Flagship Titles

Rick Dangerous arrived in 1989 as an unashamed love letter to Indiana Jones - specifically, the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark. 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 boss encounter.

The game’s defining quality was its philosophy of punishment. Rick Dangerous was, by design, a game of trial and error. Enemies appeared from behind walls. Traps detonated on contact with no warning. Falling boulders required memorisation of their exact timing. Death - announced by Simon Phipps’ now-legendary “Waaaahh!” voiced by the programmer himself - was frequent and frequently absurd.

This design philosophy, borrowing from arcade platformers of the era, divided opinion: contemporary reviews praised the game’s challenge while acknowledging its cruelty. In retrospect, Rick Dangerous is understood as a deliberate design statement - one that asked players to engage with levels as puzzles to be decoded through repetition rather than reflexes alone.

Dave Pridmore’s C64 SID soundtrack provided the definitive audio backdrop for many players. The Amiga and Atari ST versions offered superior visuals. The game sold strongly across all platforms and established Core Design as a studio with a distinctive voice in British gaming.

Chuck Rock represented a conscious tonal shift for Core Design. Where Rick Dangerous was punishing and precise, Chuck Rock was exuberant and generous - a cartoon prehistoric platformer featuring a boulder-belly bashing caveman through five worlds of Flintstones-adjacent comedy.

The game’s “belly barge” mechanic - using Chuck’s distended abdomen to dispatch enemies - was distinctive and expressive. Level design rewarded exploration and offered a gentler difficulty curve than the Rick Dangerous games. The humour was broad and effective, from enemy names to the game’s prehistoric visual language.

Martin Iveson’s Amiga tracker soundtrack is among the most celebrated of the era - upbeat, infectious, technically impressive within the four-channel Paula constraint. The main theme in particular became instantly recognisable to Amiga owners of the period.

Chuck Rock’s multi-platform success - Genesis, SNES, Game Gear, Sega CD, C64, DOS - demonstrated Core Design’s growing commercial reach. Chuck Rock 2: Son of Chuck (1993) extended the franchise to even more platforms. Zzap!64 awarded the C64 version a Gold Medal, and Amiga Format praised both the visuals and soundtrack extensively.

Heimdall was Core Design’s most ambitious early departure - a Norse mythology RPG in which players controlled the titular god Heimdall on a quest to retrieve stolen divine weapons. The game offered an isometric perspective, turn-based combat, and puzzle-solving elements quite unlike the company’s action platformers.

Steve Simmons’ cover art - depicting a helmeted Norse warrior against a runic background - was striking for the era and suggested the game’s more serious ambitions. Martin Iveson’s soundtrack matched this tone: darker, more orchestral in its aspirations, with a cinematic sweep unusual in Amiga tracker music of 1991.

The game was developed in collaboration with The 8th Day, a Leeds-based software house, and published by Virgin Games for Amiga and Atari ST before receiving a Sega CD port through The Software Toolworks in 1994. Critical reception praised the atmosphere and visual design while noting the complexity of the RPG systems.

Bubba ’n’ Stix arrived as a showcase title for the Amiga CD32 - Commodore’s CD-based Amiga console - and represented one of Core Design’s most original puzzle-platformer concepts. The game’s central mechanic revolved around a stick: players could use it as a weapon to defeat enemies, as a bridge to traverse gaps, or as a pole vault to reach elevated platforms.

The premise - a caveman named Bubba and his sentient stick companion Stix, stranded on an alien planet - gave the game its distinctive personality. Level design was built around creative exploitation of the stick mechanic, rewarding players who experimented with its multiple applications. The CD32 version benefited from the console’s CD audio capabilities.

Bubba ’n’ Stix was developed during the transition from 16-bit home computing to CD-based consoles, and it showed Core Design at their creative best: taking a simple mechanic and building an entire game around its permutations.

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 of Lara Croft as a female action-adventure protagonist, designing her as a capable, independently-minded explorer in contrast to the male heroes who dominated the genre at the time.

The game combined 3D platforming, combat, and puzzle-solving across a series of increasingly elaborate environments - Peruvian ruins, Egyptian tombs, ancient Greek temples, and the lost city of Atlantis. The physicality of Lara’s movement - the run, the jump, the controlled fall - was unprecedented in mainstream gaming. The camera, which tracked Lara in third person, defined a template followed by countless games since.

Commercially and critically, Tomb Raider was transformative. It 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 in a Hollywood film franchise. The franchise Core Design created generated revenues that dwarfed their earlier output many times over.

Toby Gard departed during Tomb Raider II’s development, reportedly dissatisfied with Eidos’s commercialisation of Lara. The remaining Core Design team produced four more sequels before the troubled Angel of Darkness (2003) ended their tenure with the franchise.