Happy 25th birthday, Tomb Raider 2. Here’s a little piece to celebrate its quarter century.
Every so often I load up a walkthrough of Tomb Raider 2 and take the whole thing in again. Always a walkthrough: I have the game on Steam, but I can never get it to run quite right, and besides, part of me doesn’t want to go back in person. These walkthroughs, though! Tomb Raider was a very technical platformer back in the days of the grid system, and some of these players out there are just astonishing. Their virtuosity can get in the way very occasionally, though. More specifically it can get in the way on one occasion in particular: 40 Fathoms.
40 Fathoms is an astonishing video game level, yet when I watch it on Youtube, the audacity of it never comes across in full. That’s because 40 Fathoms is actually like a magic trick – you can only really experience it as it’s meant to be experienced once. These walkthrough artists are too good: too decisive. They know where to go and they go there. They play 40 Fathoms like it’s a video game level. Whereas what it really is, is an audacious riff on the things that video game levels aren’t meant to be.
I am purely talking about the start of 40 Fathoms by the way. God, what a start. Forget No Russian or whatever it’s called – this is where my idea of what games could do was spun around three times in a blindfold and pushed off, wobbling, in the wrong direction. 40 Fathoms comes about halfway through the game. Lara Croft, adventurer and T-Rex killer, is tracking an ancient Chinese relic across the world, and has just explored an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the ocean. Shit has gone down, and now she’s escaping, clinging, without an air tank, to the back of a submarine that is making a break for it. But the submarine pilot is startled by sharks, and the sub hits an underwater cliff. Cue 40 Fathoms.
And you leap out of a cut-scene into, what? Into darkness. You’re deep underwater. You’re floating. And you’re running out of oxygen from the moment you regain control. Everything is dark, it’s hard to tell which way is up or down, but if you pick the wrong direction you’ll very quickly find you’re done for.