Inside PC gaming's wildly creative Tomb Raider mapping scene: 'Being able to create my own adventures for other people to play is such an addicting concept'

In 2013, when Lara Croft's latest, grittiest manifestation captured the attention of players worldwide, Axel Hatté began building custom levels for a Tomb Raider game more than a decade old. Hatté had been excited by the prospect of map levels for Core Design's original adventures ever since discovering the level editor bundled with 2000's Tomb Raider: Chronicles, but it took 13 years for him to actually make the jump.

It was around this time Hatté discovered the Tomb Raider mapping community, a group of die-hard Tomb Raider fans building custom levels for the Core Design-era games. It was a discovery that would, eventually, lead Hatté into the games industry itself. "I cannot imagine I would have built anything concrete without this community," he says.

The Tomb Raider games of the '90s might seem like odd choices for a mapping community to form around, given their modern reputation as unwieldy, challenging experiences. But it's little different from similar modding scenes that evolved around games like Quake, Thief, Half-Life and so-forth.

It exhibits the same love for 3D level design, the same fascination with building upon the ideas established by Tomb Raider's original developers, the same habit of tweaking ancient creation tools to facilitate builds that would have been impossible in the '90s.

It also has a similar depth of history to the communities surrounding the FPS titans of that era, with thousands of custom maps built across a quarter of a decade. Indeed, the first fan levels for Tomb Raider appeared before the release of Chronicles' official level editor, thanks to a user-created toolkit developed by a modder known as Turbo Pascal.

"Although buggy and limited, their editor initially allowed making levels with the engines of Tomb Raider 1, 2 and 3," says Klona, the site administrator for TRCustoms, a fan website that hosts thousands of custom Tomb Raider missions. "You can see levels on websites that date a year before the release of the official Tomb Raider Level Editor."

That level editor, commonly known as TRLE, would form the basis for most of the custom maps going forward. TRLE supports levels made with the TR4 Engine, hence why most custom maps are for Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. Over the years, TRLE's functionality has been expanded and modified by custom tools and fan patches, until a whole new level editor called Tomb Editor was released in 2017.

"Tomb Editor was not only a much-needed gasp of air, but it also allowed so much more due to it actively being developed," Klona explains. "It allowed people to build for any of the classic engines."

For much of its existence, the Tomb Raider mapping community revolved around trle.net. But in 2022, TRCustoms was set up by Klona and another Tomb Raider fan mapper, who goes by Dinne, as an alternative. "Several other community members were also unhappy with the state of trle.net as it was old-school," Klona explains. "So anything you wanted to submit or fix, you had to email the webmaster and await their response."

With the trle.net webmaster's permission, the TRCustoms founders established the new site based on trle.net's historic data: "The initial idea was to overhaul the original trle.net website, but the idea quickly changed to creating a completely new website with its own systems," Klona says.

Both trle.net and TRCustoms host nearly 4,000 custom Tomb Raider levels, over 3,000 of which are for Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. These range from classically styled Tomb Raider adventures like the celebrated Himalayan Mysteries, which sees a young Lara surviving in the mountains following a plane crash, to novelty concepts like Enterprise, in which Lara explores Star Trek's most famous spaceship.

Likewise, the community has fostered numerous respected level designers, such as BradTRe, who got involved with the community after discovering the level editor. "It wasn't until 2007 that I researched what it was. I then found online custom levels other builders had made, was blown away and since then have been creating my own," he says. "Being able to create my own adventures for other people to play is such an addicting concept."

In the last 18 years, Brad has produced nearly a dozen new Tomb Raider adventures. Most of these are ambitious, multi-level affairs, with each stage designed to be very different from the last.

"Usually, each level I build has a purpose, so I usually start backwards. I think of what the goal of the level is and how the level ends. So is the character finding an artifact, entering or escaping a location, or some other goal?" He explains. "Once that's decided, I plan the main beats to the level, making sure I include certain gameplay elements, enemies, traps etc, all fitting toward the end goal and making sure the level has a good flow."

Brad's maps include his most recent project Curse of Camazots, and the festive adventure Another Bloody Christmas, a sprawling mission that took him two years to build. "It has the largest levels, the most scripting, cutscenes, dialogue and intense story I've ever created," he says. "It's also my most ambitious project I've ever built (and ever will)."

Hatté, meanwhile, has built seven maps since 2013, and is perhaps best known for his demake of Tomb Raider: Legend, Crystal Dynamics' series debut. "I took this game from the PS2 era and reimagined it in the classic Tomb Raider style," he says. "My focus is always on creating custom levels I would enjoy playing myself. I tend to prefer more linear levels, with a strong focus on platforming and traps rather than complex puzzles."

Today, the Core Design Tomb Raiders are generally considered to be challenging revisits, due to their cumbersome controls and puzzle designs that can be obscure. Nobody I spoke to in the community denied this. But they believe that the Core games also have a specific appeal that later Tomb Raiders lack. Klona believes the key is to embrace their fundamental nature as oblique environmental puzzlers. "Don’t worry about getting lost or not knowing what to do next: that’s the fun of it. Each level is a puzzle in itself."

Hatté, meanwhile, doesn't deny that they can be an "acquired taste" but also believes that Core's Tomb Raiders have a clarity of focus that gets lost as the series progresses. "I love [that] you’re not interrupted by cutscenes all the time, when you can explore large environments freely without invisible walls, when Lara can make these acrobatic jumps," he says.

For Hatté, getting involved with the Tomb Raider community also proved a career-defining decision. In 2023, Hatté was approached by Saber Interactive's technical director to work on the recently released Tomb Raider remasters published by Saber subsidiary Aspyr. "He was specifically looking to hire people with strong knowledge of the old Tomb Raider games, experience with modding them and who could do the best job possible," Hatté explains.

"At that time, I had no professional experience in the videogame industry, and I didn't even really have an artist portfolio, so I made one in a bit of a rush." Nonetheless, this was enough to convince Saber, and Hatté joined the team as an environment artist, working primarily on Tomb Raider 4-6 Remastered.

"My role on the team was specifically to work on the environments and remaster the textures," Hatté says. "It was a life changing experience. I'm incredibly grateful to have been given that opportunity."

Reamsters aside, Tomb Raider has been dormant since 2018's Shadow of the Tomb Raider. But late last year, two new Lara Croft adventures were revealed—a second remake of the original game, and a new adventure by Crystal Dynamics pitched as a sequel to Tomb Raider: Underworld.

Both games appeal to the series pre-2013 history, and naturally, the Tomb Raider mapping community hopes this carries through in their game design: "My hope is not only to see Core Design's Lara return in some way, but for the original style of gameplay to make a return," Klona concludes. "Getting lost in a maze-like level where I had to make sense of my surroundings and find my objective was always part of what made the originals really stand out."