I’ve posted the corollary to yesterday’s Tomb Raider article, which you may read if you like.
Now that I’ve had the printed version of GSQ8 in hand for a little while, I’ve had some time to examine and digest and analyze it. It’s probably the book I’m most proud of so far, because it’s massive and packed with lots of great articles. It’s also probably the most disappointing to me personally, though, because in retrospect I can see where I bit off too much with it and ended up cutting corners.
Even though it’s not the biggest book we’ve done (coming in four pages shy of GSQ5), it was far and away the most involved; the articles are much lengthier, and I didn’t template the design, so the production process took vastly more time and energy than any previous book. I ended up burning out at the end and not giving it the extra attention that would have pushed it to perfection. So… I’m sorry about that. I can see things on every page that should have been different, whether little typos or big blobs of screenshot art that became too abstract in black and white and interfere with legibility. Sorry! I’ll try to do better next time.
So true. I never played Tomb Raider on PlayStation, only on Saturn. And since I never played another game in the series, it remains associated with Sega consoles in my mind.
You’re always going to be more critical of your own work. I think the book is excellent.
I’ll second that.
Can’t wait to get my copy in, it’s on the way. :)
Those Tomb Raider screenshots sure bring back memories. The first Tomb Raider was the first game I bought with my own money. Even now, those vistas look really cool and the water looks great and I’m vividly remembering the atmosphere and the puzzles. Lara herself has not held up well at all, if she ever was thought to look good in the first place.
Great issue. The Square localization article was a standout, and I was glad to also see it on 1UP. As usual, there were a bunch of games I’d only heard of tangentially that I’m interested in checking out now.
Any insight into how it ended up on the Playstation in the first place? Eidos seemed primarily a PC publisher, with Deus Ex, Thief, and Hitman getting their starts there, and I associate the original Tomb Raider with the PC for the most part (it was one of the first games to use 3D acceleration, also). Not only that, but they and Core were UK based, which seemed all the more unusual. The only other big UK developer I can think of that worked with the Playstation was Bullfrog, and again, they were porting their PC stuff.
Tomb Raider predated Deus Ex, etc by a number of years. I think Eidos knew they had a hot property on their hands and wanted to get it into as many hands as possible.
I have a vague recollection of the Saturn version actually coming first…either it was lead the console platform or was originally intended to be a Saturn exclusive or something like that. But even at that point the PlayStation was viewed as a far more popular console, I think.
The saturn was definitely the lead console. Core had a good working relationship with Sega as well since the Mega CD days, they were one of the few companies that actually made games that played to the Sega CD’s advantages and used scaling and rotation. The reason the first Tomb Raiders architecture is built out of squares is because the saturn used quads instead of polygons. Thus multiplatform ports were easier with one quad being replaced with two triangles on the PS1 and PC. It wasn’t until the PS1 exclusive Tomb Raider 2 that they started using triangles in their architecture. Tomb Raider was also one of the few games that had it’s release date pushed to any earlier date, well on the PC anyway. I remember reading it in the UK PC gamer.