Postmortem: Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider: Underworld

This in-depth postmortem from the creators of the latest Tomb Raider title, originally printed in Game Developer magazine earlier this year, explains exactly what went right and wrong during the making of the critically acclaimed franchise update.

Crystal Dynamics: The concept phase of Tomb Raider: Underworld began while its predecessor, Tomb Raider: Legend, was in final QA and nearing submission. 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.