“O K, this is going to change your life.”

That was how Jeremy Heath-Smith, Core Design’s founder and chief executive, braced Andy Sandham for his first taste of Tomb Raider royalties. The change was, indeed, profound. One of Sandham’s colleagues, soon after getting his own cut, scorched into Core’s Derby parking lot in a brand new sports car with gull-wing doors. Before a crowd, he struggled to exit the car ass-first, old jeans slipping down his thighs.

At Core, which juggled multiple teams and games at once, working on Tomb Raider was a glamorous and highly lucrative tier of the company hierarchy, coveted and resented by those who toiled underneath on forgotten projects like Swagman. Sandham, previously a concept artist at Theme Park developer Bullfrog, had been with Core since 1994, but hadn’t broken through until he was promoted to level designer on 1998’s Tomb Raider III. It might never have happened had the team from the first two Tomb Raiders not begged off to do something new. Sandham was called up, along with colleagues like programmer Martin Gibbins and designer Richard Morton, to take care of Lara Croft.

“We were all absolutely shitting ourselves,” Sandham remembers. “We knew we had an enormous responsibility. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life.”

It’d be an understatement to say that Toby Gard’s creation kept the lights on at Core — if the developers had lit the offices with burning cash, they’d still have been able to buy country houses and space cars on Lara’s dime. Success was even sweeter for publisher Eidos, who had acquired Core in 1996. The first Tomb Raider sold five million copies and by itself put the struggling firm into the black.

Tomb Raider was critical to Eidos’s financial bottom line, but the publisher didn’t interfere creatively with Core out of concern that doing so could screw up a good thing. In turn, Heath-Smith more or less gave his developers free rein. “I know nothing about writing a video game,” he says, “but I’m pretty good at fronting a business, raising some money and getting out there and making the company successful. My philosophy’s always been that you let people do what they’re good at, and they let me do what I’m good at, and between us all the whole thing works.”

Sandham remembers it, fondly, as “the Wild West years of game development”. At the start of a project, the developers would pitch their level ideas to Heath-Smith and that was about the extent of his involvement, says Sandham. He recalled the conversation when he proposed a level set in London.

HEATH-SMITH: What the fuck are you talking about? SANDHAM: It’s to do with the London Underground stations, and… HEATH-SMITH: Right, right, fuck off and make it then.

Generally, Heath-Smith’s “Wild West” approach paid off. Tomb Raider III finished on schedule, Sandham thinks, not because of corporate oversight but developer self-policing. “In the last months of that project,” he says, “we’d be staying every day and every night for three months.”

Hours like that were de rigeur for game development. Core was no different. To release a new Tomb Raider every year, you had to work like that. (Heath-Smith estimates the actual development time at a mere seven months.) “If you want a girlfriend, avoid working in computer games like the plague,” Toby Gard told the fashion magazine The Face in 1997, in reply to a question about whether his girlfriend ever got jealous of Lara. “If you work seven days a week, 15 hours a day for almost two years, with barely enough time for a pint, you have no time whatsoever for relationships.”

The pressure of making Tomb Raider year in and year out, Heath-Smith agrees today, was huge. “Did it stifle creativity? Of course it did. Did it affect the long-term franchise? Yes, probably did. Did it make us all a lot of money? Yes, a huge amount. So you know, you weigh all that up!”

Sandham and the Tomb Raider III team dealt with stress in part by cultivating a healthy disrespect for the character of Lara Croft, mimicking how she’d obstinately say “No!” whenever the player would try and make her do something she wasn’t supposed to. In the morning, the team would robotically walk into each other like bumper cars, squeaking a nasal “No!” ad nauseum. The happiest person on the project seemed to be the guy whose job it was to animate Lara dying in spike traps and being shot by enemies. He loved it.

Andy Sandham and Jeremy Heath-Smith. “He was always in some sort of rage, like Spider-Man’s boss,” says Sandham, with fondness, of Heath-Smith. “We used to think he was a nightmare — in fact, in hindsight, he was the best boss I’ve ever had.” (Images: Andy Sandham and Spike Global.)

“Success comes and creates its own problems, doesn’t it?” says Heath-Smith today. “Tomb Raider was such a phenomenal success that we went on and did [a sequel] in a very short space of time, which was an even bigger success.” Tomb Raider III also turned out to be a hit, and then there was no reason, from Eidos’s perspective, why Core could not release a new Tomb Raider every 12 months — indefinitely. “Eidos was hugely pressurizing us,” says Heath-Smith, “and you also got pressure from the likes of Sony, who wanted to sell more hardware and were then offering amazing deals for exclusivity with the PlayStation.”

The work was gruelling, but hardly without reward. The Tomb Raider III team — about a dozen people — were each cut royalty checks in the area of three hundred thousand pounds. “For me, it was really important that they did something with that money — bought a house, or invested it — that they didn’t go out and buy a Ferrari, or something bloody ridiculous,” says Heath-Smith — who, at the peak of Tomb Raider’s commercial success, had earned a £7 million bonus. “We were a tight-knit team and I desperately wanted to look after them.”

(Heath-Smith, by way of digression, once summoned the entire office to the Lara Croft statue in the lobby, where he sat reading a magazine in silence until putting it down and shouting: “Right, which one of you filthy fucking bastards wiped their ass on the hand towel? Who’s fucking done it?” Nobody owned up to it. “I don’t remember that,” he says now, “but knowing me, that’s the sort of thing I would do, because I would be incensed! I’d be incensed by the fact that one of our team, one of our family — and we always were, no matter how big we grew — could actually do that!”)

The Tomb Raider III team, having proven they could deliver a complete game in a year, were put straight back to work on the sequel. Heath-Smith’s only requirement was that the level designers get Lara out of the London Underground and Venetian canals: “Put [her] in a fucking tomb.”

“We wanted to make Tomb Raider IV the best game in the universe,” Sandham remembers. “It was an amazing opportunity, we knew it was.” That’s how he made his peace with another round-the-clock, seven-month grind — it was Tomb Raider! But he was exhausted already — the whole team was — and there were already plans for them to work on a fifth and a sixth Tomb Raider. With Lara Croft more popular than ever, there was no sign that annual pace would be slowing. “The public expects a new Tomb Raider game every year by Christmas,” Core’s PR manager Susie Hamilton affirmed that year. Sandham sure as hell didn’t want to be the one making those games every year. He had to find a way out.

“Put her in a fucking tomb.”

Vicky Arnold, who’d written the first three Tomb Raider games, had left Core after the third game. Sandham, interested in screenwriting, volunteered to write in her absence. As the franchise’s new writer, Sandham decided that at the end of the fourth game, Lara Croft would die. And he decided not to tell Heath-Smith about it.