Last week, new footage of the original 1996 Tomb Raider game running on Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance was shared online.
As you might already know, it’s part of ‘OpenLara’ – a classic Tomb Raider open-source engine that’s seen the game ported across to all sorts of platforms.
The latest version requires nothing more than a Game Boy Advance, and a compatible cartridge that can run the game. Game developer and YouTuber MVG has now taken a look at this “impossible port” project – making it clear how there are no secrets or tricks in play:
“This is nothing but code running on the GBA hardware, there’s nothing in the middle that’s helping this game push polygons or its framerate faster than it normally does. So this again is just a real piece of technical wizardry and fantastic optimisation that does take advantage of the GBA’s strengths and really understands its limitations as well.”
MVG also asked the project’s developer Timur ‘XProger’ Gagiev about the possibility of getting the entire contents of the game onto the GBA in the future:
“He said it would be [possible], he is confident that the full game – all the levels, including the FMV, could potentially fit onto a 32 megabyte GBA ROM cartridge, and that is pretty impressive, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
For now, this GBA version includes the first two levels and Lara’s house. What do you think of this amazing GBA version of Tomb Raider? Leave a comment down below.
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