Tomb Raider I-III Remastered PS4 & PS5 features detailed, new key art revealed

Tomb Raider I-III Remastered PS4 & PS5 features detailed, new key art revealed

Aspyr explains how the seminal classics were restored.

Chris Bashaar
Director of Product, Aspyr

It’s been almost 30 years since Lara Croft took her first snowy steps in the mountains of Peru. In about 30 days, PlayStation players will get to re-experience Lara’s first three globe-trotting adventures, with a fresh look and feel in Tomb Raider I-III Remastered on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. 

How did we get here? That story takes us to Austin, TX in 1998.

Aspyr & Lara go way back
A burgeoning video game company, Aspyr, launches Tomb Raider II on Macintosh computers. Aspyr continued with the Tomb Raider franchise until 2003, launching Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider III, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider: Chronicles, and Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.

We’ve always wanted to revisit these titles, but we always debated the right approach. For years, we worked through the right balance of preservation and modernization. And once we felt we nailed it, we got in touch with our friends at Crystal Dynamics.

Crystal Dynamics vision
As Crystal Dynamics continues to expand the Tomb Raider Franchise, the timing seemed perfect to reintroduce audiences to the games that started it all. We wanted to both honor the foundations of the franchise and make accessible to modern audiences the original games in all their glory. 

What would the balance of preservation and modernization look like? We call it Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft.

Remaster defined
Within pre-production, we divided the conversation into three buckets: engineering, gameplay, and art. With these categories in mind, we led our conversations in the same order.

Engineering goal – performance with pixel-perfect preservation
At the outset, we knew we would use the original source code and engine. Magic can’t simply be rebuilt. A critical feature for any updates we made was to allow the users to toggle back to the original look and feel for Tomb Raider I, II, and III.

It’s a love letter to all of our memories of these games, but it’s also truly fascinating to see how far hardware pushed in the ‘90s to make Tomb Raider work. Preserving that experience will continue to inspire engineers of today and tomorrow to push games to be more immersive and memorable.

Gameplay goal – surprise and delight lifelong hardcore fans
We had a firm belief that the gameplay of Tomb Raider I, II, and III is timeless, and with our use of the existing source code, we had every jump, secret, enemy, and puzzle exactly as the original development team designed and intended.

So the conversation evolved into: how do we surprise and delight these fans? And that’s where we started brainstorming additions instead of revisions.

FULL ARTICLE HERE   LCO TR 123 RE-MASTERED LANDING PAGE FOR VIDEO AND PICTURES HERE