Sequels arrived annually for years, quality slid, and the series was eventually rebuilt twice. Films followed, then a long public argument about who the character should be. The property has now outlived both its original studio and its original publisher, which says something about the strength of the initial idea.

The world at the time

Late 1996 was a scramble to work out what games should look like on the new disc-based hardware, and most of the answers were racers, fighters and shooters. Outside the industry, games were still covered mainly as a children's toy story or a moral panic, and no game character had a public profile extending far beyond the specialist press.

What it changed

Third-person action-adventure became one of the medium's dominant commercial forms. The marketing approach, treating a character as a licensable personality with a life outside the software, was copied widely and remains standard practice. The arguments the character provoked about how women are drawn and written in games became a permanent part of criticism, and the series has been redesigned repeatedly in response.