“I don’t want to say cornily that it was love at first sight, but it was quite a big moment to see Lara Croft on screen at that point.” “I remember driving up late on a snowy February, and I went to Silicon Dreams first, and then drove on to Derby to meet Jeremy Heath-Smith, the managing director of Core Design.”Ĭore had a number of titles in development that year alone but the biggest surprise of all was Tomb Raider. “All I remember of course is Core Design, which was the jewel in the crown,” says Livingstone, who did the due diligence during the acquisition by visiting CentreGold’s studios and seeing their assets. It represented a foothold into the American market as the company had acquired games from the US to publish in Europe under the label US Gold, such as Duke Nukem 3D, but it would also include its studios Silicon Dreams and Core Design.
As a new publisher, Eidos was simply looking for the opportunity to grow, which it decided to do by acquiring struggling company CentreGold. “Toby had seen the rise of girl power at the time like Neneh Cherry and Tank Girl and proposed this character initially called Laura Cruz before it changed to Lara Croft.”Īt that time however, Livingstone had no idea about Tomb Raider.
“The idea was, as the whole industry was growing up and becoming responsible, to have a character that was certainly not going to be thought of as being Indiana Jones, so I think someone said maybe there could be an Indiana Jane instead,” Livingstone recalls. Moving to video games was not always a likely direction for Livingstone, as he tells me, “I can’t actually code myself, even though I campaign for coding in schools.” It was in fact off the back of the success of Deathtrap Dungeon in 1984 that he was approached by a company called Domark to write for a text adventure game called Eureka! But rather than be paid royalties, he opted to take an equity stake in the company, which led him to becoming a member of the board in 1991.
That isn’t just a neat period Easter egg but a tribute from developer Eidos Montreal to Eidos Interactive, the British publishing giant where Livingstone was president and CEO, until it was acquired by Square Enix in 2009. READ MORE: Why ‘Tomb Raider’ will always be a core part of my queer identity.
Before he even got into the video games industry, he co-founded Games Workshop, while his choose-your-own-adventure Fighting Fantasy gamebooks have been hugely influential to RPG developers – you’ll even find a copy of his 1984 best-seller Deathtrap Dungeon in the bedroom of a young Peter Quill in Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy. Ian Livingstone’s reputation precedes him.
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