Format: PS2
Release: 2003
Publisher: Eidos
Developer: Core Design
The stress fractures were clear a long time before Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness was released. In May 2002 at the E3 conference in LA, Eidos showcased ‘playable’ levels of the game which were little more than short animation demos. For a game due out ‘imminently’, it appeared woefully incomplete.
Fast forward to Sony’s PlayStation Experience at Earl’s Court in September the same year and the public was able to see the next-gen Lara for the first time. Able to play the opening level – set in a Parisian backstreet – the disappointment at Lara’s clumsy negotiation of a dumpster followed by some awkward ladder climbing was tangible. “We spent an inordinate amount of time on the animation of Lara and designed the controls around the animation instead of designing the animation around the controls,” explained Jeremy Heath-Smith, Core Design’s co-founder, shortly after the game was released.
“We got wrapped up in that whole beautiful big animation experience. I don’t know if we ever would have understood what we got wrong with the animation until the game was out. We could have easily used another two or three months. We could have used another year.”
Significantly, Heath-Smith had to present the game at a buyers’ conference several months before the game was released. It was an agonising experience both for the man himself and those attending. "It was the worst opening level to any game,” an anonymous source tells Edge. “I had to sit through Jeremy Heath-Smith cursing through it while attempting to get Lara on top of a bin. It was unusual behaviour at a buyers’ conference to say the least.”
But this is the end of the story; its beginning is equally gruesome. By all accounts, The Angel Of Darkness was in trouble from the very start. A new team was assigned to the next-gen Lara game while the experienced Tomb Raider stalwarts continued to plug away at Tomb Raider: Chronicles, the last of Eidos’ annual Tomb Raider hits on PS1.After completing Chronicles at the back end of 2000, lead programmer Richard Morton moved over to Angel Of Darkness, and he was shocked at what he found. “The tech had to be completely rewritten from PS1 to PS2 and scrapped again when the Chronicles team started on the game,” he explains. “We lost the first year due to Chronicles and only had the basic story, character models and concept art.”
It's a classic tale of hubris, with Core’s senior management boasting of innovative features to the press while the artists and programmers tried to keep up with the grand design. “The phrase ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ springs to mind,” continues Morton. “This, coupled with the management trying to cram every new game idea into the design – stealth from Metal Gear, character interaction from Shenmue, upgradeable attributes from RPG games, and so on. Instead of letting the team make a really great Tomb Raider game.”
Early reports also hinted at an epic storyline spanning several games, or episodic content depending on how effusive Core’s management were feeling when they spoke to the press. Charged with outlining this vision was a fresh-faced writer, Murti Schofield: “The Tomb Raider games were in a rut and needed fresh thought and direction. Would I be interested in coming over to Derby and doing a pitch? Would I! I was determined to make the most of this opportunity to pack in as much of my own thematic obsessions as I could get away with and still have it work effectively in a gaming situation.
"Obscure references were dropped in everywhere, in names, as locations, as clues. Background histories of characters were chronicled to depths that gave me intense satisfaction as a writer even though I knew only the tip of these biographical icebergs would ever show in the game.”
Core was keen not just to give Lara’s first PS2 outing a dark mood but also set it in contemporary locations. “By December of 2000 the bulk of the story, establishing scenes and supporting concepts were in place and documented,” recalls Schofield. “I would say the main skeleton of 90 to 95 per cent of what we finally used was there. Then there were changes throughout the next two-and-a-bit years right up until the last possible minute but the infrastructure of the story, as it now exists in the finished game, was there.”