The Making of Tomb Raider
Ratings1
Average rating2
15
Ratings1
Average rating2
Back in 1994 at the game company 'CORE Design' in Derby, Lara Croft was born. Through eighteen months of pure hard work from the team, Tomb Raider was released in 1996 and became the success that we see today; taking part in the mid-nineties celebrations of Brit-Pop and Girl Power. This is the story of the team who were involved in creating the first two games, then leaving the series to a new team in 1998. Lara Croft brought class, comedy, and a James Bondian role to the game, dreamt up by Toby Gard and helped to become a pitch with Paul Douglas. The game was a gamble, but because everyone at the company believed in it, it led to huge success for everyone, except for Toby and Paul. The Making of Tomb Raider goes into detail of how Lara and the games were born, alongside why Toby Gard and Paul Douglas left before the sequel was released. Throughout eleven chapters of countless interviews, this book will tell you who was responsible for creating the first two games; from its levels, its music, the many voices of Lara Croft, and much more. The team also reveals all about the star of the second game; Winston the Butler, and how he came to be by Joss Charmet. Over twenty people were interviewed for this story; from the pitch for what would be Tomb Raider, alongside the challenges along the way, up until the release of Tomb Raider 2 in 1997.
Reviews with the most likes.
I was pretty excited for this book and really wanted to like it. There was a lot of positive promotion for it going on within the Tomb Raider community that raised my expectations and increased my enthusiasm for it. Though, I am also aware it's Daryl Baxter's very first book.
Even though I liked the content of the book a fair bit, I cannot give it a better rating because the editing is absolutely horrendous. Since most of the book is made up of interviews with different people most of the work would have been the editing process. I don't know who chose to ship it like this, but considering how expensive the book is it's just terrible.
There are countless typos, many repititions where entire paragraphs are copy-pasted, mentions of specific things he goes back and forth on and it's a whole pattern. It doesn't just happen once or twice by accident, it happens repeatedly, which really put me off my reading experience.
The conducted interviews are not edited at all, they read like they're simply recorded and written down and I'm convinced that's exactly what happened - including grammar mistakes, sentence structure and filler words. It's super clunky to read and takes away from what's actually being said.
At the start of the book I was satisfied enough by the graphical content that added a bit of background information but it's nothing I hadn't seen before and nothing you couldn't find online if you looked it up. When you get to the part about Tomb Raider 2 it's literally just screenshots of ingame scenes, cutscenes or FMVs. Most screenshots are way too dark to even make out and if you know your basic way around editing graphics you could have fixed that issue within a minute. The last 40 pages are filled with 3 screenshots per page, making it feel like he ran out of content and was forcing it to be longer than it actually is.
Another big no-no was that it was sometimes really hard to understand who was talking. Some of the bits of interviews have the interviewee's names written in front of it, some other parts don't and most of the time the mentioned names are first names only. I would have appreciated it if he had simply added the full name every time. I want to know exactly who is talking and remember their name, not go back to chapter 1 and reread the list every time. This way it was extremely confusing when you get to the parts that have the name mentioned once in the first paragraph, then every time they're talking all you get is a block quote to remind you someone is talking. Who? No idea, because in between there were 3 other people talking but in different formatting.
All in all this was a pretty disappointing experience for me. It would have been way better as a web article, maybe even multiple web articles over a span of time. I don't know why the editing is so bad, if he ran out of time or similar. But he should have taken the time, because from my point of view that was most of the work to be done.
I would only recommend this book to people that want some juicy little details by the makers of TR 1 / TR 2. The content of the interviews is completely fine and while I did hear about some of the info given before there were also bits and pieces I hadn't heard of before.
If you can, borrow the book or make use of subscription services online to read it because it's simply not worth the price it's sold for. Sorry.
2 stars for the people in the interviews. the cover is cute but that's not the tr1 or tr2 Lara, it's no Lara at all. the pics are dark, you can barely see what's going on in them. the fact that the author made SO MANY typos and didn't even write the levels' names correctly makes me wonder... what the fuck is this? many paragraphs were thrown in there twice, the interviews weren't even a little bit edited like the repetitions or the 1000 “you know?”s. the 4 blank pages at the end are just a big LOL. waste of paper. also the price is just insane for ... I can't even call this a book, i'm sorry.
