this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Blame the Brits for changing it to Lara in the first place.
If I understand the progression they went through designing Tomb Raider's protagonist, Core Design started off with "Let's make a game called Tomb Raider, it's about exploring ancient ruins and collecting relics and artifacts." So they designed the player character as a man with a whip and a hat and then said "Blimey that's Indiana Jones, we can't do that or Spielberg will sue our bollocks off." And someone said "Hey there's an idea, let's make the character female."
So they came up with a feisty Latin American woman named Laura Cruz. But depending on whose telling the story, either they couldn't find a voice actress that could do a reasonable Latina accent in Derby England, or the publisher wanted a "more UK friendly" read whiter name, so they changed it to Laura Croft. But for some crumpet-related reason they thought Americans wouldn't be able to pronounce "Laura" thinking it an uncommon name over here (it isn't, we've got lots of Lauras), so they changed it to "Lara" which is genuinely unknown over here.
So then a bunch of things happened at once: