was created by Toby Gard, who worked for Core Design, a game development studio based in Derby, England, that had established itself developing titles for home computers and Sega consoles. It was proposed by Gard to company head Jeremy Heath-Smith during a 1994 brainstorming session for game concepts for then-upcoming PlayStation console. The entire staff approved, and Heath-Smith gave Gard permission to start the project once he finished work on BC Racers for the Sega CD. The game concept was created before anything else, with the main hooks being its cinematic presentation and being a 3D character-driven experience. The initial team was Gard and Paul Douglas who worked on design and pre-production for six months, before the team expanded to six people including programmers Gavin Rummery and Jason Gosling, and level designers/artists Neal Boyd and Heather Gibson. The team wanted to mix the adventuring style of Ultima Underworld and the 3D characters shown off in Virtua Fighter. The development budget for the game at the time was approximately £440,000. The production atmosphere was fairly informal. Development began in 1994 and lasted eighteen months. The team endured excessive overtime and crunch during the last stages. During production, Core Design was sold to CentreGold, which in turn was purchased by Eidos Interactive in May 1996, who became publisher for the title. When Gard first presented the idea for the game, the concept art featured a male lead who strongly resembled Indiana Jones. Heath-Smith asked for a change for legal reasons. When Gard created the initial design document, he decided to give the player a choice of genders and created a female adventurer alongside the male character. Once he realized creating and animating two playable characters would require double the design work, he decided to slim back down to one. The female character, originally named Laura Cruz, was his favorite, so he discarded the male character before development work began. After Eidos became the game's publisher, they unsuccessfully lobbied for a selectable male lead. Speaking about his approach to the concept, Gard noted that he deliberately went against publisher trends when designing both the character and the gameplay. Laura went through several changes before the developers settled on the final version, including a name change to Lara Croft after Eidos executives in America objected to the original name. The inspirations for the character of Lara Croft included the character Tank Girl, the Indiana