Toby Gard is an English video game character designer and consultant. He was part of the team that created fictional female British archaeologist Lara Croft. Lara Croft was awarded a Guinness World Record recognizing her as the "most successful human video game heroine."
Biography
1990s: from ''Tomb Raider'' to ''Confounding''
Originally employed at Core Design, he was part of the team who designed the original Tomb Raidervideo game in 1995 along with the character Lara Croft. His work on the game included building and animating most of the game's characters, animating the in-game cutscenes, storyboarding the FMVs, and managing the level designers. Core gave Gard creative control over the game, although it was clear they wanted to market Lara's sex appeal, even asking Gard to implement a nude code into the game, which he refused to do. His vision for Lara was "a female character who was a heroine, you know, cool, collected, in control, that sort of thing" and that "it was never the intention to create some kind of 'Page 3' girl to star in Tomb Raider". Gard left Core Design in 1997. With Tomb Raider already an established hit, Core was no longer giving Gard the creative freedom he originally had. In the end he was given the choice of making a Tomb Raiderport for the Nintendo 64, or working on Core's vision for Tomb Raider II. Neither option appealed to him, so he left the company. Gard had been headhunted by other software companies including Interplay and Shiny Entertainment but did not take up their offers of employment. In late 1997, he formed the company Confounding Factor along with co-developer Paul Douglas, who had worked with Gard on Tomb Raider. Galleon was announced soon after.
2000s: return on ''Tomb Raider''
Galleon released nearly 7 years later on Microsoft's Xbox, in 2004, then Gard was hired by Eidos to work with Crystal Dynamics on a reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise, beginning with '. While initially hired as a creative consultant, his work became "hands on" during the production and eventually included Lara's visual redesign, overseeing character design and creation, co-writing the story, designing and implementing parts of the character movement system, and directing the cinematics. The next game in the series, ', was a re-imagining of the original Tomb Raider. It was co-developed by Crystal Dynamics and Buzz Monkey Software. Gard's role on Anniversary was limited to "story consultant", while also adding his voice to the audio commentary included in the game. For , Gard's work included co-writing the story, directing the cinematics, voice direction, motion capture direction, and directing the European TV advert for the game. Gard and Eric Lindstrom received a nomination for "Best Writing in a Video Game" by the Writers Guild of America for their work on Underworld.
2010s: ''Otherworld'', ''Ninja Gaiden Z'' and a new studio
From 2010 to 2012, he worked on a webcomic called Otherworld. From 2012 to 2014 Gard was the game director for at Spark Unlimited. In 2014 Gard founded a new studio called Tangentlemen. Gard has been the owner of Cathuria Games since 2019.
