'Down Among the Dead' Renders

So it turns out that there were 8 renders specifically created for the 1999 story that was released to supplement The Times Exclusive level.

There was always that one render, of Lara stood in a library looking through a book, that has been synonymous with the Times level, but since we bought the newspaper that featured episode #7 of the 'Down Among the Dead' story, we had this theory that some others were made for it too. We had touched upon this in a post we made on our Virtual Lara Tumblr back in February 2021. The said issue then confirmed that the image of Lara stuck in a spider web in an Egyptian setting depicted the story being told. For many years before, people, including us, assumed that the render was created for TR4 and somehow represented the game. No one knew who the man in it was but we could only loosely guess that it was Werner Von Croy, somehow, even though you could see that it wasn't. However when you read the 'Down Among the Dead' story, you'll learn that it is in fact a character called Alvin Blackmore.

Our theory was also based on the fact that in the Tomb Raider Style Guide, the set of renders that are numbered TR5001-TR5009 (although we aren't sure where render #TR5007 comes in) were labelled under the Tomb Raider Chronicles set of renders, even though they thematically don't belong to Chronicles. When we acquired the physical Style Guide, we could seen the dates of the renders on the disks; they all date to November-December 1999 - around the time when the story was printed, and what's more, they pre-date Chronicles. When building our website, this was enough proof for us to create a Renders page with these images on, even though we had only seen 2 episodes.

This theory was proved correct when UroshUchiha accessed the Times digital archive and found out the remaining episodes. From this, fans can now understand what the renders are showing, and we can now see where and in which order the other renders were used. For us, this is another Tomb Raider mystery solved!