Lara Croft - The Picture Encyclopedia of Cultural Images

Lara Croft - The Picture Encyclopedia of Cultural Images

Lara Croft is a fictional character created by Eidos Interactive. Originally, she was the heroine of Tomb Raider, the first TPS (third person shooter) PC game from the middle of the 90's.

Tomb Raider, telling the story of the archeologist-adventurer Lara Croft, was a revolutionary game, and became very popular very quickly. In seven years, the game had six episodes, but the Tomb Raider series started to decline after the second episode. By the sixth episode, Angel of Darkness, the once-great adventure game lost its entire fan base.

Lara Croft, on the other hand, lived on, unchallenged in popularity and untouched by time. In the last decade, Lara became a real celebrity from a mere CGI character. In the early years, Eidos paid attention to hire a new model for each Tomb Raider game, but the early years of the 21st century showed that Lara Croft is a CGI phenomenon, who is totally independent of the success of Tomb Raider. The feminine, sexy Indiana Jones grown out of the more and more boring game episodes and began a career of her own.

Dark Horse Comics devoted a comics series to the adventures of Lara Croft, basing the strips solely on the CG character (instead of the models she was originally based on). Two Tomb Raider movies were made starring Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001 and The Cradle of Life in 2003), but they did not grow up to the expectations, supposedly due to the weaknesses of the screenplay.

Today, there is silence around Lara Croft. The seventh episode of the Tomb Raider series is due to come out in April 2006, with a new and redesigned Lara Croft, and polished game play among the promises of Eidos Interactive. Whether it gives the boost to the long dead game series or not, it will hardly influence the fame and iconic position Lara Croft has achieved during the ten years of her existence.

Picture 1: Lara Croft