Tomb Raider was released in October 1996, developed by Core Design in Derby and published by Eidos Interactive. You play Lara Croft, a British archaeologist hunting the Scion of Atlantis through the ruins of Peru, a Tibetan monastery, the lost city of Khamoon and finally Atlantis itself. The game appeared first on Saturn, then on PlayStation and PC.
It is one of the first games to get three-dimensional exploration right. Where its contemporaries stuck to corridors, Tomb Raider offers vast vertical rooms where you have to read the architecture, judge a jump, grab a ledge, swim underwater and operate mechanisms. Enemies are scarce — a wolf, a bear, one famous T. rex — and the solitude is part of the point. Success was immediate, Lara Croft became an icon, and the series shipped a sequel a year for five years. An expansion, Unfinished Business, came out in 1998 in the edition known as Tomb Raider Gold.
Recalbox does not replay the original binaries: it uses OpenLara, a free reimplementation of the early Tomb Raider engine, written by Timur "XProger" Gagiev and distributed under the BSD-2-Clause licence. It reads the original game's level files and renders them at modern resolutions, with clean filtering and native controller support.
| Studio | Core Design |
| Publisher | Eidos Interactive |
| Year of release | 1996 (October) |
| Engine | Original engine, reimplemented by OpenLara |
| Game type | 3D action / adventure / exploration |
| Port licence | BSD-2-Clause |
| Controller | Mandatory |
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenLara | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ |
Tomb Raider is only available on RPi5/500 and on PC (x86_64). The core is built neither for the RPi3/RPi Zero 2, nor for the RPi4/400, nor for the OGA/OGS/RG351 and RG353 handhelds. On those machines the system does not appear.
OpenLara is the only emulator for this system. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. This core declares no CRT output support.
Place your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Tomb Raider/
The system looks for one specific file, Tomb Raider Gold (1998).zip, which acts as the entry in the game list.
Recalbox ships no game data for Tomb Raider. The
Tomb Raider Gold (1998).zipfile in the folder is empty (0 bytes): it is not the game, only the entry that shows up in the list. Until you replace it, that entry will not start.
The engine needs the data from an original copy: the level files (.PHD for the first Tomb Raider), the sounds and the resources that go with them, as found in the DATA folder of the original installation. Replace the empty file with an archive bearing exactly the same name and containing that data.
This system has a built-in downloader. Open the Tomb Raider system menu, then pick DOWNLOAD GAMES: Recalbox fetches the official Tomb Raider demo, extracts it into the roms folder and refreshes the game list. A network connection is required.
The demo only covers the first levels. For the full adventure you still need the data from an original copy.