First was Nathalie Cook, previously a live-action Snow White who’d been employed by Disney and subsequently recruited by Eidos to attend promotional events. There’d been ‘human’ versions of Lara from the off. We've matured as an industry, and Lara Croft the character looks a lot more realistic now and a lot more believable, but back then, things were different.” The human touch. “But we were living in the times of lad magazines. “You look back at it and you might think it was too much focused on the sexuality of Lara Croft,” British gaming legend Ian Livingstone and then Eidos bigwig says in hindsight. 'Bigger than Pammy, wiser than Yoda' roared the strap. Now as much a symbol of Britpop and Cool Britannia as Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit, that June Lara appeared on the cover of The Face. With the birth of the slick, cool Sony PlayStation in 1994, for the first time video games were aggressively pitched to adults, and Lara was only getting bigger. The Nineties were heady times for video games – the first Tomb Raider game was launched by flying journalists from around the world to play it at the foot of the pyramids in Egypt. Core offered their employees a royalty-based contract – but royalties were only redeemable if employees remained at the company. Eidos, Core’s parent company, had budgeted for 100,000 units to be sold. Toby Gard’s decision to walk away from Lara and Tomb Raider, would cost him a fortune. “She’ll become a supermodel, like Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista”. “The digital Lara is going to sign a modelling contract with a big agency,” said Eidos spokesperson Cindy Church. In a 1998 New York Times article, writer David Barboza talked of Eidos and Core Design receiving flowers, Christmas gifts, even wedding proposals, from young boys and men. Frustrated by the direction in which his creation was being pulled, Gard quit the company. He continued: 'It was never the intention to create some kind of Page Three girl to star in Tomb Raider'. “ female character who was a heroine, you know: cool, collected, in control, that sort of thing'. Rumour has it the company asked Gard to include a code that would allow you to play as Lara, naked. Elsewhere, Core wanted to exploit the character's sex appeal. Her long braid remained in the transition from Laura to Lara, but her nationality didn’t. In the beginning, though, she was simply Laura Cruz. Others have cited the popstar Neneh Cherry as an inspiration. It’s been said she was based on the Essex-born developer’s younger sister, Frances. It’s widely accepted that the credit for Lara’s creation lies with the game designer Toby Gard, who created the character during his tenure at the Derby-based videogame developer Core Design.

Glory of the tomb raider