The Making Of Tomb Raider

Tomb It
May Concern

The Making Of
Tomb Raider
by Daryl Baxter
White Owl Publishing
ISBN: 9781399002059

Lara Croft was a magical name for me when I was a certain age. I’d not been in my working life long but needed to get myself a new Apple computer for home use to keep up with the world of graphic design and, naturally, I wanted some games to play on it evenings. I think the first of these new style 3D games that I loved were Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem and Quake. I’d not been that aware of Tomb Raider the year it came out but, somewhere in the middle of playing that lot, I grabbed myself a copy of Tomb Raider 2 and, yeah, I remember hours of playing Lara through what could sometimes be frustrating and difficult levels. I remember the joy of driving and jumping a speed boat through some windows off the canals of Venice and the frustrations of getting the timing wrong and dying time after time. The amount of obscenities thrown at Lara as I watched her fall from somewhere high and break her neck was almost a constant thing at times.

This new book by Daryl Baxter, The Making Of Tomb Raider, is a look at the creation and development of the first two games, Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider 2. It would be fair to say the book isn’t what I first expected it to be when I saw it go up for pre-order at the tail end of 2021. I was expecting loads of illustrations and design sketches from the pre-production. Instead, the majority of the illustrations in the book are screen grabs from the games and the occasional shot of one or more of the design teams (and some of those seem way less quality than a standard print resolution would perhaps dictate). The reason for this, I suspect, is because it’s labelled up as an ‘unofficial’ look at the franchise. That will always have the tremendous disadvantages in terms of illustrations and photographic material available for a publication, not to mention restricting the pool of people that can be tapped for the research.

However, the big plus side for an unofficial edition... and the reason why I like them so much... is that they are often far less inhibited about getting to the truth of the matter and will go to places which would be ‘out of bounds’ for an authorised edition. So, yeah, always swings and roundabouts with some of these kinds of accounts of a period of time but, I’d rather something truthful and informative than something which just looks nice for the sake of it.

That being said, I’m not sure how I stand on this particular book... which has a cover which endorses my thoughts on an unauthorised edition by highlighting (or technically lowlighting in this case) the word THE in red letters. So, yeah, this is not just The Making Of Tomb Raider, it’s THE Making Of Tomb Raider... according to the publishers at least.

Well, it’s got its good points in terms of the fact that it certainly tells a credible version of the development time spent making both the initial game and the follow up... which lost its two pioneering creators, who were having creative differences for the idea of a sequel and who left before the incredible sales of the first game could make their fortunes (as it did for many of the people on the team for the first two games). It does this by using huge amounts of interview segments with various creators culled by the author from various sources. And I certainly admire Daryl Baxter for pulling off the incredible task of choosing and organising the many quotes used to drag the volume together... it must have been a pretty big task.

My main issue with the book is that it’s not particularly well written or inspiring in terms of the glue holding these excerpts together, which is to be fair, the smaller component of the book but, you know, it could be better. For example, apart from various typos, one repetitive sentence starts with the words “Upon his return...” and then finishes up with “on his return.” You certainly don’t need to qualify this stuff twice within the same sentence and there were a few incidences of this happening, not just in what should have been the main body of the book but also in the many interview sections. It’s quite possible of course, even probable, that the interviewees themselves were making these errors in their responses but, you know... anyone heard of editing?

Another thing which surprised me is that sometimes the writer will plug the exact same lengthy paragraph into the text as illustration of a point two pages running. At one point, this is done with two different sets of paragraphs within a couple of pages of each other. So this is either a testament to the fact that the context of their placement wasn’t actually needed or, well, that a final proofread might have been in order before publication (I’ve no idea what the deadlines were on this but I assume getting it out for a Christmas market may well have been the priority here).

So, yeah, that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one. The Making Of Tomb Raider certainly does what it says on the tin in terms of the content of the book (or for the first two games at least). I came away with some sense of just how hard these things were to put together and the mental toll it took on the very young looking teams that made them. And also, a little insight into Nathan McCree’s music was also welcome. Plus little things I didn’t know such as Ian Livingstone, the guy who used to write some of the earlier remembered (but definitely not the first) ‘choose your own adventure’ books being the guy who ran Eidos, who bought out Core Design specifically because he saw the potential of the first Tomb Raider game as it was being developed.

Overall, though, I would say it feels like this is the book you read while waiting for something more robust and spectacular to be released, to give a more detailed overview of the entire lifespan of Lara Croft, in her various forms to date. So, if Tomb Raider was a big deal for you in the mid-nineties, as it was for me, then you’ll probably get something out of this tome. For less die hard readers I’d say, maybe have a mull over spending the cash on this one first.