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A Game Boy Magazine Gave 2000's Tomb Raider a 10/10, Then Lowered the Score So It Wouldn't Beat Pokémon and Zelda
Core Design artist Matt Charlesworth says the Game Boy Color Tomb Raider began as a Flashback-style space prototype called Salvage, and that a magazine later walked back its perfect score because it was ranking above Nintendo's biggest games.
Charlesworth had done loading screens for Tomb Raider 3 when he started talking with coder Sean Dunlevy, who had just finished Fighting Force 64. Both wanted the new Game Boy Color. For Dunlevy it meant going back to low-level assembly on a simple 8-bit machine. For Charlesworth it meant learning pixel art, which he calls an art form that was “(at that time) dead on major home consoles.”
“After a month or two of prototyping, Sean and I had the framework of a cartoony space adventure with similar gameplay to Flashback / Another World, called Salvage,” he says. Then they noticed what they had. “We realised that we could make this into a pretty great portable TR game,” so they took it to Core Design boss Jeremy Smith and got the go-ahead.
The reasoning was simple. To them, Tomb Raider already felt like “a direct 3D evolution of games such as Prince Of Persia, Another World, and Flashback,” so a 2D version should play like those games. So the handheld Lara was built to move like the heroes of those side-scrolling games.
The team grew in pieces. Gameplay coder Ian Manders came from Rare, where he’d shipped Donkey Kong Country games on Game Boy and Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run on the Super Nintendo. Two animation graduates from Ballyfermot Animation College in Ireland, Fergus Duggan and Paschal McGuire, arrived at Core, and Duggan took over all the background art. Lee Pullen, whose pixel art defined the Chuck Rock characters, taught Charlesworth “a bunch about efficiently conveying motion” at very low resolution. Producer Troy Horton, Charlesworth’s late friend, kept it manageable.
It took about a year of “incredibly long hours,” and THQ published it. Then came the review score, and the magazine’s second thoughts about it. Charlesworth doesn’t name the magazine. He just calls the retcon “hilarious.”
This is the kind of story I love from the Game Boy era. A couple of people who wanted to work on smaller hardware built a space game nobody asked for, realized it was secretly the right shape for a famous character, and then made something good enough that a magazine got nervous about it. The retcon is funny, but it’s also a little sad. The reviewer liked it that much, and then someone decided a Tomb Raider game couldn’t outrank Nintendo’s own stars. If you have a Game Boy Color in a drawer, this is a good reason to find the cartridge.