The Temple You Trained In

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation doesn’t open in Egypt, where the rest of the game is set. It opens eight years earlier, with a sixteen-year-old Lara Croft scrambling through the galleries of Angkor Wat under the eye of her mentor Werner Von Croy — a flashback level built as her, and the player’s, training ground before the real story starts.

Core Design’s level designers didn’t invent a generic jungle ruin for it. They gave the level the temple’s actual grammar: tiered stone galleries, corbelled roofs, corridors lined with bas-relief carving, a rope swing across a sunken chamber lit gold like torchlight through a window. It’s a low-polygon, late-90s Angkor Wat, but a recognizable one — a teenager learning to climb, swing, and solve her way through the same kind of quincunx of towers that took a 12th-century kingdom decades to quarry, float, and raise.

For a lot of players in 1999, this five-minute flashback level was the first time they’d ever heard of Angkor Wat at all. It’s a strange kind of monument-building in its own right: a temple raised in sandstone by Suryavarman II gets raised again, briefly, in polygons, as the place a fictional archaeologist learned to become one.

Lara wasn’t first, though: six years earlier, Quintet’s Illusion of Gaia sent SNES players into a 16-bit dungeon it simply called “Ankor Wat,” carved corridors, dark chambers, and all — a temple mountain rebuilt in sprites before anyone had heard the name Lara Croft.