In 1997’s Lara Croft 2, Lara climbs into a shower before turning toward the player and saying, “Don’t you think you’ve seen enough?” An ad campaign for the games suggested men were abandoning strip clubs to play the game and fantasize about Lara. (As cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian once pointed out, game makers usually cover male avatars with capes or make it impossible for the camera to zoom in on their behinds.) A rumor spread that a certain line of coding could remove Lara’s clothes.

The camera often focused on her rear end. Not only did Lara’s creators endow her with a Barbie doll figure, but the mechanics of the game encouraged objectification - already a problem in the male-dominated gaming space. In fact, her creators have admitted they were surprised when women wanted to buy the game, too. But unlike the Spice Girls, she was designed for a primarily male audience.

The first Tomb Raider game was released just two months after the Spice Girls dropped their first single, “Wannabe.” Like her fellow Brits, Lara Croft earned fans for both her independent spirit and her sexy outfits.

“So she becomes a flashpoint for people to talk about gender in games and gender in society.” That means Robertson-Dworet had to contend with more than just telling a good story when bringing Lara to the big screen: it also mattered how both men and women experienced this unique heroine. At the same time, she’s conventionally sexy,” says Hammer. Lara Croft has had to carry the burden of representing the perspective of all women. “For men to say ‘I did this’ about a female avatar is a big deal in a society that teaches men not to value women’s experiences,” says Jessica Hammer, a Carnegie Melon professor who researches gender in gaming. Lara Croft remains one of the few popular female video game characters that players can actually control, so how men feel when they step into Lara’s combat boots matters. When gamers play as a character, they see things from their perspective. Yet the original Lara Croft character was created in 1996 by men in with men in mind, the original cyberbabe. Female gamers clung to her as one of the few playable female characters in video games, aside from Ms. First introduced in 1996, she became one of video game’s most popular characters, simultaneously a feminist icon and sexist stereotype. The new Tomb Raider movie - largely based on the 2013 rebooted video game series - also attempts to contend with the complicated history of the video game character.

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