Not that she wasn’t an entertaining, well, er, rounded character.
“She was obviously fully-formed; she was a confident, wisecracking adventurer and it was something that people weren’t necessarily connected to 15 years in,” Gallagher explained, ”So we wanted to strip it down, give her a personality, make her feel more human, grounded and believable.”
How will Crystal Dynamics accomplish this?
“The thing we want to do is make her a more modern version of a young British girl versus somebody that was so, I hate to use the word ‘posh’, but in a sphere where she had a butler,” Gallagher described, ”She wasn’t that relatable – almost like the niece of the queen or something. You look at some of the actresses that are popular at this point, someone like a Keira Knightley, she’s just a very likeable English girl and that’s the kind of person that you’d imagine Lara to be like. We really wanted to make her a little bit closer to somebody you could know.”
The task is difficult, of course, because since her debut in Tomb Raider back in 1995, Lara Croft had become an iconic character. Gallagher compared her to Batman and James Bond and the team looked to Batman Begins and Casino Royale on how to reboot her.
”What they’ve done is essentially had turns in their franchises that made it feel modern,” he noted.
Tomb Raider is due to be released in March 2013 for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
