And for a brief, tantalizing moment, Lara Croft was supposed to join it.
When Core Design announced Tomb Raider , it was a technical marvel. The fully 3D environments, the fluid (if blocky) animation of Lara, and the atmospheric lighting were cutting edge. It was announced for PC, PlayStation, Saturn... and the 3DO. tomb raider 3do
The market did shift. It shifted away from expensive, multimedia boxes and toward focused gaming machines. But for a brief moment in 1996, Lara Croft was supposed to help one last console stand up. And for a brief, tantalizing moment, Lara Croft
When the press asked Trip Hawkins (3DO’s founder) why Tomb Raider was canceled, he deflected. He didn't say "We couldn't run it." He said "The market shifted." It was announced for PC, PlayStation, Saturn
Somewhere, on a dusty dev kit in a forgotten storage unit, a low-poly Lara is still waiting to jump over that first chasm.
Before Tomb Raider became the PlayStation’s killer app and the face of an entire generation, there was a ghost on the release schedule: The Promise of the Interactive Multiplayer Let’s rewind to 1995. The 3DO was dying, but it didn’t know it yet. Panasonic was touting it as the ultimate multimedia machine—CD-quality audio, full-motion video, and "true" 32-bit 3D graphics. While the PlayStation and Saturn were fighting for arcade ports, the 3DO was getting PC ports and experimental titles.
But graphics? The 3DO struggled with texture mapping. Lara would have likely been a flat-shaded, gouraud-shaded mess. And the loading times? The 3DO’s 2x CD drive was notoriously slow. Every door in St. Francis’ Folly would have meant a 45-second load screen.