Tomb Raider: Anniversary Game Commentary

The Tomb Raider: Anniversary Game Commentary is an in-game feature that allows commentaries to be played while you are playing. After unlocking them and turning them on, Commentary Markers can be found throughout the game. In it Jason Botta and Toby Gard give you behind-the-scenes information on the original Tomb Raider and on Tomb Raider Anniversary.

Peru, Mountain Caves

• Peru, Mountain Caves, Start Platform

The first commentary marker crystal is found on the starting platform of the first level Mountain Caves.

Botta - Welcome to the game commentary for Tomb Raider: Anniversary. I'm Jason Botta, the creative director for Tomb Raider: Anniversary.

Toby - And I'm Toby Gard, the original designer, from the first TR1.

Botta - No, you were the creative director, give yourself some credit.

Toby - I suppose, there were only six of us though, we didn't have such grand titles back in those days, but yeah. So in terms of the opening sequence of the original game, the whole thing was leading up to sort of the whole wolf extravaganza that happens, where it was the 'big reveal' of Lara Croft. And obviously some of that wasn't really appropriate any more, people know who Lara was, so it enabled us to actually be able to show Lara in the intro in the foyer in Calcutta and obviously we didn't have to go quite so crazy with the wolf bit with the big tails flying off her and stuff.

Botta - And I think the essence of that whole cinematic and whatnot is the same, sort of an introduction to the main characters of the game and sort of sets up what the entire game is about, so that sort of remains unchanged.

Toby - Yep

Botta - Yeah, we sort of tried to follow a lot of the shots from the original game, sort of inspiration for us throughout the entire game but for this opening cine as well.

Transcript

• Peru, Mountain Caves, Crossing with Bats

The second commentary marker is found at the crossing where the first bats appear.

Toby - So I remember when we were first putting together the design for Tomb Raider, and I found that it was pretty much disturbing how many games, how much there was of killing in games, basically so many people killing each other mindlessly, you know, you walk up to some chap and just because they're from a different country you can gun them down and that seems to be perfectly reasonable.

Toby - So in TR1 I felt like, apart from the fact that I didn't think we could do very good humans at the time, like, other human enemies, it seemed to me like a much nicer thing to do to have the enemies be animals, sort of, you know, vicious, vicious animals like bats and rats and things.

Botta - Which is ironic because I think now most people would consider killing animals way crueler than killing people.

Toby - It is, yeah, pretty much, yeah. The worst thing about it of course is that they're all endangered species. None of this occurred to me at the time. To be honest with you, I just thought "Great, we're not killing humans hardly at all, what a great selling point!"

Botta - When we redid it, we went and we looked at the animals in TR1 and they weren't very mean looking, which made killing them even, even worse.

Toby - No, I remember my teddy bear model was very cute.

Botta - That's right, so we consciously tried to sort of go back and make the animals much more vicious this time around, so you didn't feel so bad about killing them. You can maybe only lose about an hour of sleep instead of all night.

Transcript

• Peru, Mountain Caves, Wolf Bridge Room

The third commentary marker is in the room with the Suspension Bridges and the Wolves.

Toby - So this was one of the rooms, the wolf bridge room, essentially, so early on in the game, in the original Tomb Raider, where it was really just, hey look, there's going to be some big baddies that you're going to fight at some point but you're able to just stand above them and shoot them to death.

Botta - Lara's so mean.

Toby - Yeah, well, or you could sort of just leave them alone I suppose. There was nothing really going on in that room in the original TR1 and I was kind of pushing for us to simply just skip this room on the remake because it wasn't particularly significant, but, um.

Botta - Yeah, I think visually, it was one of the more recognizable areas from TR1 though so we wanted to keep it but sort of changed it a little bit so I think it was you, that had the idea of breaking the first bridge so that you fall down into the wolf area.

Toby - Yep, so really, basically make life difficult for the animal lovers.

Botta - You have to kill the wolves now, or they kill you.

Toby - The people who didn't kill the wolves, didn't snipe the wolves, basically get the worst deal.

Botta - That's right, plus it makes the second bridge a little bit more intense now.

Toby - Yeah, that's the big one, yeah.

Transcript

Croft Manor

• Croft Manor, Main Hall