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Paul Douglas

@cnhyv.bsky.social
404 followers 49 following 74 posts

I developed games and other less serious things. Co-created Tomb Raider half a lifetime ago.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 8h
We did briefly discuss Lara's decision to 'off' a kid on a skateboard, so the player is given the choice of running past and leaving him to his skating. But hardly anyone took that option. So you're all just as culpable as Lara. He *did* shoot first though... 😉
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 8h
We really should have spent more time on creating Natla's minor sidekicks but they were created in haste before the VA session. I'd vetoed the Atlantis pyramid being a geoengineering machine which meant we needed some story changes for it being an incubator instead. Was the right decision though.
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 8h
The skating area was meant to be part of the concrete and pipes of Natla's excavation work but the engine never depicted that well so it feels incongruous, but that's part of TR's aesthetic. I gave him that catchphrase as nod to Taxi Driver, a classic movie about isolation (one of our themes too).
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 8h
Cant remember exactly whose idea it was to make one of the goons a skater. Not mine. Probably Toby or Vicky, possibly Stu Atkinson who was enlisted to make his model and animations. X Games had started around that time and skateboarding was everywhere. He is *so* 90s coded...
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 8h
The idea for 'Skatekid' came when brainstorming Natla's goons. The male characters in OG Tomb Raider were deliberately created as quite buffoonish (except PD of course). The encounter a means to recover the Uzis and for some silliness to lighten the mood before the tension ratchets into the finale.
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
No, I dont have a copy. Almost certainly lost to time, like FMV source files etc.
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
What a way to blight a legacy.
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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 · 07/02/2026
Not really surprising is it? With a few exceptions, entertainment press has always been more adjacent to PR than news journalism.
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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
This editor was also used on Core's Blam:Machinehead game as that shared some character/animation tech I had created for first Tomb Raider game. It could also import from Alias/Wavefront programs on SGI machines as an original design feature but TR only used 3DStudio on PC for modelling & animation.
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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
Nintendo Powerline advert from the 80s.
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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 · 31/12/2025
I look forward to reading that. The ports cant have been too difficult. More lucrative for them than me by sounds of it ;)
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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 · 07/11/2025
Bon sang, ça fait 31 ans pour moi et 29 ans pour toi.
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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 · 25/09/2025
The braid joints were animated via a rudimentary physics engine, rather than hand animated like rest of Lara. The physics engine used spheres and boxes to represent solid objects like her backpack and neck to collide the braid against. Ergo, independent of polygon count. It just needed tuning...
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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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Reposted by Paul Douglas
The Associated Press @apnews.com · 24/09/2025
The apparent use of artificial intelligence to clone an actor's voice for video game character Lara Croft has fans and actors up in arms.
bit.ly
AI-cloning of Lara Croft's voice has 'Tomb Raider' fans and actors up in arms
In France, the apparent use of artificial intelligence to clone an actor's voice for video game character Lara Croft has fans and actors up in arms.
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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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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 18/07/2025
media.tenor.com
a man in a blue shirt is sitting in front of a brick wall and looking at the camera .
ALT: a man in a blue shirt is sitting in front of a brick wall and looking at the camera .
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 17/07/2025
My experience was the classism was pernicious. Quite a few working class in the trenches but rarely in positions above that; "Congratulations, here's a job on the production line but don't get ideas above your station" It's been similar outside gaming, just with less exploitation and abuse.
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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
Magnetic stripe card with 'SEGA City' logo and 'GAME CARD' text.
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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
My PC ISA devkit had the first GPU as did the blue debug stations, so we were used to the extra jankiness during development. The later green debug stations had the revised GPU as did Yarozes. Retail consoles with the first GPU are rare, anything much after Western launch is revised version.
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
Technically the original GPU truncates the values from the gouraud shader DDA to 5 bits before modulating texel colours, whereas the revised version uses 8 bits resulting in visibly less quantisation noise. Changes were also made to speed up transparency and frame buffer effects.
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
Lara's arm had a tiny 1x1 (!) texture map so it clearly illustrates the banding but so does her backpack and torso. It's also very apparent in Tomb Raider's first level entrance with the snow that has the wolves footprints. Many other games demonstrate it too.
Visible banding in the entranceway of the first level of Tomb Raider on PlayStation with the first version of the GPU.Smoother shading of the snow and wolve footprints in the first level of Tomb Raider on PlayStation with the revised version of the GPU.
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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 · 17/05/2025
My understanding is the extensive playfield compositing features of VDP2 were added later to augment VDP1 which renders sprites/quads to framebuffer. This was due to VDP1 having lower throughput than the (also in development) PS1 GPU. Exactly when this happened in development process I dont know.
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
Just improper use of step-down transformers. We only had a few transformers so they would often be swapped around the building and hence voltage outputs not switched correctly. AIUI the extra VDP came later. We had final hardware docs in summer 94. Before that I dont know timelines.
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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 player can toggle the underlying grid (spaced in yards because, well, it's golf) with 'G' key on PC which aids visualising the contours of the course and depth perception. This formed a starting basis for the game mechanics design and prototype of Tomb Raider, which I worked on next.
Screenshot of 'The Scottish Open: Virtual Golf'. 
Shows player 'paul' in the bunker 38 yards from the flag.
Grid lines are enabled - there to aid the player with reading/parsing the course terrain and depth perception.
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
The PC version fitted entirely in a few megabytes and came on 2 floppy disks. A CD-ROM version was also released. Like most Core games of that era it could have done with plenty more time & polish but 'bish bash bosh' was the order of the day.
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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
A Sega 32X version was planned for but Core only had the one devkit which was used to port BC Racers. By then 32X had flopped so was abandoned. Later ported to Saturn and PlayStation (as 'Tournament Leader' in Japan). With addition of female avatars, that were missing on PC due to space and time.
Screenshot of 'Virtual Golf' on PlayStation. Featuring female avatars and better texturing and detail than the PC version.
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