Co-creator Toby Gard of Tomb Raider and Lady Croft has said he is "definitely, absolutely" still interested in developing triple-A projects, but the timing was right to leave.
The "reality" of development is that the "control of the characters" doesn't belong to one individual, they have "a life of their own" in a team. His ideas tend to be "rather expansive".
"It's always difficult doing that but you can get stuck doing the same thing over and over," Gard told GamesIndustry.biz, referring to his decision to leave Lady Croft behind.
"The only real way that I can really effect Lara Croft is to be in charge of a project. More and more as I was working at Crystal, especially on Underworld where I was just doing cinematic work, the reality is the control of the characters is in the hands of the creative directors and the publisher," he noted.
"I think it's just something you have to learn to realise that there's no one person really in charge of what goes on with a character and they have a life of their own in the hands of the team."
He confesses his new videogame designs somewhat outweigh the reality of his given situation.
"I guess the tough thing for me is that when I think about the types of games I like to play and the games I like to make they tend to be the rather expansive ones rather than the smaller ones," he continued. "So although I'm developing in my brain the project I'd like, I don't actually have a team at the moment to create it."
Tomb Raider gave rise to one of the most iconic videogame characters ever created, and helped explode the popularity of the action adventure genre. The original Tomb Raider was released back in 1996, and showed us what gun-toting girls could do.
The original Tomb Raider 
