Interviews// Crystal Dynamics Eric Lindstrom Talks Tomb Raider

SPOnG: You say it’s more about the experience?

Eric Lindstrom: Yeah, it’s an emotional immersion that we thought was really at the heart of it, so that’s what we’ve tried to do.


SPOnG: With the success of Tomb Raider Legend there must have been a lot of pressure to improve and expand upon in Underworld.

Eric Lindstrom: There’s always pressure, in every game you make. In Tomb Raider especially, there’s a kind of psychological pressure for really doing right by Lara Croft and the series. There were so many ideas that we wanted to do and only a certain amount of what we could do… with Legend, it was more about picking and choosing and focusing, not about, 'What can we come up with?' The important thing for people to remember is that even though we did a really nice job I think of porting Legend on the 360, the game wasn’t built for the next generation at all.

Underworld is made for this current gen, high definition series of consoles, through and through. It really is a huge leap in magnitude from what people saw in Legend. So, the kinds of lush environments are really easy to see in the first five seconds, but there are also a lot of different game-play elements that wouldn’t have been possible in any previous game.

To be able to bring the kind of open environment that we couldn’t do in Legend with the kind of fidelity that we can now bring to bear on these high definition platforms… We had all the pieces we needed from stuff that we couldn’t fit in Legend, and we’ve just had the opportunity to bring it all together in Underworld.


SPOnG: One of the things that interested me about the way Crystal Dynamics approached the Tomb Raider franchise was the fact that you guys were working on Tomb Raider Legend and Anniversary at around the same time. Would you say that, in your quest to try and find what was right with the Lara Croft franchise, you used Anniversary as an experiment to try and rediscover the roots of the original game and apply that to future projects?

Eric Lindstrom: I’d say that was a pretty close statement, actually. Anniversary and Underworld started almost at the same time, towards the end of Legend's development. Because of the nature of what
Anniversary was, it was quicker to market.

But we had already figured out a lot of what we thought was successful and what wasn’t by that point, so it wasn’t that Anniversary was a series of tests per se, more that we felt that we had already made the tests with Legend and Anniversary was our re-write. So, we implemented a lot of these things, went back to a lot of the exploration-heavy side of things.

We were really happy with how that all came together and the way the fans responded to it because we were really worried that we were tampering with something people had very strong memories of. We were especially aware of how people were remembering it in a context that was no longer true. It was a whole different world back in 1996 so to be able to modernise the game-play but still have those kind of feelings was daunting and we were really pleased with the way people responded to it.

I was working with Jason Botta as both Anniversary and Underworld went forward, because some of the features that we were thinking about for Underworld ended up going into Anniversary. This was because the ideas and technology and everything was there and available, and we thought 'Let’s do as much cool stuff as we can up front and keep an eye on it, see how successful it is.' So, in a way you could say that Anniversary was validating those feelings that we had, but not in an experimental way. It was more in a “we think we got it right, let’s see” kind of way.