Eidos Interactive co-founder recalls "love at first sight" experience seeing Lara Croft for the first time

As the co-founder of Games Workshop, co-creator of Fighting Fantasy, and co-founder of Eidos Interactive, you could certainly say Sir Ian Livingstone is behind some of Britain's best when it comes to gaming. After a panel at San Diego Comic-Con Málaga, we caught up with him for an interview about his storied career.

We couldn't resist asking Livingstone to reminisce about his first experiences with Tomb Raider, and he said he fell in love with the IP as soon as he saw it. "So being the games geek guy at Eidos, I was tasked with looking at all their games in development. So I drove to Derby, to Core Design, met Jeremy Heath-Smith, who's the managing director, went into his offices and he showed me around all the games that were in development, and some were okay, but nothing like, wow, until the very last room," Livingstone began.

"And I walked in and you could say, in a strange way, it's love at first sight, I guess. There was this female character on the screen and she was moving into the screen. So most games in those days, in the mid-nineties, were 2D side-scrolling games. And here's one of the very first games with not only a 3D character, but a female 3D character. And the camera was also moving as well, so you could look up and down."

"And so it had incredible technology, incredible graphics, and this unique character. And it had these three pillars of exploration, puzzle-solving, and combat. And I thought, wow," Livingstone continued. Of course, he wasn't alone in thinking that Lara Croft was going to be a hit, but even he underestimated just how many people also fell in love at first sight. Livingstone predicted they'd sell around 100,000 copies of the first Tomb Raider, and instead they shipped 7 million units. Quite the increase.

If you want to check out the full interview, and find out how Lara Croft was nearly called Laura Cruz, we've got the whole video below: