This week marks the 20th anniversary of PlayStation in the UK. Over the next few days, we're reminiscing about our favourite games for Sony's first console.
Lara Croft ran for the student union at my university. She probably did at yours, too, if you went into higher education in the mid-1990s. For one term, she was everywhere: on the cover of Face, yes, but also photocopied and hand-cut and plastered all over the walls around campus, trampled underfoot by the payphones and hanging off the ceiling tiles in the corridor leading up to the bar. She was perfect for this kind of work, which probably explains why there were actually multiple Lara Crofts running for positions in the union that year, twin pistols driving home the message that she would get us all subsidised beer, even if she had to shoot a tiger or two to make that happen.
That Lara Croft is not quite the Lara Croft. It strikes me that in the first game, she is not quite the way she ended up later on - even before she was rebooted into Nolan territory with a weeping set of impalement wounds and a backstory after-work job at the local boozer. Lara Croft in the first game was angular, fierce and slightly sinister. She wore those round-lensed glasses everywhere as if she was in the background of a Belly video, and in advertising images she often had a rather frightening crocodile smile to go with them. Lara could always handle herself, but this first one really looked like she enjoyed the crueller aspects of raiding tombs and dispatching wildlife. This one suggested that Croft Manor might be full of illegal furs, and that she would sell any loot she found to the highest bidder, sourcing nick-knacks for terrifying men in awful regimes.
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