It was unusual behaviour at a buyers’ conference to say the least. “I had to sit through Jeremy Heath-Smith cursing through it while attempting to get Lara on top of a bin. ”It was the worst opening level to any game,” an anonymous source tells Edge. 64 game and there was a demo of this at the 2000 Spaceworld in Japan. It was an agonising experience both for the man himself and those attending. But there was also plenty of room for innovation and establishing new territories to explore with our gun-toting heroine. Significantly, Heath-Smith had to present the game at a buyers’ conference several months before the game was released. The foundation of Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft was well established, of course, and there were parameters and defining elements that had to be adhered to. We could have easily used another two or three months. I don’t know if we ever would have understood what we got wrong with the animation until the game was out. Saturday Crapshoot: Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness. “We got wrapped up in that whole beautiful big animation experience. “We spent an inordinate amount of time on the animation of Lara and designed the controls around the animation instead of designing the animation around the controls,” explained Jeremy Heath-Smith, Core Design’s co-founder, shortly after the game was released. Able to play the opening level – set in a Parisian backstreet – the disappointment at Lara’s clumsy negotiation of a dumpster followed by some awkward ladder climbing was tangible. For a game due out ‘imminently’, it appeared woefully incomplete.įast forward to Sony’s PlayStation Experience at Earl’s Court in September the same year and the public was able to see the next-gen Lara for the first time.
![public demo tomb raider angel of darkness public demo tomb raider angel of darkness](https://64.media.tumblr.com/b1c9a15f05ea8c473d7ac74f689d250e/tumblr_nt6y4nb1YL1rm20t6o1_1280.jpg)
In May 2002 at the E3 conference in LA, Eidos showcased ‘playable’ levels of the game which were little more than short animation demos.
![public demo tomb raider angel of darkness public demo tomb raider angel of darkness](https://crimson-ceremony.net/laras/samplers/dpk-eidos-04-disc.jpg)
The stress fractures were clear a long time before Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness was released. It underlines all the problems the devs faced with the game and how they were rushed by poor PR decisions. Here’s a very interesting piece about TRAOD.