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Core Design is a video game developer best known for creating the popular Tomb Raider series.

The studio is based in Derby, a city in the United Kingdom. It is owned by Eidos Interactive, having been part of distribution company CentreGold when it was acquired by Eidos in 1996. Eidos subsequently sold most of CentreGold, but retained Core Design.

Core Design has developed numerous games, including the following titles:

Corporation
Rick Dangerous
Chuck Rock
War Zone
Heimdall
Wonder Dog
Thunderhawk AH-73M
BC Racers
Shellshock
Tomb Raider
Fighting Force
Herdy Gerdy

Tomb Raider

The company is most widely known for the Tomb Raider series, created by Toby Gard and Paul Howard Douglas, which was released in 1996 and followed by several sequels. The success of Tomb Raider and its subsequent sequels played a huge part in keeping Eidos Interactive financially solvent. In 2003, however, parent company Eidos took the Tomb Raider franchise away from Core Design after the sixth installment, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, which was a commercial failure. The franchise was given to Crystal Dynamics, another Eidos-owned studio. This prompted many key members of the Core Design team to leave the company and establish a game development team of their own, Circle Studio. Core Design still exists, but in a significantly diminished form.

Tomb Raider film royalties

When Paramount Pictures wanted to adapt Lara Croft's story for the big screen, it entered into negotiations with Core Design and Eidos; Paramount's contract with these two companies must rank as some of the shrewdest negotiating ever achieved. Among other provisions, the contract is believed to have awarded to Eidos only a few million dollars as a licensing fee, but no share of the film's takings .

For some reason, Core Design felt it was more important to secure merchandising rights over any share of box office takings. Perhaps Jeremy Heath-Smith of Core Design was considering George Lucas' lucrative mid-'70s merchandising deals with Fox over Star Wars. However, there were some fatal errors to this train of thought: not only was Lara Croft already an established brand (rather than an original IP), but the merchandise had no clear target market; Lara Croft fans saw no need to purchase Tomb Raider toys when they already had all the Tomb Raider games.

Paramount Pictures invested $80m in making the the film, which grossed over $130m in US box office alone (international box office grosses were between $250-300m). It is unknown how many toys and other crossover merchandise were manufactured, nor how many were sold.

At the time the movie was released, there was some criticism that no tie-in game was planned for simultaneous release. This choice was perhaps understandable, as Core Design believed the mere appearance of a major motion picture based on a video game character would help sell further copies of the existing Tomb Raider titles—as indeed it did.

Siding with Sony

Despite a brief history of producing impressive work on SEGA consoles (Thunderhawk for Mega CD was arguably the only game that took advantage of the platfotm), Core would later become easily influenced by the persuasive tactics of Sony Computer Entertainment. The first occasion was after the release of the original Tomb Raider, which had debuted on the SEGA Saturn platform ahead of the Playstation version (although both had been in simultaneous development).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Core Design ]

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