20 Years of Tomb Raider (Book)

LARA1One of video game’s most popular female icons turns 20 this year.  Makes me feel old, how about you?  To celebrate, Prima Games has put together an awesome hardcover book with more than 300 pages featuring the Tomb Raider games, the fans, and Lara Croft herself.

Before even opening the book you can tell it’s very nice.  It’s huge, with a hard cover and would make a great ‘coffee table book.’  Do people even have coffee table books anymore, or am I just showing my age again?  Here’s a larger shot of the front of the book.

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The first few pages of the book talk about the folks who originally came up with Tomb Raider: game makers Core.  They have a history of the company, how they came in contact with Eidos (the original publishers of Tomb Raider), and an interview.  They also showed some of Core’s earlier works, like Chuck Rock.  Although I wish they would’ve mentioned Wonder Dog, too.  I think Core made that game, too, and I kind of liked it.

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Then the book goes over all the Tomb Raider games.  And I do mean ALL of them!  We’re talking main series, handheld games, Flash titles, board and card games, interactive DVD adventures, and mobile offerings.  They even talk about Lara Croft GO, a game I reviewed a while back and really liked on my iPad.  There’s lots of interviews with programmers, voice actresses and composers, and they even talk about cancelled games in the series, too!

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They even feature costumed Lara Croft models that have helped promote Tomb Raider games over the years.  Later on in the book, there’s a whole section on Lara Croft cosplay as well.

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Next they go over Tomb Raider comics and print media.  Man, there have been a lot of Tomb Raider comic books!  I had no idea!  Here’s just a sample page:

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They also have Lara Croft novels and magazines, too!  One thing that they didn’t have that I know about are times where Lara Croft was featured in newspaper comic strips.  I even clipped out one back in the day.  I’m reposting it here, I hope that it’s OK for me to do that.  Anyway, this newspaper comic is Foxtrot, and one of the characters is young boy Jason.  Like many young boys, he likes video games and has trouble around girls.  In this comic strip, he doesn’t want to play a Tomb Raider game because a girl is the main character, but then Lara Croft brings out Ms. Pac-Man to show Jason that he’s played video games with female characters in them before.  I clipped out this comic strip back in the day mainly because it featured Ms. Pac-Man, not Lara Croft.  I’m a pretty big Pac-Man fan!  It’s too bad they didn’t mention this comic in the book.  Or at least not where I could find it.  It’s always possible I could’ve skipped a page or something.

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Tomb Raider is so popular that there have been a couple of major Hollywood movies about it, too.  I think I’ve seen both of them, but the only part I remember was when Angelina Jolie punched a shark in the nose and it swam away.  In my head I was imagining the shark going “yipe yipe yipe yipe!”  Good thing I don’t make movies.  Anyway, they feature both movies in this book (Did you know there was a Tomb Raider movie ride in an amusement park back in the day?  I didn’t know that either, but it’s in the book!).  But not only that, the book goes over short film documentaries, an animated series I had no idea existed, and even tributes and cameos in other TV shows and movies.  Even Wreck-It Ralph, where he mentions her name once.  Here’s that page in the book:

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There’s even a section about Lara Croft as a pop-culture icon, even featuring her in product endorsements and music.  Here’s a page with some of the parodies from magazines like Cracked, MAD, and The Simpsons!

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Next is a huge section about the Tomb Raider fans.  The book goes over fan web sites, cosplayers, fan art, fan fiction, fan films, a Tomb Raider level editor, and collectors.

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I kind of wish they would’ve gone over more of the Tomb Raider statues, actions figures, and other products than what they did.  I even reviewed a weird Tomb Raider item back in my newspaper days that I didn’t see in this book.  When I wrote game reviews for The Dallas Morning News, I also reviewed a lot of accessories, too.  One of the things they sent me to review was a PlayStation memory card that was shaped like Lara Croft.  That was crazy, I mean, how do you review a memory card?  In my review, I wanted to say it was the only memory card with breasts, but I figured that wouldn’t be appropriate for a newspaper read by millions.  Even now I feel a little embarrassed printing that here.  Speaking of which, while I would say this book is mostly family-friendly, I guess there are some mild suggestive themes with images of Lara Croft, and some of the games are rated T and M, but that’s it.

Anyway, aside from a couple of missing items that I remember, this is still a very thorough book!  Almost obsessive, even!  I would say it’s slightly creepy how much info they have in this book, but saying it’s creepy gives the book a bad connotation, and this book’s not bad at all!  In fact, if Prima Games ever wanted to make a Pac-Man retrospective book like this, I’d want the same author who wrote the Tomb Raider book to do that one as well (although I think they’d need my help, don’t you?).  Anyway, if you’re a big fan of Tomb Raider, Lara Croft, or just video game history in general, you’ll definitely want to get this book!  I’m not really that much of a Tomb Raider fan, and even I found this book interesting.  And it’s a good deal at only 25 bucks.

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