iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

What a way to blight a legacy.

Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Lara's OG motorcycle was a Norton Commando modified like a café racer. Note the distinctive crankcase cover. Was originally just a generic sportsbike but myself and Neal (who really loved his motorbikes too) decided it should fittingly be a British classic instead. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_...

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Rain,rain,rain except for February the 14th...

Weather forecast for the UK, showing rain on all days except Saturday, February the 14th when we are due some sunshine

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Fwiw, Gary Antcliffe was the 2nd programmer on Tomb Raider, starting after Toby and I had done some pre-production. He created the framework for the editors, ported what I had on PC to the Sega Saturn, and helped build the pipeline. He left Core a while after the other programmers joined the team.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFy... Stu Atkinson 'demos' the character & animation editor for the OG Tomb Raider games. This editor was used to texture & paint meshes imported from 3D Studio 4 and link, sequence and markup sets of imported animations. Built in-house by myself and Gary Antcliffe. #TR30

youtube.com

Inside Core Design Studio In 1997

YouTube video by This Week In Gaming

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

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. Toby Gard 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.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

It has been snowing in the UK. So an excuse to post this wonderful short from 1963. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl4p...

youtube.com

Snow (1963) - Geoffrey Jones | BFI National Archive

YouTube video by BFI

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Some intriguing casting for live action TR. Is the Sasha character a doppelgänger? Dead ringer for Lara...

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Reposted by Paul Douglas

The Public Domain Review @publicdomainrev.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Fireworks at the Ryogoku Bridge, by Utagawa Hiroshige, 1858: publicdomainreview.org/collection/u… #fireworks #NewYearsEve

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Lara / Laura - even the publishers sometimes get it wrong 😏

Lara referred to as Laura by Aspyr (c. 2022)

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

31 years. Where did all the time go...

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

There needs to be another 90%+ TR after all this time... I'm quite looking forward to seeing both new games now. Visually they are stunning, something we only dreamed of 30 years ago. We will have to wait and see if the gameplay and resulting feelings of exploration and adventure are as good.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Aha! We get best of both worlds... 🇮🇳🦖

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Rawr! She's back apparently. Personally I'd prefer exploring new lost worlds than another remake/remaster/reimagining of something we crafted under intense duress in the 90's. Fingers crossed, eh. Dinosaurs will always be cool though...

Tomb Raider Allosaurus concept artwork by T Gard. 1994

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Well done our lass. However, I suspect most of those magazine covers were in the 90s and 00s so it's hardly a contest nowadays. And I imagine Aloy is looking quite large in the rearview mirror too. Let's hope CD and Amazon don't rest on their laurels, eh...

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

A new book about Tomb Raider to peruse whilst interminably awaiting further adventures. 🇫🇷

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Lara's braid was replaced for a presentation at E3 as it would clip right through her back and neck which looked rather grotesque. Then we had a huge list of higher priority tasks to crunch through before launch so it stayed as the temporary bun. Nothing to do with polygon count as stated here⬇️🤦

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

GenAI used in this way: Not cool. Not classy.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

A lot of us from that era honed our crafts on the Amiga computer, before multimedia/game degrees became de rigueur. Eg. Toby Gard's animation portfolio created on the Amiga was featured in one of the computer art magazines a year or two before he joined Core Design too. #Amiga

Picture of Toby Gard with text describing his animation work on an Amiga.

Rearview picture of a woman with red hair brandishing a bloodied sword.

Caption reads 'The girl looks quite out of place when compared to the others,' reasons Gard. 'She was drawn during my 'Disney' phase'

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

The Amiga computer is 40 years old. It was more affordable than PCs and Macs, allowing those of us who had limited means to be creative. I loved that machine, spent so many hours programming on it, building 3d objects for my demos and games, making sounds with a 8bit sampler and so forth. #Amiga

'Lohnar' open world 3d game demo on Amiga 500 by Paul Douglas. Early 1990s.

Definition file for a 3d object that kind of looks like a dalek. Really a tapered hexagonal prism with a sphere on top...
13 vertices, 7 polygons, 1 sphere, 1 partitioning plane (for sorting).
By Paul Douglas, early 1990s.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

All of videogaming history fits into 4 Duke Nukem Forever dev cycles.

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Reposted by Paul Douglas

Bitmap Books @bitmapbooks.com · 19/07/2025

Happy 40th Birthday to the Amiga 🎂 Grab a copy of our book - Commodore Amiga: a visual compendium: www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/... #bitmapbooks #books #retrogaming #gaming #birthday #ocs @rachelsham.bsky.social

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Reposted by Paul Douglas

Richard Moss @mossrc.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

The feature-length first episode of @terrorbytesdoc.bsky.social is now free to watch on YouTube. Dozens of interviews digging into the history and evolution of horror in games, written and directed by me. And if you like it, you can buy the whole series from terrorbytesdoc.com. youtu.be/TA2aZVn9FvE

youtu.be

TerrorBytes Ep. 1 – Enter the Survival Horror | Full Documentary Episode (FREE)

YouTube video by CREATORVC LIVE

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

From when Sega had arcades. Pretty sure I got this card from the one in Irvine, CA. 1990s. More standard arcade than the theme park like attraction that SegaWorld at the Troc was. #Sega

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

In 1994 a group of us would go play Virtua Fighter in the arcade on Derby's Cornmarket during our lunchtimes. The fluidity of the characters' motion was mightily impressive at the time and hugely influential.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

Did you know the original PlayStation had a revision to its GPU and VRAM early in its life? The Initial version had noticeable colour banding on shaded texture maps and slower effects like transparency. Consoles released after tailend of 1995 fixed this.

Noticeable colour banding on Tomb Raider running on a PlayStation with the original GPU.
(Screenshot author unknown)

Smoother gouraud shaded texture maps on Tomb Raider running on PlayStation with revised GPU and SGRAM.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

We used the same Saturn devkits at Core. One per team. Testers had the hardware address checker. Earlier kits were the Sofia boxes from Japan. We had a protoype the size of a beer fridge with only one SH2. Alas, someone fried the mainboard by introducing it to 240V. It probably ended up in a skip.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

'The Scottish Open: Virtual Golf' by Core Design was released ~30 years ago. Jon Hilliard and Jason Gee made the game in about 6 months. I helped out with the 3D terrain, LOD, camera etc. Had to run on a low spec 486sx PC. It was the only entry in the short lived "Core Sports" range. 👇

Box cover for 'The Scottish Open: Virtual Golf' on PC. Released in 1995.

Screenshot of 'The Scottish Open: Virtual Golf' on PC.
Shows player 'paul' teeing off on par 4 hole.

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Reposted by Paul Douglas

Sasha's Retrobytes 🏳️‍⚧️ @sharkabytes.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Gateways to adventure. The first Tomb Raider game still has a feeling of raw wonder and excitement. Felt like there was a whole subterranean world to explore, never knowing what would come next. And the ambient sound! The rushing waterfalls, the creaking of ancient wood and stone. 💜

A crt TV screenie of Tomb Raider's press start button title screen (PS1)

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

youtu.be/ZEtGtCcLDBY?... Some janky footage of Tomb Raider running on Saturn at Sega's booth, E3 1996 here (38:06). Barely a game at this stage, just Lara running around Vilcabamba with some bats & wolves for company. We went gold four months later in September. No patches in those days.

youtu.be

E3 1996 - Rare footage of the games from 1996.

YouTube video by Kev's Art Stuff

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

Heather and Jason worked on this one before joining the Tomb Raider team.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

That's coming full circle... The origins of the 3D code in Tomb Raider started on my Amiga in the early 90's. Toby did a bunch of artwork on his Amiga before joining Core too, including a redhead character with a sword - a bit proto-Lara.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

Thats a shame if true, but holy moly that's some profligacy... "...now gone through two writers rooms and tens of millions of dollars in development costs" By contrast, the entire development cost of the first Tomb Raider game was around £440k - about a million dollars inflation adjusted.

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Reposted by Paul Douglas

The Society of Authors @societyofauthors.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

We are disappointed but not surprised that Meta has used millions of pirated books to develop its AI systems. As a matter of urgency, Meta needs to compensate the rightsholders of all the works it has been exploiting. But what can authors do? Read here: societyofauthors.org/2025/03/21/t...

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

Some credit where it is due, Sega saw the potential in Tomb Raider long before Sony or Eidos. We demoed to a contingent from Sega Japan (+AM2) in Autumn 1995 and the ltd.excl. deal came shortly after, leading to Saturn version being shown on Sega's stand at E3 in May 1996. 🧵

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

The videogame industry is broken.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

Looking forward to checking out the remaster of IV. It always felt the closest to a a true spiritual sequel to Tomb Raider to me.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Been a wee bit windy today. Some tiles have blown off the roof, the bathroom window was smashed when something blew into it, and everyone's rubbish is strewn across the street because it was, of course, bin day. Oh, and a powercut too. But thankfully all safe and sound here. #StormÉowyn

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

Happy New Year everyone! Got a good feeling about this one despite the ominous dark clouds.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

30 years ago, Guy Miller, Toby and myself were brainstorming Tomb Raider as an amalgam of the adventure novels of Haggard and Conan-Doyle with the ancient astronaut pseudo-archaeology of Sitchin and Von Däniken to interweave the ancient civilisations and mythologies. With a dash of Indy to sell it.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Posting here now. Albeit infrequently. Love and peace.

Blue sky. On a lovely wintry day in the North of England.

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