One of the greatest efforts on the part of a group of developers to troll their players has to be this little detail in 1997’s Tomb Raider 2. It’s something which many of you diehard Tomb Raider fans who grew up with the series ought to know about by now already, and if you don’t, prepare to be blown away.
But first, a bit of context. A particularly awesome (and sneaky) feature of the first three Tomb Raider games is that it’s possible to skip levels by making Lara perform an amusing little routine. These routines are forever etched into the lobes of my brain, and in the brains of many others who lived off of these games from a young age, I’m sure.
Once I learnt of the existence of these cheat “codes,” young, more impatient me had an absolute field day with them. Whether the reasoning was to swiftly evade an area that was too scary or too puzzling for my underdeveloped and unseasoned gamer’s brain, or simply because I really wanted to see which exotic corner of the world Lara was headed to next (I had zero shame) - these codes were life-savers.
For each of the three games, the sequence was slightly different. The first Tomb Raider required you to take one Shift-step forward, one Shift-step backwards, turn around counter-clockwise three times, and jump forward once. Doing that would immediately transport you to the start of the next level. Yay!
But those who got away with that in the first game were in for a bit of a surprise when trying it out in the game’s sequel. Doing so would simply make Lara explode into smithereens, which was accompanied by a loud kaboom that was particularly deafening for any young ears who were trying to sneak their way through the game. Core Design was all like, “haha, got you.”
But of course, all you had to do was adjust the sequence a bit in order to actually get Lara to skip to the next level. The correct sequence for Tomb Raider 2 is: pull out a flare, take one Shift-step forward, one Shift-step backwards, turn around three times (in any direction), and jump forward. You could also acquire all weapons including full ammo and med-packs by replacing that last forward-jump with one backwards-jump.
Tomb Raider III: Adventures of Lara Croft also came complete with both a level skip and an all-weapons cheat sequence, this time incorporating the game’s new crouching functionality. I remember it like a nursery rhyme:
Draw your pistols
One step backwards
One step forwards
Duck, stand
Turn around three times
Jump forwards (for level skip), or backwards (for all weapons)
Oh, the thrill of rule-breaking!
But then the devs went and made it all really inconvenient by going a whole different route with the cheat codes for subsequent games (I for one didn’t even know any existed back then; Young Me would have absolutely killed for this knowledge). If you’re interested, you can find them detailed here (varying depending on the platform) for The Last Revelation, Chronicles, and The Angel of Darkness.
Nice to see the folks behind the iconic series had a decent sense of humor.
Source: Tomb Raider Horizons
