One of the original creators of Tomb Raider has revealed that Lara Croft was supposed to have a very different look in Japan, with a complete anime redesign.
Tomb Raider is one of the roughly quadrillion video game franchises celebrating a major anniversary this year, with the original game due to turn 30 this October.
To celebrate, a ‘reimagining’ of the first game, called Tomb Raider: Legacy Of Atlantis, is scheduled for sometime this year, but there’s likely to be a variety of events and collaborations – especially with the new Amazon TV show coming up, starring Sophie Turner as Lara Croft.
Ahead of all that though, Paul Douglas – the programmer and co-creator of the original game – has offered an interesting revelation: that Lara was almost redesigned with anime style look, at the behest of the game’s Japanese publisher.
In the West, Tomb Raider was published by British company Eidos Interactive (which was subsequently bought by Square Enix, which then sold the Tomb Raider rights to Embracer Group), but in Japan it was published by the now defunct Victor Interactive Software.
Tomb Raider has never been especially big in Japan, compared to any other Western franchise of the time, but in a post on Bluesky, Douglas revealed that Victor Interactive wanted to change Lara’s in-game appearance to ‘appeal more to a Japanese audience’.
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This included anime style eyes and a larger head, with the publisher faxing Douglas and designer Toby Gard some suggested art designs and a mocked up in-game screenshot. Although Douglas doesn’t know who specifically created those.
As drastically different as the designs are, at the time it wasn’t unusual for Western companies to tweak designs, particularly of main characters, given that most Western-made games went all but ignored by Japanese gamers.
The most famous example of this is probably Clank, from the Ratchet & Clank series, who is usually designed to look quite different in Japan. Crash Bandicoot almost always has a different design for the box art in Japan – because he was originally deemed too scary looking – but his in-game character model is not usually altered.
According to Douglas, Gard didn’t want to make the changes to Lara, even just for Japan, but did alter the manual and guide for Victor Interactive.
Douglas and Gard worked at British developer Core Design, which was shut down a few years after the release of the disastrous Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness on PlayStation 2.
At least as recently as 2021, Gard was still in the games industry and continued to have a minor involvement with the Tomb Raider franchise up until the first entry in the reboot trilogy. Douglas only ever worked on the first game, although he did collaborate with Gard on 2004’s Galleon.
If you follow Douglas’ Bluesky account, he often posts reminiscences and bits of trivia from the original game, including what seems to be the suggestion that the dinosaur in the original game was an Allosaurus and not a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which seems almost as shocking as the anime revelation.
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