![]() "Everyone just chucked stuff in the game as fast as they could and somehow we made it all work," he says. They didn't bother with design documents or any real planning, either, notes Nathan McCree, composer and sound designer at Core from 1993 to 1997 (and freelance composer on Tomb Raider III). All the teams were in small little rooms, so we couldn't have fitted more than six people in our room." "It was a big Victorian house… and had been converted into offices. "I've heard it described as a mansion," says Rummery. The atmosphere within the studio seemed more akin to a collective of bedroom coders than a professional company with offices, and the building that they worked in only added to the feeling. "They'd had enough success Jeremy knew if he got these crazy guys and wound us up and let us go. The Smith brothers "just kind of left us to it," he says. Gavin Rummery, programmer at Core from 1995 and studio manager after the Smith brothers left, has similar recollections. "To me, it always really felt more like a place where talented people would come together to show off their ideas and skills in video-game development than an actual ‘work office.'" "We had a lot of freedom," notes Roberto Cirillo, an artist who worked at Core from 1992 to the 2003 split (and one of the few staff who never worked on a Tomb Raider game). Eidos then swooped in with a £17.6 million takeover of CentreGold in April 1996, six months before the release of the original Tomb Raider.Ĭore's organizational structure through all this time was fairly lax, and neither ownership change had any effect on the company's autonomy. Core soon established itself as one of the stronger producers of Amiga and Sega CD games, which was no doubt a factor in its 1994 acquisition by CentreGold. The studio was granted a license to develop Sega Genesis games before any other British developer, and in 1990 it set up its own publishing and distribution business. How, in the space of just a few years, could a games development studio go from untouchable at the top of the world to bleeding out in the gutter? Where did it all go wrong for Core Design? AdvertisementĪH-3 Thunderstrike, also known as Thunderhawk, was raved about in 1992 to 1993 on Sega CD, Amiga, and DOS. ![]() ![]() Eidos sent in its own people as interim management, and many wondered if the studio-its reputation in tatters and its identity lost-would live through another year.īut let's backpedal. The British heroine was packed off to Legacy of Kain developer Crystal Dynamics in the US, where she has arguably flourished without the pressures of annualized sequels.Ĭore soon split in two, with Heath-Smith and his brother Adrian-who was second in command-taking around 30 employees with them to new venture Circle Studio. By the end of 2003-the year that the disastrous, hellishly developed sixth Tomb Raider in seven years was forced out unfinished-they were laughing stocks of the entertainment world.Įmbarrassed at losing face, Eidos put Core Design co-founder and CEO Jeremy Heath-Smith on gardening leave (suspension with pay) for a year and yanked the Tomb Raider franchise from its home. But the studio's creative origins clashed with the publicly traded Eidos' year-in, year-out reliance on the Tomb Raider brand as a money-making machine. Tomb Raider developer Core Design appeared untouchable with Lara in tow, and it was thanks to the franchise's immense success that publisher Eidos had just been named the fastest-growing company in the world at the 1998 World Economic Forum. And she later found her way onto the silver screen, portrayed by Angelina Jolie in two blockbuster films. Croft quickly became an icon not just of the burgeoning, maturing games industry, but also of popular culture. She was on the covers of magazines such as Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Time. Fresh from two gang-busting chart toppers that eventually amassed roughly 15 million in sales between them, Core Design and its parent company Eidos prepared to release a third adventure for starlet Lara Croft-a video game character so immensely and immediately popular that she was a household name within a year of her introduction. The house that built Tomb Raider sat on top of the world in 1998. Like the Tomb Raider franchise itself, the story of developer Core Design has its share of ups and downs.
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