Page 21 - 01_Bafta ACADEMY_Lara Croft_ok

LARA’S THEME
TOBY GARD, THE MAN WHO LED THE TEAM BEHIND THE CROFT ORIGINAL, TELLS CERI THOMAS HOW HE HOPES TO MAKE LIGHTNING STRIKE TWICE
Iplayed Tomb Raider II a bit and then I got frus- trated because I thought it was too hard. I didn’t play three and I haven’t played four. I would play four, but I’m trying to, you know, get hold of a free copy,” laughs Toby Gard. “It just seems wrong for me to have to buy one somehow.”
He’s got a point. Without Toby Gard, say his peers on BAFTA’s Interactive Entertainment
Committee, there would be no Lara
Croft, no global industry based
around her exploits and nothing to fill that curvaceous, gun-toting hole in the lives of gameplayers every- where. You’d think the least the 26- year-old designer could expect would be a couple of free copies of the games every once in a while.
But then again, maybe it’s not sur- prising that he doesn’t. You see, he may have come up with the idea for the lovely Ms Croft back in the early Nineties and he may have (along with programmer Paul Douglas and the team) slaved away creating the first Tomb Raider, but he doesn’t own the character. No, Lara belongs to the massively successful software com- pany Eidos, whose development sub- sidiary, Core Design, Toby and Paul worked for at the time. Emphasis on “at the time” because the pair walked away from Core during the early days of work on TRII.
After disagreements about Lara’s development. Toby and Core’s MD Jeremy Smith agreed to part. Toby Gard took the £50,000 in royalties that Lara earned him in just two months (he doesn’t earn a penny from her now) and set off with Paul Douglas to found his own software company, Confounding Factor.
That was just over two years ago. Now the fledgling games house is flourishing, Paul and Toby bagged themselves BAFTA’s Berners-Lee Award For The Best Personal Contribution To The UK Interactive Industry (“a great thing, fabulous”) and Confounding Factor’s first game, Galleon - which they started work on it November 1997 - is finally nearing completion.
Photos opposite page from left to right: Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love; Velvet Goldmine; Julianne Moore in The End Of The Affair; a scene from The Wings Of The Dove
“It’s been a slow job because we started from scratch,” explains Gard. “I mean, we did with Tomb Raider too, but Galleon is such an incredibly more complicated beast. The sheer amount of work that’s been needed to make editors useable for this kind of complex game and just writing the system from scratch... it’s taken ages.”
Focus On Technology
Another sprawling adventure, Galleon follows the escapades of a pirate captain travelling from island to island, fighting mythical beasts with a variety of pointy weapons. There are echoes of Tomb Raider, but in most ways - the gender of the hero, the setting, the use of swords and knives instead of guns, to name but a few - seems like an attempt to be as different from Ms
Croft’s adventure as possible.
“It was a quite conscious decision
actually,” Gard agrees. “But then the whole point of Tomb Raider at the time was to do the opposite of what every- one else was doing too. If you look at it, it has an awful lot of opposites in it, deliberately opposite to what the mar- keting department thought of as safe bets. Having a female lead character for one thing. As the story goes we were told that it wouldn’t sell if it had a female character and that we should change it and stuff by the bosses.
For Tomb Raider, Gard drew on movies like Indiana Jones and the Hong Kong films of John Woo for inspiration. A lot of the same stuff feeds in again, but Galleon - which Gard describes as less a pirate game and more “a Ray Harryhausen kind of thing” - also draws on slightly older film material like The Crimson Pirate.
When the game finally comes out at Christmas, the weight of expectation will be huge. Everyone will have seen screen-
shots and read reviews and frankly be wondering whether Galleon will match the success of Tomb Raider. Everyone, that is, except Gard, himself.
“You can’t really worry about that kind of thing,” he shrugs. “Your goals still have to stay the same. You have to try and get as much quality as you can in there and try to beat what everybody else is doing by just trying to make everything as innovative as possible. That seems to me the best way to do it. If it fails, what can you do? At least you tried hard.” ■
Next issue Jeremy Smith lifts the curtain on Lara’s teenage years.
www.confounding-factor.com www.core-design.com www.eidos.co.uk Photo above main: Paul Douglas and Toby Gard receving BAFTA’s Berners-Lee Award
for The Best Personal Contribution To The UK Interactive Industry
19