Tomb Raider 2013 drawing fire for 'attempted rape' scene

Crystal Dynamics head Darrell Gallagher and game producer Ron Rosenberg expressed their views on reactions to the violent Tomb Raider trailer shown at E3.

In one part of the video, Lara appears to be fending off a would-be raper, kneeing him in the groin and struggling to shoot him when he pins her to the ground.





“To actually see what she goes through, to become hardened, to become this tomb raider than we know and love, or at least a new version of it," Gallagher told the Penny Arcade Report. "A big part of that journey is seeing some of the hits she’s taken along the way and why she had to get that inner strength and the inner core to become the woman that we all know. There is that sense of seeing it and being explicit about that. It’s part of the narrative.”

Rosenberg explained that the emphasis on Lara's suffering was intentional — and that their research into survivors of extreme situations revealed a common mantra: keep moving.

“You see that in the beginning of the game, where we begin to build her up and give her confidence to cross the ledge, cross the plane, she forages for food and she’s feeling really successful," Rosenberg said. "Then towards the end we start to really hit her, and to break her down. Her best friend is kidnapped, she’s taken hostage, she’s almost raped, we put her in this position where we turned her into a cornered animal.”

Tomb Raider, scheduled for release on March 5 of next year, is better considered as a reboot than a prequel. The Lara Croft that we've seen before is not necessarily the one we'll know by the end of the new game.

“They share many traits so you can recognize the iconography, it’s the same character, but it’s a more modern version," said Gallagher. "It doesn’t necessarily lead directly into Tomb Raider 1, with hot pants and a braid.”

"The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualized version of yesteryear," he said. "She literally goes from zero to hero... we're sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again."

It's some dark material, the type of content you might not expect from an action-adventure game like Tomb Raider. But Rosenberg isn't worried about alarming people too much. He says players will see right away that this is a darker, "more mature" version of Lara's story. He compared it to the origin story of a comic book like Spider-Man or Batman, saying he thinks it "has that feel to it."

"We're not trying to be over the top, shock people for shock's sake," he said. "We're trying to tell a great origin story."

GamePro Magazine came under fire last November for a cryptic tweet that read:
What does rape have to do with the #TombRaider reboot? Buy the 1st GamePro Quarterly & solve the mystery on page 49.