Lara Croft and the Reinvention of Game Heroes

How Tomb Raider changed games, and why its leading lady still matters 15 years later.

By: Jeremy Parish
October 22, 2011

A woman sits on a boxy sofa in a hotel. It’s meant to be a classy Calcutta hotel from colonial days, but the decor is very Silicon Valley circa the mid-’90s: Simple polygonal shapes make up the columns and furniture, and harsh lighting breaks the room into clearly demarcated spaces of shadow and light. The camera rotates around the the center of the room as it zooms in and descends, bringing the checkered floor — the hallmark cliché of early 3D modeling — into clearer view.

A robotic man glides toward the divan and its occupant as the point of view comes around. He lobs something onto the coffee table before her: A magazine, which glides to its resting point with no sense of inertia. On the cover is a photo of the woman to whom the magazine has been presented, captured in the act of riddling a massive yeti with bullets.