Tomb Raider (1996 video game)
Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Core Design and published by Eidos Interactive. It was released in 1996 for Sega Saturn, PlayStation and MS-DOS. "Tomb Raider" was released for N-Gage devices in 2003, and for the PlayStation Network in North America in August 2009, and in Europe in August 2010. "Tomb Raider" follows the exploits of Lara Croft, an English archaeologist in search of ancient treasures.
Tomb Raider III
Actual development on "Tomb Raider III" began in December 1997. At the time, lead programmer Martin Gibbins, who previously worked on the 1996 title "Blam! Machinehead", was tweaking the old "Tomb Raider" engine to build a new game with a stronger emphasis on action and shooting. The new team considered Gibbins' additional work to the engine valuable and decided to use it as a basis for the 1998 "Tomb Raider" game, which was originally intended to be a spin-off called "The Further Adventures of Lara Croft". However, as development progressed and more ideas were introduced, the company considered the number of changes enough to justify a complete sequel. The PlayStation served as the lead platform for the game, while the Microsoft Windows release is simply a conversion with slightly improved visuals. As a result, everything was built around the capabilities of the PlayStation hardware, with 16-bit palettes and high-resolution graphics, as opposed to the 8-bit palettes and "pseudo medium" resolution of the earlier titles, Core Design CEO Jeremy Smith explained.