Richard Morton

Job: Lead Level Designer

Qualifications: O- Level in Art and Design.
Time in the industry: Nearly 19 years.
Recognisable work: The first 5 levels of the Last Revelation.

An interview with Richard Morton
Richard Morton talks about Core Design's Anniversary Edition.
Copyright Planet Lara 24th July 2007

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First of all we would like to congratulate you on Lara receiving the converted ‘blue plaque’ award. Will it be sad to see the Derby offices go or do you focus on the positive of Lara being acknowledged with such an honour?

Richard: It’s great that Lara has received the Blue Plaque, regardless of where her current home resides.

How did the Anniversary Edition come about? Did Eidos request a remake specifically for the 10th anniversary or was the game concept left to Core Design’s imagination?

Richard: Core developed the idea, myself and a few others came up with the idea and suggested making it. We knew we wanted to remake the original for the new generation and celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the first game.

The timeline of events has been subject to much speculation among the fans. When did work first begin on Tomb Raider Anniversary Edition?

Richard: Work first began in late 2005, we had a year to finish it which would have meant the game would have been released in time for xmas 2006, the 10th Anniversary year.

At the time you were making this game was Toby Gard already working with Crystal Dynamics on Tomb Raider: Legend? Was it ever a possibility that he’d be working with your team?

Richard: Yes, Toby was working on Legend at the same time as we were working on 10th Anniversary. There was never any talk of Toby working with us though.

A lot of fans are confused as to why the project was actually cancelled, it seemed as though it was almost complete. Was the cancellation because of the series changing developers? If so, why was the game commissioned in the first place?

Richard: It was a strange time really, we’d just finished Free Running for PSP/PS2 and had developed a really good control system and camera, we started messing about with a Lara model on the PSP in the Free Running engine and the idea of 10th Anniversary was born. We suggested it to Eidos who allowed us to develop it, but when Core was sold to Rebellion it seemed like they didn’t want the franchise to go ‘out-of-house’ hence the cancellation of our project.

Other than the graphics, how does the Anniversary Edition differ from the original Tomb Raider game? Was it a priority for Core to stay as true to the original as possible?

Richard: We wanted to stay true to the original in terms of story and level flow, but we also wanted to offer the player something new in terms of moves and puzzles, so many of the big puzzles were twisted around to be different but still familiar to the player. We wanted to make the good bits even better and re-imagine the bad bits into something spectacular, we even planned an new extended ending level.