ACCESSING THE COMMENTARIES: Completing each chapter of the game (Croft Manor, Peru, Greece, Egypt, the Lost Island) unlocks the designers' commentaries for that chapter. To access the commentaries in-game, load a saved game or replay any level in a chapter you have completed and turn Commentary on in the Options menu (i.e., from the Main menu or Pause menu choose Options, then Display, then set Commentary Markers to "On"). Then as you explore the level, you'll see blue crystals here and there. Activating these crystals by pressing Interact plays the commentary tracks recorded for that area by Creative Director Jason Botta and Story/Consultant Designer Toby Gard. If you're not sure what the guys are saying, you can also turn on subtitles under Options > Language. (Many thanks to the awesome Treeble for providing these transcripts, which were first posted at TombRaiderBOARD and are reproduced here by permission.)
Toby: One of the interesting things about the sequence of Lara going to Natla's office was how she went up the elevator shaft, because when we were looking at the sequence it seemed like it was going to be pretty boring in the original game. You know, her just breaking into an office and rifling through Natla's drawers. So we came up with this idea [of] her using the counterweight to fly up the lift shaft, and it's kind of interesting because I remember that basically actually got sort of, you know, plagiarized slightly, no, not plagiarized, what's the word, it was "homaged" in the Matrix movie, which was pretty cool actually. And then in remaking the office section we decided to use that space to [actually] build a little bit more information on Natla because we don't really get to see a lot of Natla so we came up with this idea that instead of Lara reading some kind of diary she gets to look through Natla's—
Botta: Video logs.
Toby: Video logs, exactly, and we get a little bit of backstory both on Larson and Pierre and it was an interesting way to get more character going on without Lara having to interact with them or change the sequences too much.
[ * * * ]
Toby: So originally, old Pierre, you just fight him here, he just runs out and starts gunning you down basically but we wanted to, well, first of all, make a character that was a little more interesting than just a shoot first and ask questions later, but we also wanted to [sort of] keep one of the aspects of Pierre that made him really interesting in the first game, [what] I really liked about him anyway, which was pretty much that you had to fight him about three or four times throughout the level and you'd shoot him loads and loads of times and then he'd just suddenly decide to run away and as soon as he went out of line of sight he'd just vaporize basically.
Botta: Which was a little cheap.
Toby: Yeah, so when we came to doing the remake I was, "That's great! I love the way he just sort of goes behind a pillar and vanishes!" and everyone's going "No, it's rubbish! It's ridiculous, where does he go?" and so we decided to play on that in the cut scene and have him sort of be this 'ninjary' guy who could be anywhere behind any pillar potentially and basically work that into the cut scene.
[ * * * ]
Botta: St. Francis folly is, I would say, probably the second most recognizable area from Tomb Raider 1, other than the T-Rex valley. I think a lot [of] people [really] remember that big vertical room and climbing up the broken thing in the middle. So we really wanted to keep that feel when we redid it, and the just [sort of] make it more involved, more challenging to the player this time. But essentially, it's pretty much unchanged, we even [sort of] went back and duplicated the textures from the original for the floor panels in the middle because they're so recognizable.
Toby: Yeah, [I mean] it was an interesting sort of goal with that area, because it's [quite] common with game designers, even when they have a 3D vertical space that they can play with, they tend to end up making sort of long flat things anyway. That particular area from the original game was just, "Let's sort of go as vertical as we possibly can and see what we can do with it," and it was great with Lara being so easy to kill because it was such a frightening space to move through. As usual, with Anniversary, everything is double the size now, so it's even more frightening looking.
[ * * * ]
Botta: This wasn't even a room in the first game, it was a hallway, with a ball at the top.
Toby: We didn't even have time to actually build Atlas.
Botta: Yeah.
Toby: The whole idea was that there would be this statue, obviously, the chap with the big rolling ball which was one of our small number of generic tools which we could use to make our puzzles, and have it sitting on his back and textured like the world; we just didn't have time to do any of that so we just had a ball at the top of a ramp and we left the rest of it to people's imaginations.
Botta: That's right, so now we've actually been able to build Atlas.
Toby: Woooo!!!
Botta: So that's good, and there he is, he rolls the ball down, essentially, the theme is the same, we just sort of added the added difficulty of having the pit at the end; in the original you just sort of hid behind a ledge and let the ball roll over you.
Toby: No, basically it was the same, basically you had to drop down into a pit, and let the ball roll over you because it would fly over the top.
Botta: So, yeah.
Toby: So you made it a bit more complicated.
Botta: It's a tad bit more complicated, but thematically identical. Except we actually have a statute.
Toby: Yes.
[ * * * ]
Toby: In the original, the idea of the two sections of the room was, the first one was obviously, [just essentially, kind of, really] basically just a random death machine. So you had this checkered pattern on the floor and [you know] I think you were supposed to be able to tell where the next lightning bold was supposed to come and then try and avoid that area but in reality you just had to run across as fast as you possibly could in case you get fried.
Botta: This is quality design. Random death.
Toby: Random death machine. Do you realize how much time we had? Anyway, so after the random death machine the concept of the next room actually was, I liked the idea of having to put yourself [like] into the most dangerous position you possibly could, right.
Botta: Right, under the hammer.
Toby: You had to physically stand under the hammer and then wait for it to [kind of like] crank back and then drop and then have to just run off at the last second, and that was particularly evil in the first one because Lara moved so slowly; she took so long to react to anything. So you had to kind of, it really made for the situation that you'd stand on the pressure plate and then you'd kind of run off and go "ooooh!" and it didn't trigger and you'd go "ahhhh." I was a little bit too much of a chicken that time, and then you'd run back and go "wooo!" and run off. Well, at least that's what I used to do anyway.
[ * * * ]
Toby: All right, Neptune.
Botta: Neptune, yeah. So originally the Neptune room was essentially just a hole in the floor with a little pool of water, wasn't it?
Toby: How dare you! No, the goal with the Neptune area was to give people a real sense of claustrophobia under water so it was an extremely long shaft. The moment you stepped into it sucked you all the way down to the bottom. I wanted to get this feeling of that terror of being deep underwater and knowing that you can hardly swim back. And because of the draw distance in the original Tomb Raider is basically sort of faded to black after not very far, the cool thing about the Neptune room was that you get sucked down this hole so far you can't, it's black above you, you can't even see the surface any more, and it was that horror of being pulled down to your doom that I was trying to get in the Neptune room. You basically have to find a switch to turn off the current just in the nick of time. But what did you guys do? It looks pretty crazy.
Botta: Yeah, we took that original area where you get sucked down and [then] we built an entire new room off the side of that so instead of just pulling the switch and swimming back up, you pull a switch and you go into na entirely new room themed around Neptune and water. Though you know what I just realized, we should probably, is uh, we renamed this room.
Toby: What did you rename it to?
Botta: It's Poseidon.
Toby: Oh! That's good.
Botta: Yeah, see, this goes back to originally Toby not knowing who the Greek and the Roman gods were.
Toby: Ahhh. That's not as bad a mistake as Thor though.
Botta: That's true. So while the original room was Neptune this is now the Poseidon room. So that it's the same god, just now it's appropriate to Greece.
Toby: Yeah.
Botta: So that works out, fictionally better. But the room's still all sort of water centric, and you just sort of swim around, and do stuff, get the thing, and swim back up the hole.
Toby: You don't swim down to your doom?
Botta: Well, you still get to swim back up. [If] there's no doom, Toby doesn't like it.
[ * * * ]
Toby: So the Damocles room was basically, obviously he's... his story is about having a sword sitting over his head. So the plan with the room was basically that you walk in and see this forest of swords hanging from the ceiling and you think that's bad news. Then you pick your way through the room and actually nothing happens to you. But you know there's a prize at the end of the room and you just know what's going to happen when you take it. So it's kind of really building that expectation of when the swords come flying towards you like magic missiles.
Botta: Right, we just sort of took that concept and ramped it up and now it's got swords in the walls, and swords in the floor. It's sword-tastic.
Toby: It dilutes a little bit, the whole sword from ceiling though, which is the legend.
Botta: Ahh, true.
[Main Anniversary Page | St. Francis Walkthrough]
Botta: The coliseum, this time, is round.
Toby: I see that's a really major improvement! It didn't have any angles apart from right angles, obviously, the first time around. So it does look quite a lot more like a coliseum.
Botta: Yeah, we try.
Toby: Yeah, that's impressive. It's particularly impressive when you think that, again, the coliseum isn't Greek, is it?
Botta: No, it's not Greek, but we just sort of fudged it. It's Toby's fault because he put it in the first game.
Toby: Yeah.
Botta: We had to put it in this one.
Toby: But it was, ehh, "Romany Greeky." I wasn't too bothered. It's a cool idea, I thought, to be able to, because really, kind of the concept of Tomb Raider 1 was just this idea that when I go to these sort of places, a coliseum, or Stonehenge, or any of these sort of ancient ruins, I personally have a terribly strange urge to climb all over them and see where I can get to. And I thought hey, if I want to do that, then maybe other people do, so getting the coliseum in there seemed like a cool idea because it's sort of exploring around on the inside and we tried to create the rooms obviously that have been recreated here again, which are things like the gladiator areas, and the places, the animal pits, and just tried to let people sort of string together the story of how the area would have actually worked, you know, centuries before in their own heads.
Botta: That's right, this game, like most games, is fantasy fulfillment, right, so it's all about exploring the ruins that you couldn't really explore if you went to Rome and went to the coliseum.
Toby: Yeah, there's too many people telling you "Hey, get off that ancient bit of rock there you crazy monkey man!"
Botta: That's right, you're gonna break it!
[ * * * ]
Toby: In the first one all you had to do was essentially, I think you had to pick up a couple of keys, down in the —
Botta: And then go around the top right.
Toby: Yeah, and there was a specific route around the outside, and obviously Pierre showed up again in the first one, and did his disappearing behind pillars trick, which was really pretty cool. But yeah, it was a very simple area, basically just unlock a couple of keys and then go up to the King's viewing, or the Emperor's viewing area, Caesar I suppose, which was full of monkeys, and then, you know, get out of there into the next area.
Botta: There's still monkeys. They're gorillas, they throw stuff now.
Toby: So what did you do? Go on, tell us all how, [you know,] you went about 'expanding' it.
Botta: [Yeah, so in the original...] We sort of kept that idea the same, we just wanted to, obviously Lara's more nimble now so we had to increase the [sort of] level of detail in her interactions with the environments, so we just [sort of] made the environments more complex. We've got her traversing over various ruins, bits of broken columns, and pieces of the ceiling that have fallen out. So essentially it's the same, it's just updated to match the abilities of Lara.
[Main Anniversary Page | Coliseum Walkthrough]
Botta: The Midas garden, I think we sort of, we did the thing you guys intended, which was to build the Midas statue.
Toby: Yeah, I mean the garden itself was supposed to have, well exactly, I mean, we had, we just didn't have the resources to build a gigantic statue in the garden.
Botta: All right.
Toby: So it was pretty much there was a garden and if you climbed about on the roof you could find a little room that had a hand in it, basically.
Botta: It had a hand, and a foot.
Toby: Yeah, and that was about as much as we could really do.
Botta: And the best part was is that the foot with, and like up to the knee I think it was, and then that was the ceiling of the room.
Toby: Yes, yeah, the roof would collapse or something, probably.
Botta: But here we've actually gone and built a whole Midas statue, but obviously we had to keep the hand turning things to gold, that was key.
Toby: Yeah, absolutely.
Botta: Yeah, so that still happens, which is cool. We originally were trying to think of a way to make the monkeys turn to gold, because that would have been really cool.
Toby: Yes, that would have been. It's one of the few times in TR1 when we actually, and it's something I remember sort of debating a little bit because all of the other areas, all the other rooms in the Greek level, and I think, in fact, sort of throughout the whole game, they all made some kind of real world sense, you know, there's sort of, all the traps, right, they're sort of ancient mechanisms, and it was only Midas's hand that alluded to some kind of magical effect, something that you couldn't explain through any kind of science. That, I remember, was a really tough call to make, because the goal was not to break the rules of [sort of] reality, but Lara turning to gold was so much fun to animate. I don't know, I just broke my own rules.
[ * * * ]
Toby: Ach, well, I mean, pretty much the original idea for the room was just, I mean, the spikes were just a generic trap for us; basically you could walk through them, but if you ran through them or if you fell on them they're instant death. They're kind of fun because you can't tell they're there apart from the floor texture had little holes in it, so you had to keep your eyes open, so I thought it was a really fun little trap. This was just, like, with many of our rooms, we would essentially think about some of the basic tools we had at our disposal and we would just try and see how we could theme a room to it. So this was pretty much originally just "Let's make Lara do loads and loads of jumps where you fall straight on to spikes!" because it's so painful looking when she goes on spikes.
Botta: This all gets back to Toby's love to see Lara die.
Toby: What? Look, no, man, you put spikes on everything haven't you!
Botta: Yeah, we took the idea of the spikes and made it even more spikey. You know, we gotta step up the challenge. Spikes are fun. Watching Lara get spiked is fun, though we can't actually do that anymore. The old ESRB doesn't allow us to impale Lara in a teen rated game anymore. So. You didn't have ratings when you made TR1, did they?
Toby: Yeah, we must of.
Botta: I don't know, you impaled her all the time.
Toby: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it wasn't a good day if Lara wasn't getting impaled.
Botta: Yeah, well, so we can't do that anymore. But she can still get spiked and die, so at least that little fantasy lives on.
[ * * * ]
Botta: So this was one of the three challenge areas off of the Midas area.
Toby: Right, because you've got three metal bits that you have to change into gold to get a door open.
Botta: The lead bars that must be turned to gold.
Toby: Lead to gold, very alchemical. Basically, other than the basic tools of traps like rolling balls and spikes and stuff and breakable floors, the only thing that we really could do in the original TR1 engine was essentially swap rooms. We could build two rooms that were identically sized and we could swap them, so long as Lara wasn't in that room basically. We actually managed to get quite a bit from that, and this sand puzzle was basically this kind of concept of if you were to pull out the support of the floor then the whole room would crumble and fall apart above and you'd get a completely different layout so you could essentially move across the room in two different ways.
Botta: Right. The whole, real, sort of nature of Lara pulling out a foundation of a column be damned.
Toby: Yeah, exactly, yeah, and that was pretty hard for us as well, because I mean, we've got to sell the column; we just had to have like a block there you pulled out and the world sort of rumbled and when you went upstairs it was all different. But of course, fabulous new technology.
Botta: That's right, now, you go down in the room and it rumbles and some sand falls through, and then you go back up and the room's changed.
Toby: That's good, yeah.
Botta: We've come a long way in over a decade.
Toby: That's actually one of the things I wanted to do, was to be able to show the actual changes, basically just sort of fake an animation of the change in the environment. We actually did that a little bit in the original TR1 on the last level, where we actually cut away and showed an animated object and then we did the room swap and that makes it a lot stronger. But this particular one, even you guys couldn't chew off, could you? A whole room collapsing and turning into a different one...
Botta: Yeah, that was, we tried to pitch that and the producers came back and said no, you don't get to build two versions of this room. So we did one and we did what we could. It still sells it, I think, at least as well as the original Tomb Raider did.
Toby: Grrrr!
[ * * * ]
Botta: All right, so this is the, originally it was a series of columns with fire in the middle that you had to time jumping across to get to the piece at the end, and there was water on the sides. So our first little pillar here is the homage to the original Tomb Raider pillars, and the rest of the room we completely changed. Yeah, so now there's still lots of fire, but we've added more timing elements to it to make it harder.
Toby: Originally, I mean, the whole point of the room, actually was that there was actually, it was all about the fact that Lara worked like clockwork, so if you kind of start a jump at certain point, once she lands there's only basically, there's a specific point when she can jump again, and it's not like it's any time, even if you push the button earlier, it's still going to be that specific time. So you can actually do what, like three or four jumps in a row, and you will always jump basically, exactly at the same point. So we'd been training people to jump from the very edge, but what we did was we stuck this sort of start line a bit earlier, so that if you start, if you literally jump or started running from there and then jumped, then you could make the entire series of jumps in one go, right. And that was the only real way to essentially get through it without being burned. In the original Tomb Raider what happened if you walked into fire was that a tiny little sprite flame would come out the back of her shorts which was telling you that she was on fire and then you could jump into the water. So, this actually ended up being possibly one of the biggest, sort of hardest parts in the whole game so I think everyone that played had a massive amount of difficulty trying to actually do it and from what I understand I think most people defaulted to literally just running through the fire and taking health packs until they could pick up the thing at the far end and jump in the water to save themselves which was, well, it didn't end up being exactly what I was hoping for.
Botta: And probably not as fun as you'd originally intended. So we tried to make it more fun this time, not so cruel.
Toby: Yeah.
Botta: Yeah.
[Main Anniversary Page | Midas Walkthrough]
Botta: This is the sort of, the little nook before the main cistern, with the rats; everybody loves the rats. I know when we were making the game, once the rats got in, everybody was like 'that's my favorite animal in the game!' They just look so cute when they run around. Then they bite you. Yeah, so we had to put rats back in, everybody dug them.
[ * * * ]
Botta: Yeah. All right, this was the big sort of cistern, underneath the Greece level, where all the sewage from everything rained down into.
Toby: Yeah, I mean, the goal with this was to [sort of] just create a massive, water based uber puzzle basically.
Botta: Which it still is.
Toby: It still is; it was a pretty frightening, I mean, a frightening level when you walk into it to actually work out where you can go, where you should go, and that was one of the real challenges, trying to balance this room in the first game. You know, when you give the player as many options as it looks like they have, it's extremely difficult to tell where they should try and actually start going and exploring. Especially since most of the actual places that you can see are physically locked off by the other level or by some other kind of door mechanism.
Botta: Yeah, and we sort of kept that theme when we redid it, I mean, it's still sort of large sections of the room are visible but gated by water levels, or gates, or whaNot. So look, it's an authentic recreation of the original room.
Toby: And just as frightening looking.
Botta: Yeah, and just as frightening looking and overwhelming to the player.
Toby: [So yeah, and then,] our goal, basically with the side rooms in the original game was to [sort of] actually just to make life much more hellish for the player I think. That seemed to be our goal anyway, whereby you had to change the water level of the entire area more than once. So you had to do things in a prescribed order and you had no idea what that order was until you found out the hard way.
Botta: You were so cruel back then.
Toby: Yeah, it was a pretty evil part of the level I'd have to say. It was hard core.
Botta: Yep. When we remade this room we decided we wanted to cut off all the side rooms and just make them like these little nooks in the wall, so you never had to leave the space of the main area. You could be there when the water levels changed and what not. So that part is missing.
Toby: That's good.
Botta: But I think it turns out, a little bit, a little bit better.
[ * * * ]
Toby: And then you of course, you and your having to do everything twice as extreme, you changed it from one centaur crashing out of a statue to two.
Botta: That's right, we had to ramp it up for the kids. Kids nowadays, they like it hardcore. So [yeah], we not only made it two centaurs but we made the centaurs twice as big, too.
Toby: Yes, of course.
Botta: So it's four times the difficulty of the original! But, in our defense, we did make the centaurs less cheap than they were in Tomb Raider 1. I remember playing this and it was like they just had machine gun fireballs coming out of their arms.
Toby: Bone chips they were.
Botta: That was a bone chip?
Toby: Yeah, the whole kind of concept with the beasts, the evil beasts, is that they were all sort of firing off bits of themselves, little sacks of fiery doom and little bone chips at you.
Botta: That's a red fireball dude, not a bone chip.
Toby: No, it's not a fireball, right! In the original it literally looks like a sort of fleshy sack that comes flying towards you and then when it bursts it ignites.
Botta: So that's how the igniting happened.
Toby: Well, in my head, that's how it worked!
Botta: All right, there you go, now we know.
[ * * * ]
Toby: So in the original game, when you actually arrive at Tihocan's tomb, basically Pierre's already there, beaten you to it, and he just kind of opens fire on you and you essentially gun him down. He's already grabbed the Scion, so you gun him down and you take his stuff. So I decided that that was not so good for a couple of reasons. We wanted to add a bit more significance to her first kill and we also wanted to, well, we didn't like the idea that Pierre beat her to it. He's always kind of one step ahead in the original. It was better that Lara sort of wins but he gets the drop on her. Another thing we changed is that we showed a little bit of what Tihocan's about because in the original game it's just, she finally goes in and reads about him on the tomb wall but we wanted a little bit more information about what's going on with old Tihocan.
[Main Anniversary Page | Tihocan Walkthrough | Peru Commentary | Egypt Commentary]
Walkthrough text copyright © 2008- Stellalune (). Commentary text is part of Tomb Raider: Anniversary and is copyright © Eidos Interactive, Ltd. All rights reserved.