It doesn’t feel all that long ago when the original PlayStation hit store shelves and changed the world of video games forever. The system had so many legendary titles, but one that really helped turn heads was Tomb Raider.
Over the past couple of years a team of dedicated fans of the original game have been working to rebuild the game from the ground up. This is interesting as the team had made several attempts to get the original source code from Square Enix to open it up to the world.
After these attempts failed they figured they would create the game engine from scratch, with no code from the original in any way shape or form. Even better is that this new OpenTomb is built to take full advantage of modern CPU’s and systems.
But the really amazing thing that highlights just how far we’ve come is that the team has been able to make the engine run like butter right in your browser. You can play the City of Vilcabamba level right now in your favorite browser, complete with audio and everything.
You can download the source code and binaries over at the OpenTomb website right now and mess about with them. One imagines that some serious Tomb Raider fans will build their own levels and worlds using this open source engine.
I can’t wait until a team comes along and recreates the Tomb Raider reboot series in this classic engine. To follow long with the project you can find the team over on Facebook.