/vr/ - Retro Games

Sasho taught himself everything he needed to know to modify the game, first in a hex editor and then with C++ and the Win32 API. He trawled through code in search of objects or areas hidden in the final release and then restored or modified them. There were missing doors and entire sections of levels that had been cut in Core's race to get a functional build out to the world, and by poking around and tweaking values he could bring them back.

He also found some stranger quirks. "There was an unused openable bin lid kept in the game," he tells me. "[But] everything I've discovered in this game was so exciting to me.... There was even an in-game scripting API which could've been provided with a game SDK [for easy modding of characters and the welcome screen]."

Huge swathes of code were written and left unfinished, for what Sasho says are "many features from which only a small part [were] actually used." Some omissions had a more telling effect on the player experience.

"[Sasho] found out in the code that the speed at which Lara runs in the final game was like 80 or 70 per cent of the speed the original animation has," Smolders says. "They were planning on upgrading the speed Lara runs at too, like with the distance she can jump and things she can push. But somehow they never managed to get that into the game.

"So what Sasho did was he just somehow in the code made it so that the animation runs at 100 per cent of the original speed."