The Tomb Raider franchise has been around since the early 1990s and even now we’re still seeing the franchise flourish. While it’s been a little while since we got a new mainline installment, most would recall the recent reboot of the franchise by Crystal Dynamics. However, there was at one point an attempt to remake the first video game installment from the original development team, Core Design.
Core Design was responsible for the development of this franchise when it first started. However, it was back in 2006 that the development team went to bring out a remake for the first Tomb Raider video game on the PlayStation Portable. That didn’t pan out, it ended up getting canceled which the publisher Eidos gave the challenge to Crystal Dynamics. Crystal Dynamics would release Tomb Raider: Anniversary in 2007, but the development team went on to reboot the franchise.
Now it looks like that the game Core Design canceled wasn’t meant to be scrapped fully. It seems that the project would continue with the team planning to release a game based on either the Indiana Jones franchise or the Nicholas Cage series, National Treasure. Again neither panned out and years later now the scrapped project was tossed over to be preserved by the Internet Archive but it looks like fans can even try the game out now.
Unfortunately, if you were hoping for a full gameplay experience then you won’t find it here. Instead, this is an alpha build which means there’s little available to enjoy. But, with that said, it’s interesting to see what the developers were attempting to pull off. As for Core Design, the studio closed down in 2010 whereas Tomb Raider is a franchise that fans worldwide still enjoy today. Speaking of Tomb Raider, while it’s not a mainline installment, there is a new game in the works called Tomb Raider Reloaded which is described as an action arcade game made for mobile platforms.
