Trigger Happy
successful company in any industry in 1999. It has sold more than sixteen million copies worldwide of the first three games in the series. Add a conservative estimate for sales of the fourth installment, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, and Lara’s getting close to becoming a billion-dollar babe.
Lara is such a recognizable icon that she now advertises other products, appearing, for example, in computer-generated television commercials for Lucozade and Nike. Generation X author Douglas Coupland contributed to the devotional tome Lara’s Book; the Germans have a monthly magazine dedicated to her. In the summer of 1999, Lara could be seen hanging from the back of buses all over London, and six months later a bus and billboard campaign giving Lara the movie-star treatment was undertaken in several cities in the United States. Jeremy Smith, managing director of Lara’s birthplace, Core Design, points out what a gift her exploding profile was to the company: “Who knows how many millions and millions of pounds’ worth of free marketing we got from the press, by them putting it in front of people who’d then think, ‘Well, wow, that looks like a great game.’ We could never have spent that sort of money on the marketing that we got from the media.” And of
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