In-Depth: Inside The Making Of Tomb Raider: Underworld

As custodian of the Tomb Raider series since 2003, Redwood City-based developer Crystal Dynamics initially planned Underworld as "an 'easy' sequel" to Tomb Raider: Legend, but as Lindstrom points out, "it never quite works out that way."

The following excerpts from Game Developer magazine's recent postmortem, published in the June/July 2009 issue, illustrate how Crystal overcome a number of significant obstacles along the way to realizing the dark adventure.

As Lindstrom explained, "Previews for Tomb Raider: Legend were very encouraging, and we felt that there was still plenty of unrealized potential to tap in the existing feature set. Enough so, the reasoning went, that we could focus on content and leveraging existing functionality to develop a bigger and better Lara Croft adventure in less time. In many ways this is what the team accomplished, but as is always the case in game development, reality was more complex than we anticipated."