Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft showrunner Tasha Huo has revealed that game developers Crystal Dynamics would "gently hint" at what could and couldn't be included in the new Netflix series – in case it overlapped with its new Tomb Raider title.
"What's funny is they're very close-lipped even to me about the video game, which I think is right because I would get too excited," Huo tells 12DOVE of the working relationship with Crystal Dynamics, who have shepherded the franchise since 2006's Tomb Raider: Legend.
"It was more [that] they would gently hint like, 'This works, this is OK, maybe don't do that because we might be thinking about that in the game'. No specifics, but that was kind of exciting."
On the collaborative process, Huo expressed surprise at how open playing in the Tomb Raider universe proved to be.
"I was actually surprised by how big the sandbox was. I could've chosen a lot of different directions and I really wanted to choose this bridge [between the Survivor Trilogy and original trilogy]," Huo explains.
"In the early days in formulating the overall story [and] the talks with Crystal Dynamics – they knew they had a game coming and it was a discussion about 'How does this fit into canon?' Because we wanted it to fit into canon and we didn't want it to be a random story that everyone kind of forgets and doesn't consider to be true to who Lara is."
A new Tomb Raider game, a "cinematic action-adventure", was announced back in 2022. Since then, there has been little in the way of updates – other than it's "progressing" nicely.
"I mean, doing a new Tomb Raider, the bar is so high. The longer you go, the expectation goes higher, so it's a huge, huge task, but things are progressing," Amazon Games studio head Christoph Hartmann told IGN back in August. "I mean, there's some really great ideas here."
A press release by publisher Amazon Games confirmed the new title would include "all the elements that have made Tomb Raider one of the most revered franchises in gaming, giving players control of the confident and multidimensional hero Lara Croft in an environment that rewards exploration and creative pathfinding, with mind-bending puzzles to solve, and a wide variety of enemies to face and overcome."
A new Tomb Raider remastered collection, featuring The Last Revelation, Chronicles, and Angel of Darkness, has just been announced and will be released in February.
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft is currently streaming on Netflix and picks up where the Survivor Trilogy left off. Following the events of 2018's Shadow of the Tomb Raider, a broken Lara (voiced by Hayley Atwell) must trek through temples and uncover ancient legends across the globe in order to stop a world-shattering event.
For more, check out our interview with Hayley Atwell, where the Mission: Impossible star outlines how the Netflix series aims to create a "more complicated" Lara Croft. Then dive into our picks for the best shows on Netflix.
