Tomb Raider Remastered Was Worked On By OpenLara Dev

Originally posted on Parade | By Oliver Brandt | Last updated Feb 15, 2024 12:30 PM ET

There’s a new collection of classic games out this week, and it’s a pretty big one: Tomb Raider I-III Remastered. The collection is an enhanced remaster of the first three Tomb Raider games, and it’s been very well received. As it turns out, that’s because developer Aspyr picked exactly the right person for the job.

Timur Gagiev, better known online as XProger, revealed on Twitter that he headed up development of Tomb Raider Remastered, which is frankly an inspired choice by Aspyr. That’s because XProger is the developer of OpenLara, an open-source engine for classic Tomb Raider games, and he probably knows the classic games better than almost anyone on the planet.

He also revealed that development on OpenLara is on hold for the moment, but it doesn’t seem like that’s a forever thing.

“For those who are still interested in the fate of OpenLara and my other projects, they are on hold,” XProger wrote on Twitter, “For the past year I’ve been busy with a dream project that has become the culmination of the last 8 years of my life - Tomb Raider I-III Remastered.”

XProger thanked Aspyr and parent company Saber Interactive for trusting him with the project, and for providing the source code, as well as Digital Forms for assisting with development. He says that he and his team had “complete freedom,” and that it could only be done by a small, headworking development team.

That hard work seems to have paid off, as the collection’s been received fairly well by the press so far. The scores on review score aggregator Metacritic have been in the mid- to high-70s — not masterpiece material, but pretty good for a fairly faithful remaster of a quite old set of games.

Tomb Raider I-III Remastered is available on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, and PS5 now.

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