With Tomb Raider being released next week, I recently had the opportunity to talk with Rhianna Pratchett about her role in writing the new game, recreating Lara, Jaffa Cakes, Moomins and a whole lot more.

Andrew Edney: Hi Rhianna, thanks for taking the time to speak with us today, I know you are very busy.

Rhianna Pratchett: You are very welcome.

AE: Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself in your own words?

RP: OK, I’m Rhianna Pratchett, I’m a games writer and narrative designer – well I’m a writer predominately for games but I have also worked in comics, film and TV, short stories and non-fiction. And I am the lead writer for Tomb Raider. I have been playing games since I was about 6 and they’ve always been a big hobby of mine. I did my degree in journalism and I then went onto being a games journalist, reviewing and previewing games and writing about the industry, visiting and interviewing developers. Then about 9 or 10 years ago I went freelance and still kept up the journalism side of things but moved into development, initially as a story editor and then I started working on level dialogues, mission dialogues and then moving into full scripts, initially with Heavenly Sword for Sony and then also working on titles such as Codemasters Overlord series, Mirrors Edge and then right up to Tomb Raider.

AE: So talking of Tomb Raider, how did you first get involved in the project?

RP: I was already working on another Square Enix / EIDOS project which I can’t talk about at the moment so I was already in the family. so to speak, and I got an email through the internal email system from one of the lead developers on Tomb Raider and they were looking for someone to really capture Lara’s character and voice and I got recommended to them. I did a bit of test work for them and an interview over the phone and I rewrote a couple of scenes for their vertical slice demo and I got the job, although I can’t really remember the moment when I actually got it as it’s become a bit of a blur and so I’ve done a lot of work on-site with Crystal Dynamics over in San Francisco, I’ve also done a lot of work off-site from London and I’ve gone back and forth between the two, and that was pretty much how we worked.

AE: Lara is an iconic character and Tomb Raider is a large well known franchise,  so how did you feel when you took over the reigns to the writing?

RP: I think I felt more pressure afterwards, I felt it was a great challenge, especially because I had worked on action adventure game heroines in the past with Nariko in Heavenly Sword and Faith in Mirror’s Edge, and so it was a great opportunity, and it felt like now was the time for me to take on Lara as I had spent a long time working on other female action adventure heroines, so I thought yep, ok, this feels right, this is the right thing to do. Then I approached it like I would any work really, I got my head down, did the work, found out what Crystal wanted and spent a long time working on the synopsis, bios, relationship webs and treatments, and lots and lots of other stuff before I even wrote for the main scripts, and I think its really only after I got the majority of the work out of the way and I got announced as the writer that suddenly I felt “oh my god this is Lara Croft” and there’s this huge pressure around it but I didn’t feel that initially because when I came on-board I don’t think there game had even been announced and so there wasn’t very much information out there and so I didn’t really feel too much pressure, and it’s gradually ramped up now.

AE: What was your inspiration for the story? Did Crystal Dynamics give you lots of ideas or did they say to you we are doing a reboot and we want you to come up with something?

RP: Crystal had taken a lot of inspiration from things like Lost, and also the Decent as well, which I was quite impressed about, because here was this big American developer and they’ve seen this British indie cult horror movie, so I was quite impressed by that. We also took influence from things like 127 Hours, so real world survival stories as well and I think that was beneficial from both Crystal’s side and mine, and what you would do to survive. Aron Ralston has talked quite a bit about that and that was certainly an influence, when a human is pushed just what they will do to survive and so it was a mixture of the real world and fictional stuff, which all kind of helped, plus there was quite a bit of research about the area and the period, so The Dragons Triangle and Yamatai and we started with a kind of a real world mythology and then built out from there and I think that Brian (Horton) the art director also went out to Japan and took hundreds and hundreds of photographs as well and did a lot of location research and so we have covered it from lots of different angles.

AE: Can you describe some of the process you go through when you were writing this story?

RP: Once I started on the project, Crystal handed me a synopsis, which was about 4 or 5 pages with some character bios as well and over the next couple of years I basically worked on that synopsis, fleshed it out, established a story arc from that, and shuffled things round and worked with level design to make sure everything fitted together well and spent a long time expanding on the bios and working on relationships between the characters and how those changed during the game and then working on the treatment and breaking down into acts and then it was actually writing the script. Then the script went through quite a few iterations and as development changes and level designs go through changes and the characters go through changes so the script has to adapt to that so it might mean that a scene is dropped or moved or the entry and exit points for the scene has to change because of where the player will be when they enter that scene. Sometimes a location can be dropped so it has to be quite flexible to deal with all that and you have to be on the ball knowing what the other departments are doing so that your story fits in with that and doesn’t feel like its been created in a vacuum, and certainly Crystal didn’t want it to feel like the gameplay was created in a vacuum and pay no attention to the story and the story was created in a vacuum with no attention to the gameplay so it’s making sure that the story and gameplay does dovetail really well and then, well, I can’t even remember when I finished this script because there were various iterations, it went to casting and myself and John Stafford, the narrative designer wrote very specific scenes for casting purposes and then there were mocap performances and I would watch the mocap practice shoots and give my feedback on those and then there was lots of things after we recorded so some things had to change and we had to see what was working and what wasn’t, and make some changes to some of the scenes, do more recordings and then there was also recordings for things like the level dialog, and secondary narrative for the documents and stuff, which was largely Johns realm. Then after that I worked on the prequel comic, Tomb Raider the Beginning, which looks at how all the characters came to be on the ship and on the expedition and there was doing stuff like this (the interview) and talks like the one at BAFTA later.

AE: You mentioned subtle changes, I noticed when I played the first three hours before Christmas that there were some changes when Lara first runs into Sam, and that scene was different to the demo that was shown earlier in the year. How late in the day were you making changes to the story?

RP: Not that late in the day in terms of by the time that scene was out I think it had already been rewritten. This is because for the trailer and the demo they have to use the best footage they have at the time and other departments were working several months ahead on other stuff and so it wasn’t hugely late in the day although we did do a big round after alpha looking at was and wasn’t coming through as clearly as it should be and then we changed some of the things around. One of the things we changed around was the reason for the expedition, we were going to have the expedition going out look for X and found Y and we changed it so that they were going to look for Y and found Y under extreme circumstances just because it meant we could front load our mythology a lot more and make it a little bit clearer to the player because it wasn’t an established mythology that lots of people know about like King Arthur or the Holy Grail or more established mythology as not that many people know about Yamatai or even the Dragons Triangle so that change, which might seem small, affected quite a few things, but ultimately it made it a lot stronger.

AE: How much of what you wrote ended up in the game or was there a significant amount that didn’t get used?

RP: Because I was the one doing all the edits to the main script, myself, the creative director Noah Hughes and John Stafford formed a kind of narrative triangle and we would go through everything and we would talk about feedback from other members of the team were giving about a scene or what was working and what wasn’t and I would keep iterating on that until I felt the scene was as strong as it could be and that it was working the way it should, so I was always making iterations to those scenes, and they are all in the game as the final iteration was, I think there may have been a few words tweaked here and there in performance and because we spent a long time in practice performance there was a lot of feedback and tweaks as we were looking at how the actors delivered the lines and whether they were struggling over a phrasing of a line and so that needed to be done differently so we did spend a long time looking the way actors were performing and took feedback from that so my main role was on the cinematic script and writing all of that, and Lara’s journals as well and then John took the lead on the secondary narrative so what Lara says to herself when she is going through the game, and I did a little bit of that and I oversaw what John was doing there to make sure the voice was consistent and then John wrote a lot of the secondary narrative diaries, letters and things like that you find during the game and they were all based on characters bios and profiles we established quite early on and myths and little bits and pieces that were established during that big pre-production phase of the story when we were working out how everything fitted together, so there was lots of space in that for John to come up with ideas on how to enhance one particular area of the character or someone who had existed on the island before and had gone through something so there was a lot of material there to use.

AE: So was it you or John that came up with the Jaffa Cakes line (there was a line later in the game were Lara tells people she misses Jaffa Cakes)?

RP: Oh that was me (laughs), I had to explain to him what a Jaffa Cake was. Jaffa Cakes didn’t make it in sadly, I did fight for Jaffa Cakes but Americans don’t really know what Jaffa Cakes are, I fought for them but ultimately that scene got changed for other reasons besides Jaffa Cakes. I was sad to lose Jaffa Cakes because that brought an extra element of Britishness to it.

AE: There is quite a lot of Britishness in the game, for example, early on when Lara finds Roth she calls him “a Northern Bastard”, were you a bit worried that non-British gamers wouldn’t understand some of those lines and humour?

RP: I think Crystal were occasionally a bit worried about it but Lara is British and so you have to kind of roll with it in a certain degree and movies and TV don’t worry about that sort of thing and they make their characters authentic for the region they come from and so I had one eye on it but I wanted her to feel authentic and so there were arguments in performance about whether she was much too prim and proper to say things like that but I said no the British aristocracy swear like troopers and she’s not a cut glass girl that never swears and you still get that Northern Southern divide and its interesting because she doesn’t mean it in a nasty way and it’s in the way that British people joke. It was important to me to have those little bits in, and I wish that I could have kept Jaffa Cakes but…….

AE: How much humour is there in the game?

RP: There are little lighter moments, obviously its not like Overlord which was a game I put a lot of humour in. It is a darker game and it is heavy on the drama, but there are lighter moments, but Lara isn’t little miss quipy because she doesn’t yet have the confidence, she doesn’t have the guns and the knowhow, or the self confidence to know that she can get herself out of any situation and so she can make light of it, she’s not at that stage yet so it didn’t feel appropriate for her to be giving the pithy one-liners that she had in previous games although you do get some a little bit later when she does have more confidence. We had to establish the right kind of tone that felt inline with where her character was at the time, it may be that she does become more pithy and have more one-lines as she becomes more confident in Tomb Raider games in the future, although I can’t confirm or deny that. This game is generally more darker and dramatic in tone with some lighter moments.

AE: Talking of future Tomb Raider games, would you like to continue to write them?

RP: Absolutely, if the circumstances were right, and if Crystal wanted me to and I’ve been very focussed on this project for a long time and helping to market and talk about it and it’s been a great platform to talk about female characters and characters in general, and games writing and the challenges that come with that and the challenges of rebooting an IP which is a once in a lifetime experience for a game writer, so I think once this one is out Crystal and I will have a long talk (laughs).

AE: So what’s next for you then after the rollercoaster that is Tomb Raider?

RP: (laughs) So I have one other game project on but I don’t know when I will be announced on it plus I have another project I have been on for a long time, I’m also currently adapting a novel called Warrior Daughter into a screenplay with script development funding from BFI and Creative Scotland and my first draft is sitting with BFI at the moment, and that’s been a lot of fun working on, and so I am doing a lot of other stuff outside of gaming and I think that makes me a strong writer as a whole. I’ve also helped form Narrativia, a production company with my father (Terry Pratchett) and two other gentlemen and we are working on adaptations of my fathers work and some other projects as well. There are also the comics, I would love to more as I have really enjoyed writing those, and really just expanding out to other mediums, I like all those challenges, I like anything that strengthens me as a writer, so that’s pretty much it (laughs). I just like to go where the challenges are.

AE: Lastly, I saw you recently tweeted a picture of a box of Moomins, ever thought about writing a Moomin story?

RP: Well there are already a lot of Moomin stories getting out there, Tove Jansson’s niece is in control of the Jansson estate. I adore the Moomins, my father built me Moomin Valley out of papier-mâché when I was a kid, and made me the Moomin house and made all the Moomins out of clay and played with them and so I really adore the original books because I am Moomin purist, it’s all about the books, not about the cartoons. A Moomin game would be interesting as it has such a interesting atmosphere, both cosy and cold and weird and funny at the same time, it very very Finnish in that regard.

AE: Thank you for your time today Rihanna.

RP: You are very welcome.

This interview took place on Tuesday 12th February 2013 before the BAFTA talk on Tomb Raider.

Tomb Raider is out March 5th for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Watch out for our review this week!