power of the artefacts and the meteorite from which they were carved. As Lara voices her opposition to his operation, Willard betrays her, steals the artefacts, and disappears into the excavation site. After fighting more mutants and navigating the treacherous ruins of the ancient city built atop the meteorite crater, Lara faces Willard, who has now used the power of the four artefacts to greatly speed up the evolutionary processes of the human body and thereby turned himself into a spider-like creature. Lara deactivates the meteorite by recovering the artefacts, kills the mutated Willard, and escapes by helicopter. Development Tomb Raider III was developed by Core Design and published by Eidos Interactive as a sequel to the 1997 title Tomb Raider II. Originally, Core Design envisioned Tomb Raider III as a "next generation" Tomb Raider game built on a new game engine with a new animation system. As artist Stuart Atkinson explained, the Tomb Raider team wanted at least two years to develop the game in order to genuinely advance the series, but the producers said that, as with Tomb Raider II, development would be completed in under a year because there was a strong consumer demand for it. For the original team, who had been living with the series' demanding development schedules for two consecutive years, "it was just too much", according to Atkinson. As a result, a new team was brought together from other Core Design projects to build a Tomb Raider game for 1998, giving the original team more time to develop their next-generation project. Actual development on Tomb Raider III began in December 1997. At the time, lead programmer Martin Gibbins, who previously worked on the 1996 title Blam! Machinehead, was tweaking the old Tomb Raider engine to build a new game with a stronger emphasis on action and shooting. The new team considered Gibbins' additional work to the engine valuable and decided to use it as a basis for the 1998 Tomb Raider game, which was originally intended to be a spin-off called The Further Adventures of Lara Croft. However, as development progressed and more ideas were introduced, the company considered the number of changes enough to justify a complete sequel. The PlayStation served as the lead platform for the game, while the Microsoft Windows release is a conversion with slightly improved visuals. As a result, everything was built around the capabilities of the PlayStation