Tomb Raider

Rhianna Pratchett is talking to me about Tomb Raider, a game she wrote over a decade ago, to reboot the franchise. On 5th March, 2013, the world was ...

"You'd be on the London Underground, or a street at night, and then something would happen that was kind of a merging in her head of real life and what she'd been through on the island. That was, I guess, a little bit more of a priority for me, to kind of bring back a little lightness to Lara and a little bit more humour. that was one of the early incarnations of it." "It was more of a last minute decision," Pratchett tells me. "When I've more of a say in the creation of characters, I've been more mindful of that," she says. To allow story and action to marry up, Pratchett says those involved need to "have that commitment at the start... As a result of this mentality, Pratchett says the narrative team "lost that battle". "But it got changed as if I had come in with that particular agenda and Crystal had said 'no', and I was like, that wasn't the case at all, but it created a sort of narrative about it." "I certainly know of one friend that realised she was gay from reading Lara and Sam fanfic and slashfic," Pratchett smiles. "It was all sort of like, nudge, nudge, wink, wink to the guy. "And it was like, I didn't know what this Croft [was going] to be," Pratchett laughs, thinking about the first time she wrote those words. I talk to Pratchett over Zoom, with the idea that we'll take a quick look back at the game that ignited Tomb Raider's "Survivor" timeline.