Does Tomb Raider (1996) Hold Up?

Arturawonders if the original holds up.

- Artura Dawn

Does It Hold Up is not a series about whether a game is good by today standards, but rather how close it was to getting things right, and what those things were. Which games innovated well for their time, and which games still hold up even in this day and age?

1996 Release Date

It is truly quite astonishing that we are slowly approaching its 25th anniversary; quite a feat granted it is probably older than a lot of gamers nowadays. So for the anniversary of the original Tomb Raider, I truly wanted to visit the game at its very roots and see how it feels to play it, how it held up, and apart from that, I decided to do some research on my own.

Released in 1996, the game received a ton of praise by video game magazines for its variety, the graphics that were at the time considered revolutionary with intriguing environments, and the use of combat to keep tension high and the general atmosphere feeling dangerous.

Ryan MacDonald of GameSpot summarised the game with the following: “Take the puzzle-solving of Resident Evil, the gory action of Loaded, and the 360-degree freedom most gamers only dream of, and you have Tomb Raider, the closest thing to a 'Super Mario 64 killer' to date.” Tomb Raider also tied with the Saturn version of Street Fighter Alpha 2 for Electronic Gaming’s Monthly “Game of the Month”; honestly, it’s funny to see how unambitious those times were, given that we now pit an entire year's worth of games against each other.