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T he story so far: It’s the early Nineties and after returning from the E3 fair where he’d just seen the Playstation and the Saturn, Core Design founder Jeremy Heath-Smith tells his troops, “Listen guys, we need to ramp up what we’re doing for the future.” Designer Toby Gard, who has since left the company, stands up and says “I’ve got this idea about a game. It’s set in Egypt, and you’re into tombs and all that...” The result is Tomb Raider, featuring curva- ceous gun toting adventuress Lara Croft. Now read on...
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LaraGetsReal
Who would have thought when we first sat down with the idea for Tomb Raider that a game which has now sold 20 million copies would come from it?” And now, he might add, an $80 million Lara Croft movie which begins shooting at Pinewood next month.
“Sometimes I have to pinch myself,” says Core’s Heath-Smith, also now new head of global product for mother compa- ny Eidos Interactive (“I can’t remember the complete title... it’s something like that,” he laughs).
A self-described “industry dinosaur” (“I’ve been in the business for 20 years”), 38-year-old Heath-Smith has seen the British video game business grow from being a few blokes handcrafting games on tape for the ZX Spectrum into being a global industry with a turnover measure- able in telephone numbers. And long-dis- tance telephone numbers at that.
He started the Derby-based develop- ment house Core Design in 1988 and remained a director of the company after selling it to games producer CentreGold in 1994. With a seat on the Eidos board, he continued to manage Core after CentreGold’s purchase by Eidos in 1996.
“Eidos were a very small listed compa- ny at that time and were looking to expand. They saw CentreGold in a whole lot of hurt and Eidos bought them. And the jewel in the crown of CentreGold was Core Design,” he explains. “Eidos had very little of their own home-grown product. Core was their first real development arm.”
But by the time that Eidos - currently enduring a rollercoaster ride on the Stock Exchange - entered the picture, Core was already well at work on what was to become their most famous piece of home-grown product, Tomb Raider and its heroine, the busty Ms Lara Croft.
Even after four Tomb Raider games, an outing on the Colour GameBoy and a lucrative career fronting Lucozade (a new ad campaign is set to air in May), Lara shows no signs of slowing down. The ending to Tomb Raider IV: The Final Revelation may be a cliffhanger which
sees her buried under tons of tumbling rocks in a collapsing cave (“We’ve actually had let- ters from people in dis- gust saying what are you doing, you’ve killed her off, what the hell’s going on?” says Heath- Smith), but fans should- n’t worry. Ms Croft isn’t hanging up her shorts just yet. Core are already hard at work on the next game.
And then, of course,
there’s that film - live
action as opposed to car-
toon, directed by Simon
West (Con Air, The
General’s Daughter). “We
did consider going the
Toy Story route. The rea-
son that we didn’t was
timing. It just takes so
bloody long,” Heath-Smith laughs.
Heath-Smith is clearly thrilled at the casting: “She is a complete Tomb Raider fanatic and turned round and said that she was honoured to be asked to play the role of Lara knowing that she’s such an icon. She’s in with a trainer now get- ting the moves and all that down.”
“We’re pretty actively involved in the movie. The reason we went with Paramount was firstly their vision of what they wanted to do with the Tomb Raider franchise and secondly that we were given an executive producer credit on the movie. So we have veto over the script, the actress, everything...
But Core and Eidos aren’t just about Tomb Raider. The company launches over 20 new games a year and Heath- Smith hints that one of next year’s crop will be something really special.
“At Core Design we’ve been working for a while on next gen- eration software. And we have an amazing game which has been in development for the best part of two years. Two guys from the team came to me and ran this concept past me to
which I said ‘What are you guys smoking? You must be mad.’
“And they said ‘No, no, no. We know we can make it work. We know that this stuff is coming. You’ve just got to trust us’. So they hot-wired a couple of PCs together to turn them into something with a little bit of horsepower and off they went to make a demo of it.”
As to when we’ll get to see this mys- tery game, Core are waiting on the arrival of the all-singing all-dancing PlayStation 2 (capable of playing DVDs as well as games) before they launch it.
Heath-Smith, tight-lipped about specifics, can hardly wait. “It’s very special. It’s a character-based game, but it’s far, far from being another Tomb Raider. The game play and the type of game is completely original. They said they wanted to create a kind of interactive cartoon movie and they’ve achieved that. We are as excit- ed about this as we were when Tomb Raider first happened.” ■ Ceri Thomas
www.eidos.co.uk
The big question has been: who is going to play the very live-
action Ms Croft herself? The
victor is Oscar-winner Angelina
Jolie (Girl, Interrupted) in a race which has seen everyone from Elizabeth Hurley to Sandra Bullock, not to mention the odd Spice Girl, tipped for the role.
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Photo above main: Core Design founder Jeremy Heath-Smith
inset: Oscar-winner Angelina Jolie is set to play Lara Croft in the movie Tomb Raider