Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bove has a long and colorful history as a rabble rouser. Born in Bordeaux in 1953, he spent most of his first seven years in Berkeley, where his parents studied biochemistry at the University of California. Back in France, he refused to do his military service and dropped out of Bordeaux University to immerse himself in various leftist political and ecological movements. In 1975 he and his wife decided to move to the country, take up sheep farming and join a local peasant movement against the planned extension of an army base in southern France. Arrested for "invading" the base...
...computer games--and his face lights up with a naughty-boy grin. "Lara's changed fairly significantly," he says of her latest outing, Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation. "She's got a bottom now. She's got cheeks. She's smoother. Now she exists just as we first imagined...
...than building a better bottom. In Tomb Raider, players guide Ms. Croft, archaeologist and daughter of an English lord, through a series of brainteasing, Indiana Jones-style adventures. Just five years old, Lara has become the foundation of one of the most successful franchises in video-game history. The first three Tomb Raiders sold an incredible 17 million copies, helping boost sales of Sony PlayStations and 3-D graphics cards...
...real key to Lara's success, says Smith, is that she's the first female protagonist in a field filled with muscle-rippled, machine gun-toting macho caricatures like Duke Nukem or the Terminator. Cartoonish features aside, Lara is intelligent, agile and handy with a pistol or two. "She's strong willed and independent," Smith says. He pauses, then adds, "like the Spice Girls...
...matter. The Brit female thing worked. Lara was unusual enough to become an icon, and Tomb Raider was addictive enough to prompt millions of men--and, for the first time, large numbers of women--to spend long nights at the console. Smith, who naively thought he'd seen the last of Tomb Raider, had to spend many more long nights (two years' worth per game) devising enough fiendish traps and puzzles for three sequels...