When Lara Croft first leapt onto screens in 1996, she was a few hundred polygons and a fistful of pixels. Thirty years later, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis reimagines that same adventurer with technology the original team could only dream of. Through it all, one goal held steady: she had to look like Lara.

For a generation of players, their first adventure with Lara unfolded on PlayStation. Tomb Raider and PlayStation came of age together in the mid-nineties, each helping shape what that new era of gaming could be. Thirty years later, that connection still resonates, and Lara’s latest journey continues on PlayStation 5.

“Now we have that technology and the computing power, we ask, how do we make this the most realistic-looking Lara while sticking with that original design?”

For the character team, the 1996 design is the anchor every choice answers to. “When the original Lara was made, we could only have a certain number of polygons, a certain number of textures,” says Brendon Bengston at Crystal Dynamics. “There were a lot of things we wanted to do to make things look realistic that we just didn’t have the technology for. Now we have that technology and the computing power, so we ask, how do we make this the most realistic-looking Lara while sticking with that original design?”

Every console generation since has moved that design a step forward. The PlayStation 2 era of Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld gave Lara smoother geometry and more expressive animation, and the Survivor trilogy pushed her detail and realism further still.

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