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[jsc]

Throughout this entire week, there will be new Tomb Raider Anniversary media, courtesy of www.gamesradar.com.

Here's Monday:

Monday's Media

Why did you decide to remake Tomb Raider?

We wanted to make something that was a tribute to a decade of support from all the fans, the Tomb Raider franchise and also as high a quality game as we could make on current-generation with the current existing technology that we had. With Tomb Raider Legend, we had a great game engine and a great team of people who worked on it so we wanted to sort of make a really solid good game, sort of a tribute - an homage to Tomb Raider 1.

How similar is Anniversary to Tomb Raider Legend?

It's similar in that Lara Croft is obviously the main character and she has all the moves that she had in Tomb Raider Legend and it uses the same engine technology that we used. But as far as the overall gameplay goes, it's definitely more evolved. We've given a lot of mechanics to use in addition to what she has in Legend and we've also sort of changed the way that we've designed the layout of the levels.

We were sort of criticised on Legend for being a little bit too linear. We really wanted to make a more branching path - a more explorative-type environment. And actually it worked out really well because Tomb Raider 1 as a game did have lots of really good interconnecting areas, paths that you would backtrack to and what-not, so it really sort of fits hand in hand with our goals for correcting most of the things we were criticised for on Legend and also to make a game that was true in form and structure to the original Tomb Raider.

The original game had a feeling of solitude - do you think the new version has a similar feeling?

Yeah it does - that's one of the things that we really noted from the original when we started out to make this remake of sorts, was the fact that the original one had a sense of solitude of Lara in these environments. It was just her for long periods of time with no music and just sort of her exploring and then she would come upon animals in her environment that she'd take out, there'd be another period of no combat, no music, just her ambient sound effects, exploration - we really wanted to recapture that mood and it's definitely become one of the things that we stuck to when we were redesigning the game.

Did you use any of the original game's source material or artwork?

Nothing is from the original Tomb Raider 1 - everything has been redone from the ground up. We drew inspiration for the locations and the environments and the gameplay and what-not from the original, but everything else has been completely redone from scratch from all the audio, sound effects, models, texturing, environments - everything is brand new.


And how about Lara's character? Over the different games she's changed a bit, personality-wise - what do you think she's like in this game?

I'd say her personality is closer to how she was in Legend but obviously Legend takes place in the future from where Lara was when she was in Tomb Raider one, so we wanted to go back and create a character with more depth and complexity to her than the original one would be able to portray in its cut-scenes, but still keep it true to where we thought Lara was a person at that point in her life.

Check back tomorrow for Part 2 as we compare the new game side-by-side with the original and Jason talks us through the new Lost Valley... and that famous T-Rex encounter. See you there.