Core Design

» see core-design.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nine people left Gremlin Graphics and registered a company in Derby on 13 May 1988. It was called Megabrite for five months and became Core Design that October. The first eight years were the ordinary British software business of the period: Rick Dangerous, Chuck Rock, Thunderhawk, Fighting Force, work that paid the rent and got reviewed politely. CentreGold bought the studio on 25 October 1994. Eidos bought CentreGold in April 1996.

Tomb Raider shipped later that year and rearranged everything around it. Eidos went from a pretax loss of 2.6 million dollars to a profit of 14.5 million, which is a number that changes what a company believes about itself. Sony signed an exclusivity agreement in September 1997 putting the sequels on PlayStation first. Core delivered one game a year after that, through 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000, which is a schedule nobody in games runs now for a reason.

The reason arrived in 2003. Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness had been announced in March 2002, slipped from a November date into the following spring, and then got pushed out on 20 June 2003 anyway so it would land near the second Lara Croft film. It was visibly unfinished. Eidos moved the series to Crystal Dynamics in California, Jeremy Heath-Smith left, and most of the people who had built the first one had already gone. Rebellion Developments bought what was left in May 2006 and kept it running as Rebellion Derby. In January 2010 the office lease came up, no restructuring worked, and the studio closed on 17 March.

What reached Turkey was the game and not the company. In the late nineties a PC game arrived here as a disc passed along, and a disc carries a title screen rather than a corporate history. Eidos was on the title screen. Core Design was somewhere in a manual that was not in the sleeve. I knew what Tomb Raider was for about ten years before I knew who had written it, and that gap is not an accident of distance. It is what happens to a developer whose publisher has a better logo.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the treadmill ~

A game a year is not a plan, it is a debt schedule. Every Tomb Raider between 1997 and 2000 was built on the same engine as the first with the deadline set by a christmas that had already been promised to retail. The team knew it. Several of them said so afterward. The fourth one was written to end the series on purpose, with Lara buried under a temple, and the fifth one came out anyway because a company that has made a franchise cannot stop making it.

Angel of Darkness was the attempt to break the cycle: new engine, new platform, a darker story with a second playable character. It needed years it was never given. Eidos had a film opening in july 2003 and a share price that moved with it, so the game shipped in june with systems half wired together. The reviews did the rest.

~ what eidos kept ~

The detail that decides this story is in the 2006 sale. Rebellion bought Core's assets and its people. Eidos kept the Core Design brand and it kept Tomb Raider. So the studio continued to exist as a room full of the same staff at the same desks, under a name owned by a company in Oxford, while the franchise those staff had invented was being made three thousand miles away by people they had never met.

Rebellion Derby did four years of contract and licensed work in that condition. When the lease question came up in 2010 there was nothing structural holding the office together, because everything that had made it worth holding together had been assigned to somebody else in 2003 and again in 2006.

~ the long tail ~

Toby Gard, who designed Lara Croft and left Core in 1997 over how she was being marketed, ended up at Crystal Dynamics working on the reboot. Jeremy and Adrian Heath-Smith started Circle Studio, which lasted about two years. The unreleased Core version of the first game's remake, the one built in Derby and cancelled in 2006, leaked out years later and gets passed around by people who want to see what the studio would have done with its own game.

Tomb Raider is still in production and will outlive everyone who was in that room in 1996. The thing that did not survive is the arrangement where a nine-person company in the English midlands could build a character that ends up on a film poster and still not own her. That was not a tragedy specific to Core. It was the standard contract.

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