Lara Croft’s design could’ve gone full FF7/Street Fighter in Japan to appeal to audiences in the mid-’90s, says co-creator, but ‘All that was changed was the manuals & guide’

Lara Croft’s up there with the most iconic game protagonists of all time—but there was a time when her design was nearly swapped out in favour of… well, just take a look.

(Image credit: Core Design, Aspyr, Saturn Fan, Victor (via @tadashidaiba on BlueSky))

That’s a picture that comes via @tadashidaiba on BlueSky, who shared scans from an issue of Saturn Fan magazine (thanks, Gamesradar). And to be fair, the actual sketch looks cool as hell—not exactly the Lara we know today, mind, but something that wouldn’t be out of place as a Street Fighter character, or a member of Final Fantasy 7’s party.

The example 3D render in that very same scan is, uh, not what I’d call good. Uncanny, haunting eyes that catch none of the sketches’ original charm, peering straight into the soul, as though they know all my sins. Like something that belongs in an analog horror video from the late 2000s.

These images also cropped up in a 2021 X post by co-creator Paul Douglas, who writes: “Quite late in TR1 development, Victor (Core’s publisher in Japan) decided our western character design wouldn’t go down well there. So they faxed over some of their own designs—that we didn’t implement.”

Given the sketches and model resurfacing in the present year, Douglas went to Bluesky to reiterate the close call: “Victor wanted us to change in-game Lara to appeal more to a Japanese audience. Huge eyes/head etc. They faxed through examples really late in dev.”

He explains that Toby Gard, the game’s other co-creator, “really didn’t want to alter Lara. As a compromise all that was changed was the manuals & guide. Not sure who did that render or illustrations.”

One eagle-eyed replier reckons they’ve cracked it, though: “I started digging around. The Japanese Saturn manual credits ‘Takanori Wada’ and ‘Hiromasa Ohta’ for graphic support. That second one was the character designer for Keio Flying Squadron, who worked at Victor for many years. And this image is signed ‘Ohchan.'”

I started digging around. The Japanese Saturn manual credits “Takanori Wada” and “Hiromasa Ohta” for graphic support.That second one was the character designer for Keio Flying Squadron, who worked at Victor for many years. And this image is signed “Ohchan.” www.mobygames.com/person/45518…

— @foxhack.bsky.social (@foxhack.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-01-20T16:12:55.720Z

Just to make sure, I went ahead and found the manual myself and, sure enough, there’s Ohta, though his second name’s spelled as “Ota” in the credits user Foxhack cites. MobyGames doesn’t have much else after the ’90s save for a few arcade credits, where it’s also sometimes spelled “Oota”, which I figure’s just down to translating his name into the English alphabet.

Anyway: Ota/Ohta/Oota did a good job on the sketch, at least—but given the clear limitations of the PS1 at the time, I reckon Lara’s less anime-inspired look was the right call.

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