Tomb Raider

An action-adventure by the British studio Core Design that began both the series and Lara Croft herself. The businesswoman Jacqueline Natla hires the archaeologist Lara to find an ancient artefact called the Scion, and the search takes her across four corners of the world: mountain caves in Peru, a medieval monastery in Greece, an Egyptian temple and the sunken Atlantis. The artefact turns out to be split into three parts, each with its own keeper, while the woman who hired her is the third of an ancient triumvirate, the one who broke the balance for the sake of power. The game runs in third person, and the hero does almost everything by the player's own hand: pulling up onto a ledge, leaping a gap, swimming underwater, throwing a lever. The levels are built out of a cubic grid devised from the structure of Egyptian tombs, and that grid stayed the series' signature for five years to come. Enemies are few, traps are many: spike pits, rolling boulders, swinging blades. The artist Toby Gard created Lara, drawing on comics and on adventure cinema; production took eighteen months and cost four hundred and forty thousand pounds. Nathan McCree wrote the music, working from English classical forms. The game came out on 25 October 1996 for the Sega Saturn, followed by the PlayStation and personal computers. Reception was enthusiastic: the three-dimensional graphics, the controls and the level design all drew praise, seven million copies sold on the PlayStation alone, and Lara Croft became one of the most recognisable faces in the whole of gaming culture.