Remember 1996? I do. At the time I was still pretending to work on my degree, but to be honest a lot of time in the computer rooms at the Vrije Universiteit was spent reading Usenet and playing games. And 1996 was a hell of a year for games: first we got Duke Nukem 3D, which whole computerlabs played with gusto, then a little later we had Quake, which really was the shit. Many a Thursday night was spent deathmatching to about 10:30, then quickly moving on to the local student pub to be there just before the end of happy hour, get thirty beers and spent the rest of the night drinking them…

Inbetween those two blockbusters there was another little noticed game, which you may have hear of, something called Tomb Raider. I remember getting the demo off an English game magazine, together with the Quake demo and wasting a weekend alternatively playing those. For me it was a pleasant distraction inbetween Duke nukem and Quake, but nothing more.

Sandra though loved Tomb Raider: she had the whole series, both on pc and later on PS2, every once so often replaying her favourites. I never have much patience for puzzle games and anything where you have to carefully guide your character past a series of traps; I’d rather point and shoot, but Sandra was good, very good even. She liked that sort of game anyway, but the fact that Tomb Raider had a female protagonist, who bigboobed as she was was also competent, no-nonsense and never in need of a man to rescue her, was a large part of its appeal.

So she’d be incredibly disappointed by what the developers have in store for the latest installment:

“When people play Lara, they don’t really project themselves into the character,” Rosenberg told me at E3 last week when I asked if it was difficult to develop for a female protagonist.

“They’re more like ‘I want to protect her.’ There’s this sort of dynamic of ‘I’m going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her.'”

[…]

“The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualized version of yesteryear,” he said. “She literally goes from zero to hero… we’re sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again.”

In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft will suffer. Her best friend will be kidnapped. She’ll get taken prisoner by island scavengers. And then, Rosenberg says, those scavengers will try to rape her.

“She is literally turned into a cornered animal,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a huge step in her evolution: she’s forced to either fight back or die.”

So they’re doing an origin story for Lara Croft (again) where they’ve made her deliberately younger, less competent and more vulnerable because because there’s no way boys would play a game with a female protagonist otherwise and it’s not that girls play Tomb Raider and the success of the original series with both male and female gamers, neither of which group had any problems indentifying with Lara, be damned. It’s typical moronic executive thinking, imported from Hollywood, where a supposed core demographic is pandered too while everything that made the game a success in the first place is leached out.

To use an attempted rape as motivation is just the rancid cherry on this turd cake. It’s insulting, it’s insensitive and it’s one more tool to undermine positive female rolemodels. Male heroes can go on adventures just because, female heroes need to be raped first. (And when male heroes do need a dark secret hidden in their past to spur them on, stuff their girlfriend in a fridge.) Hey, but at least her boobs are less big now!

Truth is, Tomb Raider doesn’t need an origin story, it just needs to be Lara Croft raiding tombs, preferably in interesting parts of the world filled with clever traps and nicely detailed wildlife for her to kill; having a plot is optional. Make the gameplay good, the settings lush and the puzzles hard but not impossible and people will buy it; that’s all.