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So why exactly was Lara Croft so famous in the 90's?

Fdkn said:
1997

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there were tons of promotions like this one in magazines all over the world
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E3 1998:

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Duke Nukem and Lara Croft hanging out together.
 
ShinUltramanJ said:
If you were a child at the time then it was probably for the boobs. If you were an adult it was for the awesome game that was unlike anything else out there.
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if you were an adult playing games in the mid-late 90s most people would have assumed you were some creepy old guy buying it for the boobs.

Like others have stated in this thread gaming was seen as something for kids back then. It was not till games like Madden, COD, GTA and others that it became more socially acceptable for an adult to play games. That and those kids from the 90s became adults and did not want to give up their games.

I am 29, I always thought about 5 years ahead me was the gaming line age wise. People 6 or 7 years older were not interested in games. People 4 or 5 were. Makes sense people 5 year older than me were kindergarden age when the NES released.
 
I had an issue of Nintendo Power where there was a letter to the editor asking why Nintendo doesn't have serious games like Tomb a Raider, and their answer was "Nintendo doesn't need to make a character who can do push ups without using her arms." Pretty cheeky for NP.
 
Because it was a very good 3d platforming/puzzle game which came out about the same time as Mario 64. Must have blown peoples minds if they played it back then.

I find it difficult to believe that, during the advent of 3d platforming, in a pioneering game, it was none of that that caught on... just triangle boobs.

Of course, triangle boobs is what she is known for now.

edit: for the record, Tomb Raider was released before Mario 64 in Europe, and about 1.5 months after Mario 64 in the US.
 
tokilamockingbrd said:
if you were an adult playing games in the mid-late 90s most people would have assumed you were some creepy old guy buying it for the boobs.

Like others have stated in this thread gaming was seen as something for kids back then. It was not till games like Madden, COD, GTA and others that it became more socially acceptable for an adult to play games. That and those kids from the 90s became adults and did not want to give up their games.
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This really isn't true.

Adults were enjoying games in the late 70s. Bars always had an arcade machine or two in them, just as they had pinball machines prior.

Things like the Pac-Man Fever cultural phenomena of the early 80s was enjoyed by all ages, not just kids.
 
One of the first good 3d games that's why the series is so popular. This was also back when the games media was way more powerful. Tomb Raider was featured in like every big magazine at the time, and more than once. I had a game player and game pro subs and they pushed the game hard. Another game that got this treatment early on is resident evil.
 
I think it was the novelty of a female action hero at the time. It's popularity was basically "the ending of Metroid - Wow the player is a girl!" as a whole game.

I was telling a younger friend how the "girl with guns and attitude" was once a novelty, and my opinion was that it emerged from the games industry and in particular Tomb Raider. Now it's so engrained in culture it's hard to see it as a thing (i.e. Resident Evil movies, Underworld, etc)
 
It might surprise younger gamers since the game didn't age too well unlike something as Mario 64 but at the time Tomb Raider was seen as an advanced 3D game.
3D gaming was still in its infancy and many experiences were still 2D in gameplay with not so good polygonal graphics however it was an exciting time to be a gamer.
 
Relatively speaking Tomb Raider was mainstream. People played it who didn't typically play a lot of other games. I had family who played it on their pc and the only other game they played was sims.

I know its anticdotal but I saw that scenario several times back then in regards to tomb raider.
 
The game was great. 3D looked good, and the puzzles and platforming were fun. Fighting the T-Rex was also one of the best moment's in gaming in the late 90's.
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Tomb Raider was a good game, one of the first high quality "3D" titles. The hype over Lara Croft didn't really kick in until the second game with the heavy marketing. Even then it was a lot about playing a strong, capable women. I don't remember much "boobs!" stuff until after the second game, when people noticed that they kept getting bigger. Around then, the main stream media picked up on and suddenly its all sex appeal and boobage. The games had also gone shitty by that point too.

Some of the posts in here don't sound like the late 90s at all. Plenty of 'adults' were playing games in the 90s. Its crazy people think gaming was some super secret niche, that wasn't even true in the 80s. You would have to narrow it down to just Nintendo/Sega and even that would be a stretch.
 
In order of importance:

1) first real "hot" protagonist in a game ever (rendered art, models, etc)
2) adventure and exploration itch - graphics made a beautiful world to explore
3) puzzles - many may not remember it, but puzzles were usually touted by the magazines and reviews as one of the hooks of the game
 
Edios actually had press releases for the news media back in the day telling people that there were not any nude patches included with the game.

Draw your own conclusions.
 
You came for the boobs and then you discovered the handstand!

Seriously, as with things like this was Lara was a product of her time. Just a combination of all the right stuff at the right moment.
 
In the mid 90's the average gamer was 13-17

Lara had big boobs

lara be popular

the whole exploration / tomb raiding / 3D movement stuff would of made it .. a little popular .. but not the phenom that it became.

I think I sold many copies myself anytime I would climb something and do a dive onto some rocks or something.

That crack noise. WOW
 
I think the reason was really marketing that also borrowed momentum from the spice girls etc.

I don't recall anyone cheering on the existence of a song female lead. Main thing I remember were girls being disgusted at the boobs.

One girl at EB Games was telling the clerk that she mainly just played tomb raider to drown Laura over and over again.
 
She became famous because she was the main character from an incredibly good and ground breaking game series.
Unfortunately at some point Eidos started focusing their marketing heavily around her instead of the game itself (the movies were also to blame for that) which eventually gave the wrong idea to people like Crystal Dynamics that this was a character driven game instead of gameplay driven and that is the reason why we haven't got a good Tomb Raider game since 15 years ago.
 
Devil's advocate said:
If i recall there were several games that tried to sell on the basis of a big chested female lead around that time and none came close to Tomb Raider's success.

So i guess the games being actually good had something to do with it.
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Yep, Deathtrap Dungeon had a fold-out ad with a woman in bondage gear and a guy chained to the wall. Not only that but they hired Kelly Brooke to model the outfit the heroine wore in it.

Nobody much remembers it.
 
Uh, the game was fucking fantastic and ground breaking?

Beautiful animations (handstands anyone?), great puzzles, great/subtle sound, full 3d movement, T-rex, Diving off those waterfalls, wonderfully thought out game mechanics (fuk aiming), meticulously scaling giant shit in a fully realized world. Swimming was even fun/exploratory.

All games pretty much do this now, but back then it was really special.
 
It's hard for me to say that it was some big groundbreaking work in 3D gameplay design because pretty much nothing plays like Tomb Raider anymore, not even Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider '13 plays a lot more like Super Mario 64 than Tomb Raider '96.
 
I didnt care much at all for the sex appeal. The games were heavily atmospheric. That shit was actually 'new' back then on consoles especially.
 
not psycho said:
Because it was a very good 3d platforming/puzzle game which came out about the same time as Mario 64. Must have blown peoples minds if they played it back then.
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My mind wasn't blown so much as it was confused! I'd rented Tomb Raider back when it was fresh new an hype an found the controls confusing along with what I was even supposed ta be doing or where to be going @_@; Never got beyond the first cave or so before I had to return it.
 
aspiegamer said:
Really, anyone screaming "boobs!" is at least somewhat underselling the games. Anyone NOT screaming "boobs!" is a fool for blissfully ignoring the boobs..
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In fairness to the boobs side of the argument, the OP is asking why Lara, not the game, was famous in the 90s. You had an industry graduating from kid-friendly consoles like the SNES and the N64 into a marketing machine now hungry for the teenaged to early adult (and still predominantly male) dollars, and there were few marketable mascots for that demo, as you seem to realize. Lara Croft was an intersection of sex appeal and 3D gaming that caught fire thanks to that brand engine.
 
Moon_frogger said:
I'm extremely uncomfortable with the assseration that tomb raider wouldn't have succeeded on it's own merits.
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For the sake of argument - Larry Croft, Tomb Raider. Would that have succeeded? Sure, I don't see why not. But it would have succeeded as a game, not a cultural phenomenon. Larry would have been on the cover of game magazines, maybe, but not as many and not on other mags. He would not have been in Playgirl. There would most likely be no Tomb Raider movies. Definitely no major Hollywood productions. Et cetera.
 
All of the above.

Women liked it because it featured a spunky, posh chick doing cool stunts in lush environments. Men liked it because it mixed guns and tits, with dinosaurs and tigers to blow away. And gamers liked it because it was one of the earliest fully-3D games without wheels or a gun-cursor that got most everything right.

(Sure, the clunky box-handling even then had its detractors even then, and when you look at how flawless Super Mario 64 was/is you wonder how anything else could have been acceptable, but there's something to Lara's control and shooting that's still worth discussing and enjoying today.)

Lara quickly wore out her welcome in the annualized sequels, and by the second game the sex appeal was grotesquely embraced in the marketing (the nude code and the big boobs always were titillating on the playground, but it wasn't until Eidos started putting Lara in bikini behind-the-back teaser shots that it started to feel less like an innocent source of giggles and more like peddled flesh.) But Core Design was a great studio, the action in Tomb Raider was fast-paced and packed with technical challenges, the puzzles and roam'able worlds were intriguing, the graphics at the time were appealing, and the story was thrilling. It wasn't just a phenomenon for idiots, Lara was hot in the best and worst senses of the word.
 
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