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: So, mining tunnels, so it was one of the places where we actually did manage to show a bit of the fiction of the world, having 'Natla Technology' crates everywhere and her minions have been mining away at the site trying to uncover the secrets of the past and we built into that, we also used this in the first game, is having your weapons removed, adding to the sense of fear of the area basically. But one of the weird things about it was that there's nothing really stopping you from missing the whole section out running forwards. Basically, there was the cowboy guy, who got merged with Larson in the remake; he was basically standing in a room waiting for you. If you went in there without guns he would pretty much shoot you to pieces, but it was still possible to actually basically just run past him if you had enough health packs and then carry on and not ever do any of it.
Botta: Right, so we wanted to address that in the remake and also some of the, we wanted to [sort of] refine the mines down to a more manageable set of gameplay areas. A lot of people, I think, found the mines to be fairly confusing to play through, so we really simplified it down to a couple of key areas that were sort of thematically the same as the original and then still kept the fight with the now merged Larson slash cowboy character at the end, but you can't run through it any more.
[ * * * ]
Toby: So coming to rework or rewrite the story for Anniversary, basically the goal was not to rewrite it but to invest it with some kind of emotional depth. And the point of the story became very quickly how far Lara will go for her obsession, how, morally, she's willing to stretch herself in order to just achieve her goals, because she's extremely single minded. And the Larson character therefore, expanded into the real test for her of, [you know,] are you going to shoot some guy just in order to get what you want. And I think that in games most people don't actually think about what they're actually doing—they are literally kind of taking somebody's life in order to achieve their goals and I wanted, because we had so little in the way of human killing in Tomb Raider One, the remake gave us an opportunity to really focus on how, what a difficult choice that really should be for a person. So Larson is a very ambiguous character, he's sort of quite a nice guy, sort of he's an enemy, but he helps Lara a little bit on the sly—obviously likes her a bit. They have a bit of chemistry going but obviously Lara has no interest really. And it was this point where we actually really wanted to connect the player with the experience of they want to move forward, Lara wants to move forward and this guy essentially is standing in the way. We basically created the 'Super Action' and instead of it being really for gameplay, it's really for an emotional connection of the player with this act that is basically Lara stepping too far over the line—over the moral line—and taking down this guy, and feeling bad about it.
[ * * * ]
Botta: Originally the Kid and the fight with the shotgun guy who [I think] didn't even have a name in Tomb Raider 1, who's—
Toby: Shotgun guy.
Botta: Shotgun guy, who's now Kold Kincaid, they were sort of separated and when we were remaking the game the notion of a guy on a skateboard in this underground skate park seemed sort of ridiculous.
Toby: It was pretty funny though in the original.
Botta: So we removed the skateboard boss fight from the game and instead combined that with the fight with the shotgun guy outside of the pyramid which I think was sort of a good decision.
Toby: Yeah and this is the fight which we really went all out on in terms of the cinematic and how intense the whole thing was partially because the previous fight with Larson was basically just shooting, it was just extremely simple in terms of the setup, it was much more of an emotional thing, so we wanted to turn Kid and Kold's fight into this [you know,] massive extravaganza, I suppose.
[Main Anniversary Page | Natla's Mines Walkthrough]
Toby: When we were working out the baddies for the first game we wanted to have some supernatural sort of creatures, but at the same time I didn't want a muddied and confused sort of that magic is, you know, anything can happen, type of game. So the concept of these Atlantean creatures came along and we used those to be both the mummies and the centaurs and so forth and we kind of disguised them for the early levels in Egypt. When you first see them, they're really well bandaged and then as the level progresses their bandages fall off and then you see there's nasty things going on underneath and then you finally get to the last level and you find out these things are actually being birthed inside the pyramid, so.
Botta: The Atlanteans were smart enough to make crazy, rabid creatures but not smart enough to make skin, eh?
Toby: Ah, you know, they're going to die anyway.
Botta: One step closer.
[ * * * ]
Botta: So the center of pyramid sort of was this giant shaft that went up the middle. In the original game, Lara just sort of jumped from one periphery room to the other off of this main area, so we really wanted to get Lara back into this big, vast, space with the constant fear of falling into the lava in the bottom. And so we cut off all of the side rooms and ended up actually taking some of them and reordering the areas and putting them later in the level, but we really just wanted to let Lara really traverse this big old giant shaft of nothing that leads up to the Scion room at the top.
[ * * * ]
Toby: So, we had this concept in the original one of Lara meeting, you know, her ultimate nemesis, a copy of her spawned by the pyramid under Natla's orders that did exactly what she did. And I remember the whole concept of the monsters from Tomb Raider 1 in the pyramid was that they had no skin on them, right. So I thought it was really bizarre. I really liked this character, because the doppelganger was a super skinny version of Lara with, so naked that she didn't even have skin on. I wanted to have this real kind of repulsion, but at the same time I caricatured her toward the manga sort of sense of what is attractive. So really big eyes, big cute manga eyes and stuff like this. So that when you got to look at her, it was the most disturbing thing that you could possibly see, this mirror of yourself. Ah, yeah, it was great.
Botta: You're sick.
[Main Anniversary Page | Great Pyramid Walkthrough]
Toby: Obviously this is, as the culmination of the story, I wanted to get that feeling that Lara really had reached her goal and you can't ask for better than what Natla offers to her, it's not just all of the knowledge that she could ever want of the past, but it's also real, ultimate power. So—
Botta: And the culmination of her father's quest to find this artifact.
Toby: Her father's quest, and then, you know, it leads into the mother's quest from Legend as well. So it's really major and because we'd pushed how far she was willing to go earlier on with Larson, I wanted really for the player to wonder, even though it's a remake and we basically know what choice she's going to make, she fundamentally is a good person and that that would be a really tough choice for her to make. When she does finally throttle back from her own obsessions and choose the good path, I think it makes it a real moment.
[ * * * ]
Toby: Obviously after you understand what Natla's been up to we wanted to show, in the original, sort of what the extremes of her sickness would create—you know, her mental sickness. And this sort of weird, freaky, torso-boss fellow was what we came up with. I think having him sort of shuffling around after you is pretty disturbing.
Botta: I agree. He is my favorite boss in the original and I think my favorite boss in the new one, in Anniversary. He's just so gross looking and the way he moves is all freaky and mutated, it's cool.
[ * * * ]
Botta: So thank you for playing through Tomb Raider Anniversary and listening to all of the director's commentary.
Toby: Yep.
Botta: It's actually been moderately fun.
Toby: Yeah.
Botta: Hopefully you didn't mind listening to us yap on and you garnered some information that you were actually interested in about the history of Tomb Raider and the remake and that's it, thank you very much.
Toby: Yep, thanks!
[Main Anniversary Page | Final Conflict Walkthrough]
The 'Style Units' is a sort of quasi-level unlocked when you complete the entire game with all relics. For details on how to access it, see the Rewards page. The commentary track for this area was provided by Anniversary Art Director Andy Wood.
Andy: Hi, my name is Andy Wood, and I'm the art director on Tomb Raider Anniversary. Welcome to the style units. The style units are four sectors, each corresponding to a quarter of Tomb Raider Anniversary. We have a unit for Peru, one for Greece, one for Egypt, and a final one for the Lost City. Each one of these areas was kind of a practice area for the art team, something that we used in pre-production where we could practice our art style, and try and establish what kind of reference material and architecture we wanted to use, and to really nail down the look of the game before we moved into full production.
[Main Anniversary Page | Rewards | Egypt Commentary]
Walkthrough text copyright © 2008- Stellalune (). Commentary text is part of Tomb Raider: Anniversary and is copyright © Eidos Interactive, Ltd. All rights reserved.