Tomb Raider Co-Creator: Games Moving Toward Hollywood Business Model

Toby Gard, co-creator of Tomb Raider who left Crystal Dynamics earlier this month to become a consultant, gave an interview to GamesIndustry.Biz in which he said game development’s going all Hollywood, and that’s where he fits in.

Right now, Gard (pictured above) says, the m.o. is to fire a bunch of people at the end of a project, but keep around a core team for future work on the IP. “[A]nd it’s not really working out the way it should be,” Gard said.

It seems like the industry wants to move to a more Hollywood model by bringing in experts for shorter periods of time and then leveraging their outsourcing, but also building small teams for projects.

But they haven’t actually fully embraced that yet and I’m just wondering whether or not there’s a way people will actually start doing that. The industry is still very stuck in its ways of building their internal teams.

Gard’s consulting business – ding ding ding – could exploit that short-term need for experts, which is one reason he left Crystal Dynamics. Another, according to his remarks, is that he’d taken Tomb Raider about as far as he could, and he wasn’t working much with Lara Croft anymore.

It’s always difficult doing that but you can get stuck doing the same thing over and over, The only real way that I can really effect Lara Croft is to be in charge of a project. More and more as I was working at Crystal, especially on Underworld where I was just doing cinematic work, the reality is the control of the characters is in the hands of the creative directors and the publisher.

Gard: Time was right to leave Tomb Raider [GamesIndustry.Biz via GamerReports]