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Planet Lara’s original roots started way back in 1998 when I was developing my first website. Hosted on ‘Freeserve’ web-space I got free with my dial-up internet connection, it was my first experience of web authoring. At this stage the site was called ‘Ridgeon Net’. There was a Tomb Raider page but also a few other pages about other things I was interested in..., most of which I can’t remember now!

After a little help from my uncle, I got the website up and running and put a free web counter on it. After a few weeks, I realised the counter was going up, and up, and up! I eventually got a bit fanatical about the counter and realised the Tomb Raider page was becoming ever popular.

After a couple of years, tinkering around and making a few new versions of the site more focussed toward Tomb Raider, Lara Croft 2000 UK was born. Hosted on Geocities, this site become extremely popular and it soon became apparent that it had outgrown its capacity. Calling it Lara Croft 2000 UK caused a few problems because I ended up renaming the site every year!

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Later down the line, I was given a domain name for Christmas with some advert-free hosting and that’s when things really kicked off. The site was then hosted at www.ridgeon-network.co.uk/lara and gradually became one of the biggest, and most popular Lara Croft: Tomb Raider websites ever made.

A couple of years later I decided enough was enough and the site needed a proper name and its own domain. PlanetLara.com was born and the site continued to expand and drastically increased traffic. Planet Lara has literally been the biggest and most successful project I have worked on so far and although I’m not working on it as much now, it still remains a large part of my life. In 2003, I created and started Planet Lara Interactive, the online community side of Planet Lara that has grown to one of the most popular and active Tomb Raider communities available. PLi was built from scratch and expanded over many years. It is still improved on now!

In 2006 Planet Lara brought to the table a new and exciting commemorative project aimed at celebrating the 10 successful years of Lara Croft and Tomb Raider. The project was known as Tomb Raider Anniversary.com and became home to rare and exclusive treasures from Tomb Raider past. This was an immense success with the community and remains one of our most successful projects to date. A few months later Planet Lara revealed its new, and somewhat controversial, project commemorating Core Design and their cancelled Anniversary Edition game. We were extremely privileged to be able to share a combination of never-before seen animation sequences, cut-scenes, trailers, artwork and screenshots from the game, all topped off with exclusive Core Design interviews.

Later in the year we unveiled our popular ‘Original Tomb Raider Soundtrack’ collection. A dedicated website offering fans the chance to listen to and download their favourite scores from a decade of Tomb Raider. 2007 even saw the launch of an Official Planet Lara MySpace page!

I owe a lot to Planet Lara and the people that have made it what it is today. The project has taught me everything I know and has set me up well with starting and running my business, Ridgeon Network.

Last year I decided to take a backseat with Planet Lara and hand over most of the updating and maintenance to my good friend Dan Barnes. Dan is now taking the site to fresh levels in creativity and adding content based on the new games. Everything is looking really impressive! I look forward to seeing the new developments and maybe coming back to do more bits on the site when time permits. Where will we be in another 10 years? The future is still bright for Planet Lara!

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I’d personally like to thank the following people for their part in Planet Lara.


Daniel Barnes – For his extensive hard work and patience with Planet Lara. The time and effort he has put in has been priceless!
Chris Jager – My uncle who helped me into web design with a few coding tweaks and bought me my first domain and webspace for Christmas!
Noel Gillam – This man has put up with me and Planet Lara for many years. Noel still supplies the hosting for the major parts of Planet Lara and what a sterling service he provides!
Ian Horsman – Ian helped me get to grips with the ASP programming language which I still use extensively nearly everyday! I’m looking forward to the projects myself and Ian will be working on in the future.
Abi Hirst – Thanks to Abi for her years of moderating service on Planet Lara!
The dedicated fans! – Without the fans, Lara look-alikes, Fan Artists, Fan authors and everyone else… Planet Lara would not be what it is today!