The Tomb Raider Remastered trilogy was led by a fan who’s spent the last 8 years working on an unofficial Tomb Raider game engine

XProger is the creator of OpenLara

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

A Tomb Raider fan, who’s been unofficially remastering the first five games for the last eight years, has announced they worked on the official remastered trilogy.

XProger, the developer of game engine OpenLara, has spent the last few years upgrading the first five Tomb Raider games and allowing players to enjoy Lara Croft’s early adventures in their browser. According to thisbreakdown, the project stays true to the original’s look and feel but adds some enhancements that make the old-school games “look a bit less archaic.”

OpenLara alters the original games' framerate so that it’s no longer fixed to 30FPS and can instead reach between 60 and 144FPS. It also allows players to set the internal resolution and adds things like new water effects, self-shadowing on all the player models, improved lighting effects, a local multiplayer mode, a first-person view, and a range of optional graphical enhancements.

You may think that since the Tomb Raider 1 - 3 Remastered collection is now a thing, XProger would be out of a job. That’s actually the complete opposite of what’s happened, as the developer has recently revealed that they’ve put their projects on hold, since they’ve been working on the official remastered trilogy instead.

I’m grateful to the heads of @SaberGames for trusting me to lead the project and assemble a dream team of true fans.Thanks to @AspyrMedia for providing the source code for their Mac ports to us.Many thanks to Digital Forms for coming to our aid, you are great pros! (2/4)February 14, 2024

On February 14, the programmer took to Twitter to tell OpenLara fans why they’ve not been updating the program for a while: “For the past year, I’ve been busy with a dream project that has become the culmination of the last eight years of my life - Tomb Raider 1 - 3 Remastered.”

In a thread, the developer shares more about their experience working on Aspyr’s remaster, revealing that they worked with “a small ‘Development Team’ of crazy people” who had an “absolute vision of what and for whom we are doing” it all for. They also took the time to thank the studios behind it for “trusting” them to not only lead the project but also “assemble a dream team of true fans.”

The Tomb Raider 1 - 3 Remastered is available now onPS5, PS4,Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter

Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more

Find out what other new releases are on the horizon with ournew games 2024list.

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training.  My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I’m also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.

Despite its crabtastic Soulslike hit, indie dev say funding for its “best game yet” just fizzled: “2024 is really taking no prisoners”

Former GTA 6 designer says the open world sequel will “blow people away” and “people will be talking about it for ages” because Rockstar has “raised the bar again”

In a first for Dragon Age, The Veilguard director reiterates the RPG won’t have DLC as BioWare pivots to work on Mass Effect 5