At the beginning of 1994 the game industry appeared to be moving towards a glut of Ultima Underworld rip-offs like Doom for instance. We conceived the idea of taking a corridor style game and introducing a main character, moving away from the first person feel. The idea was to create a game that would look as visually exciting as a cartoon but that offered the same complete freedom of movement that Underworld had.

If you're going to spend an entire game staring at a character, it might as well be an attractive one!

No. Motion capture is a bit of a non-starter for a game like this. The problem is that in order to make something move smoothly, the various animations have to link at the cross-over point. If you use motion capture, you just can't get a person to move into exactly the same position time and time again. If you look at motion capture stuff the feet tend to jiggle around like anything. To avoid that sort of thing you would have to spend so much time cleaning it up, you might as well have key framed it the first place.

We also have direct control over each animation, for instance how fast Lara runs, how quickly she can come to a stop, how far she can jump. These aspects directly influence how the game plays and need to tweaked during the games development.

The game takes place in the modern world, in 4 geographical locations, starting in an Aztec temple in South America and then… wait and see!

There will be non-player characters you can interact with, but only in a limited way. Tomb raider is not trying to be an RPG, so there will be no conversations. The gameplay is divided between frenetic blasting action, platform elements and puzzle-solving. You will have to press the action button to make Lara pick up objects.

We do not see Tomb raider as occupying the same market niche as Doom, they are mutually exclusive games, the only similarity is that they are both in 3D. Prince of Persia is mentioned in the game design document. Were you inspired by its realistic animation and freedom of movement? Yes. Prince of Persia is one of those great games that was pure gameplay. We wanted to recreate that sort of thing in 3D but with loads of extra stuff thrown in for good measure.

We thought it was very nice. Tomb Raider is a much more ambitious project though, it's simply much more advanced. For a start we're not limited to a flat floor system: the areas in which the game takes place are multi-levelled, and we have used that as much as possible. Not to mention the Camera System and Artificial Intelligence.