What a welcome surprise — Duncan Fyfe’s piece on the significance of Lara Croft (“Icon or colonialist? Inside the battle for Lara Croft’s soul”, Spectrum, Life & Arts, October 12).
I hadn’t expected the vaunted pages of FT Weekend to contend with the fleeting soft power of Britain’s once great video game sector.
Yes, it was we who established so many irreplaceable facets of gaming culture from Donkey Kong Country to Grand Theft Auto, Worms, Rome Total War, and even RuneScape.
As he ably points out of course, Croft’s adventures have gone the way of so many other assets of British technological sovereignty and been sold off.
There have been far too few exceptions. Plenty of independent brilliance still rises above the muck of mobile games and sports shovelware outsourced to us today, but gone are the days when giants like Japan and the US would tip their hats to British excellence, a trend that can perhaps be seen across the span of British arts.
Today, Lara Croft is about as British as Austin Powers, and that was a caricature of Britishness, an American film, produced by an American studio, for the principle enjoyment of the domestic American market.
Laurence Russell
Occasional Games Journalist, London N5, UK
