Tomb Raider Fan Remaking Original Games Was Hired for Official Remastered Collection

ByNews Polite

A Tomb Raider fan who was unofficially remaking the original games was hired as technical director on the Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered collection.

Timur Gagiev, better known online as XProger, celebrated the accomplishment with a series of posts on X/Twitter. Gagiev addressed fans asking about his unofficial remakes, called OpenLara, explaining they’ve not made any progress on them because of a certain “dream project”, which is the “culmination of the last eight years” of their life.

“I’m grateful to the heads of Saber Interactive for trusting me to lead the project and assemble a dream team of true fans,” Gagiev continued.

“From the beginning we had complete freedom and set ourselves an impossible goal, which could only be approached by a small ‘development team’ of crazy people, ready to work 24/7 [for the] next year with an absolute vision of what and for whom we are doing.

“Thanks to the original developers and community. We eagerly read all your comments, interviews, reviews, and reactions. The responsibility to you all was higher than the fear of deadlines and the insane amount of work.”

Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered arrived February 13 as an upgraded version of the original trilogy: Tomb Raider and The Unfinished Business expansion, Tomb Rader 2 and The Gold Mask expansion, and Tomb Raider 3 and The Lost Artifact Expansion.

Crystal Dynamics included a sensitivity warning in the collection for what it called “deeply harmful” racial and ethnic prejudices included, but said it didn’t remove them “in the hopes that we may acknowledge its harmful impact and learn from it”.

Its release was followed by the official reveal of protagonist Lara Croft’s redesign, which will presumably debut officially in Tomb Raider Next. The next mainline game in the franchise is currently being developed in Unreal Engine 5, with Amazon Games supporting development.

It will be the first new entry since 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which wrapped up a trilogy of games during the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation. This series reset Lara Croft’s origins in a grittier setting, but it’s unclear how Tomb Raider Next will fit into the equation.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.