Lara Croft, The Bit Girl

There's so much software on store shelves these days that simply creating a good game isn't enough to break out of the pack. With Lara, Eidos has created a star. ""And the character belongs to you,'' Herz adds. ""It doesn't pout in a trailer or ask you for $20 million for its next videogame. You own it. It's like minting money.''

It seems obvious now that Tomb Raider would go over big with lads of all ages, but when Core prodigy Toby Gard (who later left to start his own company) created a game around his vision of the perfect woman, he was violating several unspoken rules of 3-D gaming. Unlike with popular first-person-perspective games like Doom and Duke Nukem, players see the action over Lara's shoulder, like a movie. It's a single-player game with no options for Internet play. And, as Core's reps in France and Germany warned, who's going to play a game where the hero is a girl?

They shouldn't have worried. When the first version hit the stores in November 1996, it sold 500,000 copies in two months. Any good videogame is as much about the experience of watching as it is playing, and it was quite a corneal treat for players to see Lara run fluidly through caves and tunnels, turning cartwheels like Dominique Dawes and diving off ledges like Fu Mingxia. But unlike most action games, TR balances shooting and butt-kicking with exploration and puzzle-solving. So a female character--smart, strong and supa- dupa fly--fit in perfectly with Core's vision for the game.

""A man,'' says designer Adrian Smith, ""would have changed what the game's about. But it wouldn't have mattered how gorgeous Lara was if the game itself wasn't any good.'' When Lara caps her foes, both guns blazing like Chow-Yun Fat in a John Woo action flick, Lara takes the slogan ""Girl Power'' to the next level. Call her Shotgun Spice; right in front of you, yet always just out of reach, she's the perfect fantasy girl for the digital generation.

Tomb Raider 2 ($50-$55; 415-547-1200) is more ambitious and complex than its predecessor, so there are also more opportunities for error. At Core HQ, six testers play the game over and over--each run-through takes about 11 hours--hunting down stray bugs. Smith was playing the game an hour before the PlayStation version went to Sony, when Lara fell off a ledge and he couldn't get her back up. ""If Sony found a bug it would be nuclear here, but we're almost there.'' Then they found that they'd sent out thousands of demo CD-ROMs with the copy-protection timers already expired, making them unplayable. Then they went nuclear. Fortunately, someone came up with a patch, and they recalled the discs to make the fix. That's par for the course in the high-stakes world of game design, says Adrian's brother and managing director Jeremy Smith. ""You're working under pressure to meet deadlines, and somehow you forget to take out one line of code. Still, it could have been worse. It could have gone out to the whole game,'' he laughs.

Core hasn't changed the formula much for the sequel, but the team of four artists and three programmers have crammed in a bunch of ideas that they didn't have time to put in the original. Gameplay is smoother and more detailed, with impressive lighting effects, such as flares illuminating a corridor as they fly through the air. Where the first game had mostly animal opponents, the sequel has several human villains as well as new beasties. There are new puzzles, new locations (outdoor as well as indoor), new weapons, new moves (See Lara climb! See Lara drive!). And Lara herself has had a digital makeover to give her what Eidos calls ""a more shapely and lifelike look,'' including 46 polygons alone for her fully animated ponytail. But what fans really want are new form- fitting outfits, and Core has obliged with a wet suit, a flight jacket and, for those who finish the game, a nightie.