The Man Behind Lara Croft

By Chris Taylor

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 her."

So, 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 for PCs.

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.

All of which is not entirely due to her pixelated butt. "Lara's an enduring icon for adolescents," says game analyst Jeremy Schwartz of Forrester Research, "but she's also popular with younger kids, who aren't really thinking, 'Wow, she's a babe.'"

The 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."

Not that Girl Power was much on Smith's mind seven years ago. He was pursuing a successful career selling computer-design systems to firms like Rolls-Royce when his brother Jeremy lured him to Jeremy's small publishing company, Core, which was beginning to move into computer games.

The brothers had many happy memories of playing tabletop arcade machines like Frogger and Centipede in their father's garage. Now they wanted to take the new 3-D environment pioneered in the shooting game Doom and use it for something a little more cerebral, something set in the tombs and catacombs of Egypt. The protagonist was to be a little different too. Says Smith: "As soon as you give a male character guns, he becomes a stereotype. We always knew we wanted a female."

A character called Laura Cruise was sketched out but got the boot because "she sounded too American." When Lara Croft arrived, "we went over the top making her British." The fictional Lara is a graduate of Prince Charles' alma mater, despite the small obstacle that--as Smith points out--the school doesn't admit women.

No 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.

Could The Last Revelation be the final outing for Smith and Croft? Smith isn't saying. But you get the sense that this married father of three, who eschews the gaming industry's increasingly bright limelight, has become so accustomed to Lara's face--and other parts--that he won't ditch her just yet. "I'm happy to stand in Lara's shadow," he says. And that of her smooth, full-cheeked bottom.