Toby Gard
Toby Gard is a former character designer (and one of the original designers of Lara Croft) at Core Design, the company that developed the popular Tomb Raider video game series. Core Design developed titles 1 to 6, but Eidos (copyright holder of the Tomb Raider series) moved the project to Crystal Dynamics. Toby Gard left Core Design after the first Tomb Raider was released. In the documentary Ten Years of Tomb Raider: A GameTap Retrospective, Gard states that he left because he didn't agree with the idea of marketing Lara's sex appeal (e.g.for advertising Tomb Raider II some commercials didn't depict Lara as the archaeologist Gard had hoped). Later he developed the Xbox game Galleon. After finishing that game in 2004, he was hired by Eidos to work with Crystal Dynamics on the next title in the series named Tomb Raider Legend. At present (2009) he is working for Crystal Dynamics on forthcoming projects.
Quotes
- "Toby stood up and said I've got this idea about doing a game based on pyramids ... I've always wanted to do a game based around pyramids to. For some reason I really fancied this idea about pyramids with a Pharaoh, and having to go tunnel under the pyramids. It was just as silly as that. It didn't have characters, it was more just conceptually let's do a game based on pyramids".[1]
- ""She (Lara) was made to be as quintessentially British as possible. Its generally held that unless you have an American hero you won't be able to sell a game in America. I thought that by deliberately reversing as many rules as possible, a female, strong but not tarty. A British not American lead character, and American not British villains, we'd make something that was unusual and fresh."[2]
See also
External Links
- Toby's entry at IMDB
- Toby Gard interviewed in 1998 [3]
- Tomb Raider: Underworld - Beneath the Surface Part 2 ((YouTube)
- Toby Gard discussion at the official Eidos forums, 2005 [4].
- Toby reveals his plans for Lara to the BBC (2006)[5]
