The Making of Tomb Raider

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.