April 1 - "I can explain everything," CORE Design programmer Nigel West said when asked about the rumors that the size of Lara Croft's breasts were unintended.

"I'm a father of three beautiful girls. Now why would I go and do something like this," West said at a press conference held late last night in Leeds, UK, home base of CORE.

West said that a simple miscalculation in one of the thousands of lines of code that went into the Tomb Raider series of games resulted in the Lara as she is known today. As manufacturing and marketing plans drawn up by Eidos had already been placed in motion, to go back and rectify the programming slip-up would have meant scrapping the launch. Eidos said today that it thought gamers "just wouldn't notice" the size of Croft's breasts, and that if they did, it wouldn't detrimentally influence their decision to purchase the game.

In related Tomb Raider news, Eidos said it would let gamers - for a limited time - trade in their "busty" versions of the PlayStation and PC game for the originally designed game where Lara's chest is said to be noticeably flatter but neither "too large or too small."

The Eidos web site has details of the trade-in offer.

West promised gamers "this sort of thing will never, never happen again. This whole 'size' thing has just been a horrible experience."