Arrogant

There was not much to be said about the original Lara Croft. "She barely had a voice, let alone a character," admits Rhianna Pratchett, lead writer on the latest instalment. She was not even originally British. The character – a gender-flipped evolution of developers Core Design's original hero Rick Dangerous, himself little more than a carbon-copy of treasure-hunter Indiana Jones – was first conceived as Lara Cruz, before a trawl through a phonebook threw up the purposely bland British surname Croft.

From there, a legend was spun: Croft became the orphaned daughter of architect and all-round swashbuckler Lord Richard Croft. She acquired a stately manor house, a boarding-school education and the received pronunciation of the aristocracy. Yet those who played the first game could be forgiven for forgetting all of that. A back-story appeared in the manual, but on screen we saw little more than a pistol-toting babe in skimpy clothes, with a waist about the same width as one of her thighs and an implausible pair of breasts.

Over the sequels that followed, although she rarely ditched the hot-pants and crop-top, she developed more of a personality. Gamers came to recognise her as fearless, even arrogant, thrill-seeking and callous, bold and brave: in short, a badass. This characterisation helped counterbalance the brazen sexuality of the character design, even making it possible to argue she was some kind of feminist icon. So it was a risky move on the part of the prequel's developers Crystal Dynamics to strip a character who has often been derided as sexist of the skills and attitude that once served as an emphatic riposte to the allegation.