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The latest issue of Retro Gamer doubles down with a fantastic pair of Lara Croft features. A Tribute To Core Design looks at many of the developer’s greatest games, including Rick Dangerous and Thunderhawk with co-founder Jeremy Heath-Smith having particularly fond words for the original Tomb Raider. “The way we had the 3D engine, the graphics and level design had never been done before, so people were blown away by that,” he tells us. “Secondly, there was this female character bouncing around the screen, shooting dinosaurs and tigers, and everything she shouldn’t have been shooting! That was a recipe for success. It was never going to fail, looking back at it now.”
He continues to voice his thoughts on numerous other games in Core’s catalogue, including Chuck Rock “Chris Long was the game’s creator. I think he was modelling Chuck Rock on me, with the big belly, wandering around looking vague!”, Jaguar XJ220, “I managed to secure the licence from Jaguar. We then put competing cars in there: Ferraris and whatever. But we didn’t licence them. Those were the good old days – it was the Wild West!” and Tomb Raider 2, saying, “People wanted the series to evolve, but they didn’t realise how little time we had.”
Tomb Raider 2’s lead programmer Gavin Rummery continues the tales of Lara’s second adventure in a separate article, explaining the sheer pressure that came from making such an anticipated game, revealing that the team had around 10 months to create the sequel. Gavin also mentions numerous aspects of Tomb Raider II’s development, from the improvement of Lara’s base skills to the introduction of vehicles, “We initially planned on a motorbike, but needed something that wouldn’t look daft if you were crashing it into walls,” along with much more fascinating info.
In addition to celebrating Lara Croft, issue 145 also reviews the remake of Resident Evil 4, goes behind the scenes of HeroQuest, Sentinel Returns and Joust 2: Survival Of The Fittest, and celebrates the Amiga platformer Zool. We also look at the many strange peripherals created for Atari’s 2600 console, chat with the Xenotilt team about their supercharged sequel to Demon’s Tilt and find out how Firefly Studios created its long-running PC strategy series Stonghold.
