Tomb Raider’s creators on how the game changed their lives: ‘Skint staff were suddenly pulling up in sports cars’

‘Giving Lara Croft pistols meant we could show off her acrobatics. And when she goes to Peru, we threw in a T rex!’

Paul Douglas, lead programmer and co-creator

I joined Core Design in the summer of 1994 and met Toby Gard, who showed me his concept sketches for Tomb Raider. He’d already come up with the title and drawn a mock-up box cover with a woman holding two pistols.

I was working on a golf game called The Scottish Open when Toby persuaded me that we should pitch his idea to Jeremy Heath-Smith, Core’s co-founder, who gave us the go-ahead to make a prototype. If I had stuck to the golf game, I would have had a much easier life.