preliminary work on "tomb raider" commenced in 1993. the title was crafted by core design of derby, england, who took 18 months to develop it. the team consisted of six people, among them toby gard, who is credited with the creation of lara croft. the character went through several changes before core settled on the version she became famous for. initially, gard designed a male character to be the star of "tomb raider". as he began working on the design document, core was planning on giving players a choice of player characters, so he designed an early form of lara to be the female alternative. later realising that having two player characters would double the amount of work required for the cutscenes, gard cut the player characters back down by eliminating the male character, since he liked lara better. gard cited "virtua fighter" as an influence on this decision: "it became clear to me watching people play "virtua fighter", which was kind of the first big 3d-character console game, that even though there were only two female characters in the lineup, in almost every game i saw being played, someone was picking one of the two females."