Word: raider
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Adrian Smith is not 17 years old. The British game designer's hormones are about a decade and a half past the raging stage. Yet talk to him about his creation Lara Croft--buxom heroine of the Tomb Raider series of 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...
...thanks to the wonders of advanced computer graphics, our heroines can now be ogled more realistically than ever. But Smith's enduring relationship with Lara has been about more 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...
When Tomb Raider IV hit stores last week, you were also able to pick up a Lara Croft comic, a Lara Croft candy bar, a Lara Croft action doll. A Pokemon-esque Lara Croft card game is selling briskly, as is Lara's Book (a cultural dissection by Generation X author Douglas Coupland). Coming soon: a Lara Croft movie from Universal Pictures and 60-ft.-tall Croft wall paintings in major cities across America...
...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...
...starting to pull in big names. James Earl Jones, for example, stars in Command & Conquer's latest outing, while David Bowie is the driving force behind the forthcoming Omikron. Indeed, game designers are starting to act like directors--guys like Sid Meier (Alpha Centauri) and Adrian Smith (Tomb Raider) who closet themselves in high-end studios for two years at a time, ceaselessly fine-tuning their grand vision, their masterwork...