TOMB SERVICE

ARA Croft the highly intelligent, athletic British archaeologist and triangular-busted adventurer who explores ancient tombs and ruins for lost artefacts - turns 30 next year.

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Yes, it is three decades since the star of the long-running Tomb Raider video game series, and later Hollywood icon, was “born” here in Derby.

For many years, after she shot to fame, people in the city were very familiar with her, and were proud of her origins. Thousands of people voted to have a part of the inner ring road named after her and it became Lara Croft Way, with many votes coming from across the world, so famous had she become.

And although it had been suggested, everyone stopped short of another statue in Derby although she would probably have a more rightful place to be part of its history than a statue to Bonnie Prince Charlie, or has she?

She is probably more well-known across the world than some of the city’s more celebrated sons such as Joseph Wright, John Flamsteed and Erasmus Darwin.

But little did you know that Lara nearly never took shape in the way that she did in fact the adventuress was very nearly a fairly ruthless grave-robbing adventurer and not a woman at all.

The video character was originally “conceived” (in 1968 in the actual story) in 1993 on the computer of Toby Gard, in Derby. Toby was a designer working for game studio Core Design, in Ashbourne Road - now called Croft House. In January 1993, Jeremy Heath-Smith, who founded Core with his brother Adrian, went to an exhibition where he was given a sneak preview of a console that would revolutionise the games industry - Sony's PlayStation.

Jeremy came back to Derby to rally the troops. He told his team about the new machine and said they needed to come up with a game for it. Toby suggested a game involving pyramids, called Tomb Raider. Jeremy instantly liked it. He previously told Derby Telegraph on the game's 10th anniversary: “I'd always wanted to do a game based on pyramids.