Interspersed with Douglas Coupland’s essays and a Tomb Raider history lesson are actual video game walkthroughs. Step by step instructions for some levels of Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider II, and Tomb Raider Gold. This is more than your average video game guide, this is what video game guidebooks should strive to be!
The fact that a writer like Coupland could write a first-person Lara Croft essay, as well as his additional thoughts and short history of a game and franchise back in 1998 is amazing.
Looking back now, almost three decades removed from its publication, this is an example of just how pervasive Lara Croft was to the larger world of pop culture.
If it weren’t for my curiosity about why Coupland, an author I admire, has his name on a Prima video game guidebook, I never would have picked this up. Further, I had to ask other gamers, many of whom actually bought guidebooks for other games how common it was for essays and history lessons to be in a guidebook, making the walkthroughs almost secondary. The answer is that this book is the oddity, at least among the gamers I’m friends with and their knowledge is concerned.
Here’s the rub. I think the walkthrough video game guide publishing industry would do better sales if this one book wasn’t the enigma.
You use a walkthrough to help you, but once the game is done or you’ve learned enough of the contents of it, you’re done with it. But, if it also contained well-written essays about and from the point-of-view of your leading or favorite characters, or if it contained some history about the making of the game and a comic too, that would make even people not playing the game have an interest in said guidebook.
I bought it out of curiosity, and I wasn’t let down. This is one of the most interesting things I’ve seen. But why is it so unique? Sure, it seems like a guaranteed hit because its subtitle, “Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider Phenomenon,” is on point, but this is 1998. Even though Tomb Raider has endured, there were probably plenty of other games that may have been set up to endure as well. Anyway, this book is amazing, and again, I’m more a fan of the author than the franchise.
Coupland, for his career, is just beginning his prolific writings, though at this point he’d already published one of his seminal works in his debut novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Still, the essays in this book are amazingly prescient.
“…even if I were to die or somehow not even be a real person, I would always be real – or more real than real: hyper real – because my essence had expanded itself so hugely. And this would make me something strange indeed … … something eternal.”
But further on in Coupland’s Lara first-person essay, there’s this brilliance which eventually leads to Lara’s love of archaeology and the past:
“I think that we people are kind of lazy and arrogant when it comes to the future.
In the past century we’ve gotten used to having other people draw pictures of what the future’s supposed to look like – people like car makers and architects and Daddy and his stuffy club friends.
And we’d look at the pictures they’d hand us and we’d say, “Well, right then – no point working too hard, because the future’s going to look like tail fins and space hotels and food that comes in pills.”
But think about this: even a hundred years ago, people rarely ever thought about the future, and if they did, it wasn’t too hard and it wasn’t too clearly.
It’s really a peculiarity of modern life that the future exists as something to control and modify and anticipate and plan.”
Additionally, the original story Coupland writes to complete this “Strategy” guide is better than some of the video game adaptations that have made the silver screen. Perhaps that can serve as the next Tomb Radar feature? Maybe we should all be more like Lara and stick to the past and not the future.
Nevertheless, we have a past to look at between this book’s publication in 1998 and the modern day, and that includes more than ten Lara Croft titles that have been released as well as a few collections and remastered editions. Two actors have portrayed Lara on the big screen in three different movies, and hints at another film and television series potentially forming a connected media franchise abound.
Yet, here I am back in 1998, talking about a guidebook with strategies for three games, the hint of a fourth game, and rumors of a film adaptation. It seems to me that this kind of thing could easily have changed the nature of strategy guides, but it didn’t…
It may take Lara Croft herself to figure out that mystery.