Tomb Raider 1-3 Remasters to Include Warnings of Harmful, Stereotypical Content
The developers of Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered have not removed the harmful stereotypes in the Lara Croft trilogy. Instead, the Crystal Dynamics studio added a warning against content that can be offensive to people and cultures.
The gaming industry has changed a lot since the release of the first adventures of Lara Croft. This is clearly demonstrated by the warning against racist content that appears in the Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered collection releasing today.
A message from Crystal Dynamics (the studio that helped with the remastering of the trilogy) pops up when you start the game (via IGN). It says that the titles in this remastered package include portrayals of people and cultures based on cultural and racial prejudices. The studio distances itself from these contents as inconsistent with its values, but left them in the game in the hope that players will draw the appropriate conclusions about their harmful impact.
The games in this collection [i.e. Tomb Raider I-III Remastered - editor's note] contain offensive depictions of people and cultures rooted in racial and ethnic prejudices. These stereotypes are deeply harmful, inexcusable, and do not align with our values at Crystal Dynamics.
Rather than removing this content, we have chosen to present them here in its original form, unaltered, in the hopes that we may acknowledge its harmful impact and draw conclusions from it.
Source: Crystal Dynamics / IGN.
The studio didn't name specific examples of such content, but IGN cites fighting stereotypical cannibal natives in a South Pacific mission from Tomb Raider III. The creators would have to change that a lot (or rather build it from scratch), which would only irritate players who remember the original editions of the Tomb Raider trilogy.
