Tomb Raider was introduced to the world way back 1996, featuring a female protagonist in a male-dominated video game industry. 20 years after, developers talk about how making the game had its ups and downs. Goes to show that making a game is not fun all the time, just mostly.
The team who created the first Tomb Raider titles have revealed about the highs and lows during its development period. In a dialogue with Eurogamer, the developers openly talk about their experiences now, probably because it was 20 years ago and it's completely fine to be frank about it. People from Core Design, Before Eidos discontinued it 10 years ago, spoke about how it is like to work on a franchise that became famous in a short period of time.
Level designer Neal Boyd looked back on the eight excruciating months working with Tomb Raider 2, recalling staff getting sleep under their desks and then waking up to make coffee, then back to work. Boyd even expressed that to wake up, you have to splash your face with water. Working non-stop 7 days a week takes away your time to wash up and it was very hard.
"There was a deadline to meet, and a huge amount of work to do," Boyd adds. Although they already had timelines set and everything to alleviate the dev process, publishers and even players put them in a pressure to a level that it sometimes gets to them. To develop the sequel as soon as they can, Core Design had to work round-the-clock, even on weekends.
The devs felt that they were working all the time for months, as expressed by Gavin Rummery. He says that it was horrible and all those times he has thought of nothing else but finishing the game. It even came to a point that he'd ignore his mom's calls because he knows that her chat would take hours. It seemed that he wasn't doing anything except work. More horrible experiences can be read from Gamasutra.com's summary of the interview.
Plot Twist
Despite all the hardships stated on the interview, Toby Gard - Lara Croft's creator, said that all seemed to be worth it when the game finally got rolled out. Expressing that although it was "brutal and horrible", the rewards came pouring in after the release. The devs took six weeks off after the painstaking development process, not to mention they had tons of money to buy everything they'd wish for.
