Eidos Interactive: Lara Croft, Deus Ex and the British Golden Age

In 1996 a British publisher put a game about a pistol-wielding archaeologist on the shelves, and video games were never quite the same. Tomb Raider made Lara Croft the first true video game superstar, a face on magazine covers and cinema screens, and it turned Eidos Interactive into a giant almost overnight. But Lara was only the start. Over the next decade Eidos assembled an astonishing stable: the immersive sims of Deus Ex and Thief, the cold precision of Hitman, the dark fantasy of Legacy of Kain, the tactics of Commandos. For a while, if a game was smart, stylish and a little bit dangerous, there was a good chance Eidos published it.

This is the era's map: the Tomb Raider saga, the stealth and immersive-sim classics, and the rest of a remarkable catalogue.

The house that Lara built

Tomb Raider's success gave Eidos the money and the confidence to bet on ambitious, grown-up games, and its taste was extraordinary. It backed Warren Spector's Ion Storm and the Looking Glass veterans as they built Deus Ex and Thief, the games that perfected the immersive sim. It gave IO Interactive room to invent Hitman. It let Crystal Dynamics reinvent Legacy of Kain as the haunting Soul Reaver. For a decade, Eidos was where the clever, systemic, slightly subversive games found a home.