Tomb Raider Fan Remake has been contracted to source the original games for the official remastered collection

A Tomb Raider fan who has been remaking the original games has been unofficially named art director for the Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered collection.

Timur Gagiyev, known online as XProger, celebrated the milestone with a series of posts x/twitter. Gagiyev addressed fans who asked about his new unofficial builds, called OpenLara, explaining that they had made no progress on it because of a certain “dream project”, which was “the culmination of the last eight years” of their lives.

“I am grateful to the heads of Saber Interactive for trusting me to lead the project and assembling a dream team of true fans,” Gagiyev continued.

“From the beginning we had complete freedom and set ourselves an impossible goal, which could only be achieved by a small 'development team' of crazy people, ready to work 24/7. [for the] Next year with absolute vision of what we do and for whom.

“Thank you to the original developers and community. We eagerly read all your comments, interviews, reviews and reactions. The responsibility towards all of you was higher than the fear of deadlines and the huge amount of work.”

Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered arrived on February 13 as an enhanced version of the original trilogy: Tomb Raider Expansion and The Unfinished Business, Tomb Raider 2 and The Gold Mask, and Tomb Raider 3 and The Lost Artifact Expansion.

Crystal Dynamics included a sensitive warning in the group for what it called “extremely harmful” racial and ethnic biases, but said it did not remove it “in the hope that we will acknowledge their harmful impact and learn from them.”

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Its release was followed by the official reveal of redesigned protagonist Lara Croft, who will supposedly make her official debut in Tomb Raider Next. The next major game in the series is currently being developed using Unreal Engine 5, with development support from Amazon Games.

This will be the first new entry since 2018's Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which concluded a trilogy of games during the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation. This series resets Lara Croft's origins in a grittier setting, but it's unclear how Tomb Raider Next will fit into the equation.

Ryan Dinsdale is a freelance reporter at IGN. He'll talk about The Witcher all day long.