GI: Backtracking a bit, how difficult was it to leave Core Design?
JHS: Of course, I started Core Design in 1988; she was my baby. I sold it, which I guess changes the dynamic of that a little bit and made a me lot of money out of it as a result, but I spent the best part of my life there. My brother joined us a little after I started Core Design and the team we took with us has been with us for about 8 to 10 years. So to walk out of that building was kind of weird but I have to say that once we moved into the new building it was like a sort of cloud lifted from over us. Everything was new again. It was just all the boys sitting around trying to come up with a game. That’s how it’s really changed; it’s one of these things where the entire company is behind everything that goes on. That had been missing for a long time. It was a massive heart wrench, but looking back at it now, I don’t regret it for a second.
GI: Had it almost gotten to the point where dealing with the pressures of Tomb Raider had made it not fun at all?
JHS: No, it was dreadful; the game, putting it together was dreadful. We all lived through a nightmare. The last 12 months of that game, we all worked 7 days a week for 15 hours a day minimum and it was hell. And one of the conditions that I made when we started Circle Studio was I told everyone that they would not have to go through that ever again, because I won’t. Physically I can’t take it and my marriage, actually my second marriage, can’t take it. I didn’t say that my workers won’t have to go through the odd late night, but I did say that they wouldn’t have to go to the extremes that they did at Core Design.
GI: We think it’s pretty safe to say that the Tomb Raider franchise declined over the years. What lessons did you learn from that in moving to a new company? Would you ever keep a series running that long again?
JHS: Absolutely. But I’d listen to the passion of the gamers over the commerciality of what it should be. The difficulty of Tomb Raider was that when it was successful, you try to appease everyone. You try to appease the press because you don’t like to read negative reviews. You try to appease the marketing, sales, and commercial guys, too. And they all say that it needs to change, that it needs to be more edgy and you need Lara Croft to go into the city and go here and go there. So you do all of that because you think it’s the right thing to do and then you actually stand back and look at it and think what the heck happened. This isn’t Tomb Raider. That game was back with the wolves and the bears and the ancient temples. You talk to a Tomb Raider fan and ask them where we went the wrong direction and they’ll say that it was when we started to change the core gameplay dynamic. To be fair, we sold out to commerciality and we should have stuck to what we knew we were good at doing, which was making games. So the lesson to be learned is do not break the formula. Look at Final Fantasy, they haven’t changed the formula for that recently. They’ve advanced it but it’s basically the same game as the first one.
GI: Was there too much pressure to put out Tomb Raider games?
JHS: It was colossal. But you know what; I made a ton of money from it. Ideally we should have probably only done three on the PSone and we would have been in good shape for the next one.
