Tomb Raider turned thirty this October. On 21 October 2026, 80.lv published an interview by David Jagneaux with Raul Siqueira, Game Director at Crystal Dynamics, about what the original game established for 3D space and what survives into Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis — a reimagining of Lara’s first adventure, built by Crystal Dynamics with Flying Wild Hog, due 12 February 2027 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2.
The interview is a level-design conversation rather than a marketing one, and there is a design problem at the centre of it that any environment artist or spatial designer will recognise.
What 1996 established
When the original arrived, fully three-dimensional action-adventure games were still working out their own rules. 80.lv’s framing of what made its environments different is accurate: they were not backdrops, and not corridors connecting encounters. Players had to study their surroundings, work out how spaces connected, judge distances, and find routes through architecture that looked impassable at first.
Siqueira’s own assessment of what lasted:
I think the original Tomb Raider was a pioneer for what we currently know as a 3D action-adventure game. Some concepts from it obviously went through iteration as time went by; things like controls and combat have primarily changed a lot, however the core of exploration and navigation still holds up to this day.
Controls and combat dated. Spatial reasoning did not. That split is the useful observation for anyone designing navigable 3D space today — the input layer is fashion, the legibility of the volume is not.
On why learning the architecture itself mattered:
It speaks to the cerebral nature of the original game, asking players to slow down and pay attention to their surroundings as a way of finding the path forward. It helps put players in the shoes of an explorer; it serves the fantasy of playing as someone like Lara Croft.
That is a precise statement of a mechanic doing narrative work. The exploring is not a theme applied to the level; the level is built so that the act of reading it produces the feeling of exploring.
The remake problem
Here is the design tension the piece is really about. The original gave players very little direct guidance. Thirty years later, the default vocabulary is objective markers, highlighted routes and contextual hints — and a remake has to be approachable to players who grew up with those while preserving the satisfaction of working a space out unaided.
Crystal Dynamics’ answer: let players decide how much assistance they receive. Legacy of Atlantis has optional guidance systems.
It is the obvious solution and it is harder than it sounds, because optional assistance has to be designed twice. A level that is legible without markers and a level that is legible with them are not the same level, and a hint system bolted onto a space designed for unaided reading tends either to trivialise it or to point at the wrong thing. Siqueira frames the goal as removing barriers without removing the thrill of discovery, which is the right target and the one that most accessibility-in-games work has found genuinely difficult.
Thirty years of institutional memory, and its limit
One answer is bleaker than it first appears:
We have a surprising number of people who have been working on this franchise for over 20 years, but unfortunately no one from the original six devs from the very first game.
Six developers made the original. Twenty-plus years of continuity on the franchise, and zero continuity with the people who designed the thing being remade. So the remake is working from the artefact, not from the authors — reading the original’s intentions out of its geometry, the same way a player does.
That is a preservation argument as much as a development one. The game survives, the drawings survive in the form of the shipped levels, and the design reasoning behind them survives only insofar as it is legible in the result. It is a near-exact parallel to recreating the Apollo DSKY from archived engineering documents: when the people are gone, the documents and the object are the brief.
Siqueira also discusses how camera technology changed the construction of environments and challenges, and why preserving the original’s sense of isolation remains important — the fuller answers are worth reading in the original interview.
Sources
- Tomb Raider Director Explains How 3D Level Design Has Evolved Over 30 Years — 80 Level
- Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, Traversal & Movement Reimagined — Play Tomb Raider on YouTube