Tomb Raider is a 1996 action-adventure game developed by the British studio Core Design and published by Eidos Interactive. It was first released on the Sega Saturn and MS-DOS before arriving on the Sony PlayStation, and it introduced Lara Croft, a globe-trotting English archaeologist who would go on to become one of gaming's most recognisable characters.
The game casts the player as Lara on the hunt for an ancient artifact called the Scion, a quest that runs from the mountains of Peru through Greece and Egypt to a lost Atlantean city. Played from a third-person perspective in fully 3D environments, it combines exploration, environmental puzzle-solving, platforming, and gunfights with wildlife and human enemies. Its level design emphasised verticality and spatial reasoning: long stretches of jumping, climbing, swimming, and lever-pulling through largely empty, atmospheric ruins, punctuated by sudden bursts of combat.
Tomb Raider was a critical and commercial success and is often cited as a landmark in gaming's move to 3D. It helped define the template for the 3D action-adventure on the early PlayStation, and Lara Croft quickly became a pop-culture icon who appeared on magazine covers, in advertising, and later in feature films. The game spawned a long-running franchise: direct sequels through the original Core Design era, the Crystal Dynamics games, and the 2013 reboot that shares the Tomb Raider name.
The original remains available digitally on storefronts such as Steam and GOG, and was remastered alongside its first two sequels in the 2024 collection Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, which offers both updated and original visuals across modern platforms.
