Tomb Raider Remastered Collection Includes Content Warning

The Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered collection comes with a warning that denounces some of the content from the original trilogy as «rooted in racial and ethnic prejudices.» The bundle comprising the remasters of the original Tomb Raider trilogy releases February 14 for PC and the last two console generations.

The first three entries in the iconic action-adventure franchise were developed by the now-defunct British company Core Design, with the series then going through several developer switches that started and ended with Crystal Dynamics. And while the Embracer Group-owned studio is still the lead on the series, the Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered collection was primarily developed by Aspyr Media, its sister company.

Yet it is Crystal Dynamics and not Aspyr that is responsible for the newly emerged content warning, which was originally spotted by Tomb Raider Forums users on February 13. «The games in this collection contain offensive depictions of people,» the notice reads, adding that these renditions were influenced by ethnic and racial stereotypes that run contrary to Crystal Dynamics' values. Even so, the U.S. studio said it decided to leave the offensive content in its original form in the hopes that its «harmful impact» could be acknowledged and used to inform modern sensibilities.

The warning doesn't actually contain any examples of the content that the studio deemed offensive. But the fact that it references depictions of «people» does help narrow down the list of contentious levels by quite a bit, because the original Tomb Raider trilogy doesn't have that many human enemies or friendly characters to begin with. Excluding ethnically white and completely obscured human enemies from the equation leaves just two levels that Crystal Dynamics' warning could ostensibly be referring to: Coastal Village and Temple of Puna in Tomb Raider 3, both of which are part of the game's South Pacific section.

The games in this collection contain offensive depictions of people and