Flagship Titles

The Boulder Behind You

Rick Dangerous arrived in 1989 as an unashamed love letter to Indiana Jones - specifically the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which the hero sprints from a rolling boulder through a collapsing temple. Players guided Rick, a British adventurer in a pith helmet, through five increasingly elaborate deathtrap environments: South American jungle, Egyptian pyramid, Schwarzendumpf Castle, a missile base, and a climactic boss encounter. Published by Firebird Software and later by MicroStyle, the game appeared on seven platforms and established Core Design as a studio with a distinctive voice in British gaming.

Two Programmers and an Indiana Jones Fixation

Rick Dangerous was developed by a small core team. Simon Phipps served as lead programmer and artist, bringing in Stuart Gregg to share the programming load. Terry Lloyd contributed additional artwork. The game was built in assembly language to squeeze responsive character movement and trap logic across the target platforms, each of which required its own adaptation. The 16-bit Amiga and Atari ST versions offered the fullest visual experience; the C64 version gained its own legendary soundtrack from Dave Pridmore, whose SID compositions - indexed as HVSC entry 83 in the High Voltage SID Collection - became the definitive audio companion to Rick’s adventures for many players on that platform.

Die, Learn, Try Again

Rick Dangerous was, by design, a game of trial and error. Enemies materialised from behind walls without warning. Traps - pressure pads, spears, falling blocks - detonated on first contact, offering no preview of their presence or timing. The boulder that opens the South American level must be memorised to survive: its path, its speed, the precise moment to dodge into an alcove. The game asked players not to react but to learn, accumulate knowledge through death, and apply it on the next attempt.

Rick carried a gun, a supply of bombs, and a stick. The stick - used to trigger traps from a safe distance - gave the game its tactical dimension. A player who rushed through a corridor would die on the first trap; a player who probed carefully with the stick might survive. The inventory was limited, demanding careful resource management across five lengthy levels. Lives were finite. The game took no prisoners and offered no apology for its difficulty.

Seven Platforms from One Concept

The simultaneous seven-platform release of Rick Dangerous was an early demonstration of Core Design’s commercial ambition. The Amiga and Atari ST versions shared a visual approach; the C64 version was reworked to fit within that platform’s tighter specifications while retaining the trap-based gameplay intact. The ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and Acorn Archimedes versions each required further adaptation. The MS-DOS version appeared alongside the 16-bit releases. Managing seven simultaneous codebases in 1989 was a logistical challenge that smaller studios frequently avoided - Core Design did not.

“Rick Dangerous is demanding, inventive, and consistently surprising - an action-adventure that earns its difficulty through clever level architecture rather than arbitrary cruelty. Core Design have produced something genuinely special.” Zzap!64, issue 51, July 1989 (Gold Medal)

Ninety-Three Percent and a Death Cry

Contemporary reception was strong across most platforms. Zzap!64 awarded a Gold Medal and rated the game highly, praising the level design and addictive quality. Amiga Power and ACE both noted Rick Dangerous as one of the strongest action-adventure releases of the year on their respective platforms. The game sold well enough across its first year to make a sequel commercially inevitable, and Rick Dangerous 2 followed in 1990, published by Microprose, extending the formula to even more elaborate deathtrap environments.

Rick Is Still Dead (and That Is the Point)

Rick Dangerous has never been officially remastered or revived. The game exists in its original platform versions - available through Internet Archive emulation and the usual ROM preservation channels. Its absence from modern storefronts is partly a rights question (Firebird, MicroStyle, and Core Design are all defunct) and partly a question of audience: the trial-and-error design philosophy that made Rick Dangerous what it is belongs to a specific moment in home computer gaming, before save states and checkpoints softened the learning curve.

For retrospective documentary coverage of the game and its development, Simon Phipps appeared in The Making of Rick Dangerous - available on YouTube - discussing the game’s creation in detail. It is the closest thing to a primary source on the early Core Design period. The full catalogue entry, including platform notes and box art, is in the Games Catalogue. Dave Pridmore’s C64 SID score is covered on the Music page.

The Belly-Barge Caveman

Chuck Rock arrived in 1991 as a deliberate tonal counterweight to Rick Dangerous. Where Rick was punishing and precise, Chuck was exuberant and generous - a cartoon prehistoric platformer featuring a boulder-belly bashing caveman through five worlds of Flintstones-adjacent absurdity. Published by Virgin Games across eight platforms, the game demonstrated Core Design’s range and their willingness to build an original IP around broad comedy at a time when British games development favoured licensed properties.

Four-Channel Paula and a Caveman Composer

Chuck Rock was led by programmer Chris Long, with Lee Pullen handling the artwork. The game’s visual approach - bright, cartoony, with large animated character sprites - required careful palette management to achieve on Amiga hardware without sacrificing frame rate. The backgrounds were detailed enough to suggest depth while remaining simple enough not to compete with the foreground action.

The music was composed by Martin Iveson, whose four-channel Amiga tracker soundtrack became one of the celebrated scores of the early 1990s. Working within the Paula chip’s four simultaneous sample channels, Iveson constructed a collection of upbeat, rhythmically infectious pieces that matched the game’s comedy tone without tipping into parody. The main theme in particular became instantly recognisable to Amiga owners of the period - the sort of tune hummed in playgrounds in 1991 and 1992. Iveson was also credited on Heimdall, released the same year, where his compositional approach shifted entirely to suit that game’s darker Norse mythology setting.

Broad Humour, Precise Mechanics

Chuck’s primary attack was the belly barge - using his distended abdomen to launch enemies backwards on contact. He could also pick up boulders and throw them at enemies or platforms, and jump on larger enemies to stun them. The difficulty curve was considerably gentler than Rick Dangerous: checkpoints were generous, enemies telegraphed their behaviour, and the level design rewarded exploration without demanding it. A player who wanted to barge their way through could do so; one who took time to explore the levels found secrets and shortcuts.

The five worlds - prehistoric jungle, prehistoric sea, prehistoric factory, prehistoric caverns, and the villain’s lair - maintained the visual joke of applying a stone-age aesthetic to anachronistic settings. The factory world, featuring prehistoric conveyor belts and gear mechanisms, was the most mechanically complex: timing-based platforming sequences interspersed with enemy encounters that required the belly-barge at specific angles.

Eight Platforms in Two Years

The multi-platform release of Chuck Rock - covering Amiga, Atari ST, C64, DOS, Sega Genesis, SNES, Game Gear, and Sega CD - demonstrated Core Design’s growing commercial infrastructure and Virgin Games’ distribution reach. Each console version required adaptation; the Genesis version, in particular, was well received for maintaining the quality of the Amiga original within the Mega Drive’s technical constraints. The Game Gear and Sega CD versions followed later, the latter benefiting from CD audio.

“Chuck Rock is irresistible - funny, fast, and impeccably soundtracked. The belly-barge mechanic is inspired in its simplicity, and the whole game is put together with more wit and polish than anything Core Design has released before.” Amiga Power, issue 4, August 1991

Gold Medals and a Sequel

Chuck Rock was reviewed positively across the UK games press. Zzap!64 awarded a Gold Medal and rated the game highly on C64, praising the animation quality and the clarity of the mechanics. Amiga Power gave approximately 88%, highlighting Iveson’s soundtrack as a standout achievement. CU Amiga noted it as one of the strongest Amiga platformers of 1991. The commercial success was sufficient to commission Chuck Rock 2: Son of Chuck (1993), which extended the franchise to even more platforms including Amiga CD32, Sega Master System, and Game Gear variants.

The Gentler Counterweight to Rick Dangerous

Chuck Rock’s lasting position in Core Design’s legacy is partly as a demonstration of range. The studio had built its name on a game defined by difficulty and precision; Chuck Rock showed they could produce generous, accessible, broadly appealing work at the same technical level. The combination - one brutalist, one cartoon - gave Core Design a wider audience than either game would have attracted alone.

Full box art and platform notes are in the Games Catalogue. Martin Iveson’s soundtrack is covered on the Music page. Contemporary review scores are in the Reviews archive.

Norse Gods and Isometric Perspective

Heimdall was Core Design’s most ambitious early departure from their action-platformer identity. Players controlled the titular Norse god - guardian of the Bifrost bridge, son of nine mothers - tasked with recovering the weapons of the gods stolen by the trickster Loki. The game offered an isometric perspective, turn-based combat, puzzle-solving elements, and a Norse mythology setting that placed it closer to the British RPG tradition than to anything Core Design had produced before. Released the same year as Chuck Rock, Heimdall demonstrated that the Derby studio was deliberately refusing to be categorised.

Leeds-Derby Collaboration

Heimdall was developed in collaboration with The 8th Day, a Leeds-based software house, in an arrangement that gave Core Design access to RPG design expertise outside their own core competencies. The project was published by Virgin Games for Amiga and Atari ST in 1991, with an MS-DOS version following and a Sega CD port released in 1994 through The Software Toolworks - giving the game a three-year commercial life across four platforms.

Steve Simmons painted the cover art - a helmeted Norse warrior, rendered in a detailed, painterly style that communicated the game’s more serious ambitions immediately and set it apart visually from the cartoon aesthetics of Chuck Rock. The cover was one of the more striking box art commissions of 1991 in the British market.

The God Who Solves Puzzles

Combat in Heimdall was turn-based and strategic rather than reflexive. Players moved Heimdall through isometric environments, encountering enemies whose defeat required choosing the right weapon and timing attacks to exploit the turn structure. The game’s puzzle-solving dimension extended beyond combat: locked doors required specific keys, NPCs could be spoken to for information, and certain objects needed to be carried across multiple areas to reach their destination. The design asked for patience - a different skill set from the reflex-testing that Rick Dangerous demanded.

Heimdall’s environments were generated from a set of interchangeable components rather than individually hand-crafted, giving the game a degree of procedural variety unusual for the period. This meant replayability was higher than a fixed-map RPG, though it also meant that individual areas could feel less distinctly authored than the trap-filled levels of the Rick Dangerous games.

Martin Iveson’s Cinematic Score

Martin Iveson’s Amiga tracker soundtrack for Heimdall was markedly different from his Chuck Rock work. Where Chuck Rock’s music was upbeat and rhythmically simple, the Heimdall score was atmospheric, deliberately paced, and cinematic in its ambitions - drawing on the four Paula channels to create something closer to orchestral mood-setting than to arcade accompaniment. The main theme in particular established the game’s Norse grandeur before the player had made a single move.

“Heimdall is atmospheric, intelligent, and unlike anything else Core Design has released. The Norse mythology setting gives the game a gravity that its competitors in the RPG genre mostly lack - and Martin Iveson’s soundtrack is the finest thing he has produced.” CU Amiga, 1992

Atmosphere Over Accessibility

Critical reception praised the atmosphere and visual design while noting the RPG systems’ complexity as a potential barrier. Amiga Power noted the game’s serious ambitions and the strength of its Norse setting. CU Amiga highlighted the combination of isometric exploration and tactical combat as distinctive within the Amiga library. The game was not universally embraced - players expecting another Core Design action title found it demanding in a different way - but those who engaged with its RPG structure found it rewarding.

Core’s Road Not Taken

Heimdall 2 (1994) continued the Norse mythology setting and improved the RPG mechanics. But Core Design’s subsequent direction - Bubba ’n’ Stix, and then the world-changing Tomb Raider - did not revisit the RPG space again. Heimdall remains the studio’s only serious attempt at the genre, a compact experiment that demonstrated range and ambition before the studio’s energies were redirected toward 3D hardware. The catalogue entry and platform notes are in the Games Catalogue. Iveson’s Amiga tracker score is covered on the Music page.

One Stick, Infinite Applications

Bubba ’n’ Stix arrived in 1994 with one of the more original central mechanics in Core Design’s catalogue: a puzzle-platformer built entirely around a stick. Not a weapon, not a tool with a fixed function - a stick that could serve as a club to defeat enemies, a bridge to span gaps, a pole vault to reach elevated platforms, or a throwing implement to trigger distant switches. The game’s premise - a caveman named Bubba and his sentient stick companion Stix, stranded on an alien planet after being abducted from prehistoric Earth - gave the mechanic its narrative justification and the designers a playful framework for building increasingly inventive puzzles around it.

Built for CD32

The game was designed from the outset as a showcase title for the Amiga CD32 - Commodore’s CD-based console released in 1993. The CD32 version benefited from CD audio: the soundtrack, which would have required compromise on a standard Amiga floppy release, could run at full quality from disc. A standard Amiga version was also released, as was a Sega Genesis port distributed by Virgin Interactive - the latter bringing the game to a considerably larger installed base than the CD32 alone could reach.

Development occurred during a transitional period for Core Design. The studio was preparing for 3D hardware - Tomb Raider was in early concept stages - while still building for the 16-bit and CD-based market it had served throughout the early 1990s. Bubba ’n’ Stix was among the last games Core Design shipped before that transition fundamentally changed their output.

The Stick as Tool, Bridge, and Vault

Level design in Bubba ’n’ Stix was built around creative exploitation of the stick mechanic’s three primary modes. Combat application was the most straightforward: swing the stick at enemies and they fall. Bridge application required placing the stick across a gap to walk over water or chasms - a literal bridge - which then had to be retrieved for use elsewhere. Pole-vault application launched Bubba vertically to platforms otherwise unreachable, with timing determining the height of the vault.

Puzzles combined these modes in sequences that required thinking two or three moves ahead. A gap that appeared to need a bridge might instead be better approached with a vault to a nearby ledge; a cluster of enemies that seemed to demand combat might be bypassed by using the bridge over them entirely. The game rewarded players who understood the full range of the stick’s applications and combined them fluidly.

Three Ways to Use One Object

The technical achievement of Bubba ’n’ Stix was not in visual spectacle - the Amiga was showing its age by 1994 against the Genesis and the incoming 32-bit consoles - but in mechanical elegance. Building an entire game around the three applications of one object, ensuring that each application was necessary in different contexts, and designing levels that rewarded creative combinations without making any single solution the only valid approach, required careful iteration. The stick mechanic is one of the more genuinely original design contributions in Core Design’s history.

“Bubba ’n’ Stix uses one mechanic and rings every last possibility out of it. Inventive, funny, and surprisingly deep - this is Core Design at their most thoughtful, building a puzzle-platformer that respects the intelligence of its players.” Amiga Power, issue 32, October 1994

The CD32 Game That Outlasted the Console

The Amiga CD32 was discontinued within months of Bubba ’n’ Stix’s release, making it one of the last showcase titles for a console that never found a sustained market. The game survived the hardware’s failure through its standard Amiga and Genesis versions and has since been available through emulation. It is remembered as one of the more inventive games in Core Design’s catalogue before Tomb Raider defined everything that came after. The catalogue entry is in the Games Catalogue.

Lara Croft Changed Everything

Tomb Raider (1996) was the defining moment in Core Design’s history - and one of the defining moments of the PlayStation era. Toby Gard conceived Lara Croft as a female action-adventure protagonist: an independently-minded British archaeologist and explorer, capable, composed, and sharply intelligent, in contrast to the male heroes who dominated the genre at the time. The game built around her moved through a series of increasingly elaborate ancient environments - Peruvian ruins, Egyptian tombs, ancient Greek temples, and the lost city of Atlantis - combining 3D platforming, combat, and environmental puzzle-solving in a way that had not been attempted at this scale on mainstream console hardware before.

Toby Gard’s Rejected Designs

The design process for Lara Croft involved several discarded iterations before the final character emerged. Early concept work reportedly explored different backstory framings and visual directions before Gard settled on the combination of aristocratic British background, archaeological obsession, and the physical capability that the game’s platforming demanded. Gard wanted the character to function as a genuinely capable protagonist rather than as a decorative one - her movement, her composure under pressure, and the game’s refusal to present her as a victim were design decisions, not accidents.

The game was developed at Core Design for Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn hardware simultaneously, with an MS-DOS version following. The development team worked under Jeremy Heath-Smith’s production oversight as Core Design had by this point been acquired by Eidos Interactive, which provided the publishing infrastructure and marketing budget that transformed a strong game into a global phenomenon.

Precision Movement in Three Dimensions

Lara moved through the game’s environments using what became known as “tank controls”: directional movement relative to the character’s facing rather than to the camera. The choice was deliberate. The environment was constructed on a grid of tiles, and Lara’s movement was designed to snap to grid positions, making precise jumping, ledge-grabbing, and puzzle-solving possible in a way that analogue movement through 3D space would have made considerably harder. Players who worked with the control system rather than against it found that the precision it demanded was exactly what the level design rewarded.

Combat involved selecting the correct weapon, maintaining distance, and using the environment to avoid damage from faster enemies. Lara could shoot while jumping - a significant mobility advantage against static or slow targets. Against wildlife, patience and positioning were more effective than aggression. The game’s most memorable combat encounter - a T. rex in the Lost Valley level - was a deliberate spectacle designed to communicate the game’s ambitions to players in one sequence.

Nine Out of Ten from Edge

Critical reception was extraordinary. Edge magazine gave the game 9 out of 10, and their assessment set the tone for coverage that followed. Gaming press across Europe and North America treated Tomb Raider as a landmark release - a genuine step-change in what console games could achieve and what protagonists could look like. Sales matched the critical reception: Tomb Raider sold millions of copies worldwide, made Eidos Interactive one of the world’s leading publishers, and turned Lara Croft into a cultural icon who appeared on magazine covers, in television advertisements, and eventually in a two-film Hollywood franchise.

“A quantum leap in interactive entertainment.” Edge, issue 38, November 1996 (9/10)

Six Sequels and a Hollywood Franchise

Toby Gard departed Core Design during Tomb Raider II’s development in 1997, reportedly dissatisfied with Eidos’s commercialisation of the character he had created. The remaining Core Design team produced four more sequels - Tomb Raider II (1997), III (1998), The Last Revelation (1999), and Chronicles (2000) - before the longer development cycle of Angel of Darkness (2003) produced a troubled release that critically underperformed.

Following Angel of Darkness, Eidos transferred Tomb Raider development to Crystal Dynamics, who rebooted the franchise with Legend (2006). Core Design continued with minor projects until Eidos closed the Derby studio in 2006 - eighteen years after Jeremy Heath-Smith and Chris Shrigley had founded it. Toby Gard returned to the franchise he had created at Crystal Dynamics, credited as a consultant on Tomb Raider: Anniversary (2007), the remake of the game that had defined his career.

Toby Gard’s biography is on the People page. The full Tomb Raider series entry is in the Games Catalogue. Developer interview footage is available on the Videos page.