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A Look At Laura Croft: One Of Gaming’s Most Prominent Female Stars

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A Look At Laura Croft:

Lara Croft is undeniably one of the most famous video-game heroines of all time, bringing women into the world of game protagonists and representing a huge change in the graphic style of action adventure games, which had so frequently been without a compelling main character. Unlike her predecessors, Lara had a full background story (which only changed a few times) – the aristocratic attendee of boarding school and finishing school, Lara was betrothed to an Earl before an plane crash left her stranded in the Himalayas for two weeks, forcing her to learn how to survive on her own.

Not that she was a delicate private-school flower, mind you – she could rock climb, knew acrobatics, and had a deep interest in the foreign and mystical. Rejecting the comforts of her privileged home life, Lara wrote travel books to fund her expeditions to fight ancient mutants and was a strong, powerful woman for men to admire and women to aspire to.

 

When the character of Lara Croft was first invented, he was a male archaeologist with a hat and a whip. Sound familiar? That’s what Eidos said and he became a she – originally a South-American woman named Laura Cruz, the company insisted that she be more “UK-friendly” and its employees pawed through the Derby phonebook for English sounding names. Now British and aristocratic, she was easier to sell; what made things even easier was making her visually appealing to male characters. According to game legend, Toby Guard increased Lara’s breast size by 150% instead of

 

50% as a pure accident, but the team and company agreed they were better that way. Lara was the beautiful princess who didn’t need rescuing – she did a great job of rescuing herself. She can’t be that cool all the time though, can she? With so many stresses and thrills, there must be a way for Ms Croft to wind down in her spare time other than polishing her collection of dinosaur skulls and shooting at targets. Funnily enough, one of the characteristics they built into Lara’s backstory is her skills in needlework and tapestry – I suppose it makes sense, but it’s hard to imagine the butt-kicking, world-saving heroine doing some cross-stitch while watching JeremyKyle. After finding and killing an actual Bigfoot, she could probably afford to retire and spend the rest of her life playing her own console games, or experience tomb raider slots.

 

Everyone needs downtime, some time to relax, and the challenging life of a gun-toting archaeologist would weigh heavy on most. There is an idea of a Lara Croft. An unfeasibly sexy woman of Olympic-level athleticism, a collector of antiques and an upper-class child of tragedy, she is the female version of some of the best male action heroes we know like Indiana Jones and Bruce Wayne. In 2006 Guinness World Records named her the most successful human video game heroine of all time, but you can bet that like the rest of us, she enjoys life’s simple pleasures too.


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