ONM Remembered – PSM Week, day 5
“So how did you feel when you were called into the office and told you were going to be making another Tomb Raider?” “Extremely pissed off.”
from PlayStation Magazine issue 62 (September 2000)
A few days after we first got this issue of PSM, a bunch of friends were coming over for the weekend, one of whom was a complete Tomb Raider fanatic. My brother attempted to hide the magazine from her, but to no avail – she was nose-deep in it for the entire stay. I can’t argue for sane human beings, but for Tomb Raider fans this must’ve been captivating reading! (totally unnecessary burn – no harm to ya, Em!)
It’s probably more of a tease than an interview, though. You learn a bit about the upcoming Chronicles, and the technical side is explored a little, but so many questions are answered with, “we can’t say.” It’s definitely an intriguing read, but I couldn’t help but wonder afterwards, “what exactly did I learn?”
It’s refreshing to hear that the developers weren’t too pleased at being dragged back to make another game, especially when they wanted to shake things up a little with their PS2 debut. It’s almost amazing how much stuff was going on in the Tomb Raider franchise at this point – they had the top seller games, big budget action movies were in development, a line of action figures on shelves, really terrible comic books (with comic book crossovers, no less!)…
Now, however, I can’t help but get the impression that nobody’s quite sure what to do with the franchise. Are modern audiences still interested in the whole 3D exploration thing? Tomb Raider Legends and its two sequels seem to sell pretty well, but the fact they came out on a yearly basis probably killed any attempt to stretch out hype for them (Underworld just showed up on shelves one day and I thought, “oh, where did that come from?). Then that Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light game seemed to suggest that we’d see Lara in other genres… but nothing came of that, I guess. Also, man, playing that game on my own is torture. I am not picking it up again until I can shanghai someone to co-op with me.
And those woes are just for the franchise – what about Lara herself? If I actually knew a thing about the series I’d probably warble a little about the big debacle surrounding the upcoming game before drowning in my own verbal incompetence, but Peter Paltridge of Platypus Comix spares me that indignity with this great page on how to treat the character properly.
