- Creative Differences: Toby Gard and Paul Douglas, respectively lead designer and lead programmer (out of a team of just six working on the game), quickly got sick of how marketing the game went and how they lost almost entire creative control over the game they made or the work on a sequel they didn't even plan in such a short time-span. They would both quit Core Design and went their own ways. Toby Gard returned later to help as consultant for Crystal Dynamics and quickly managed to secure enough creative control over the games that he became the lead designer and writer for Underworld, precisely to prevent history from repeating itself.
- Dummied Out: A surprisingly large amount of content was cut out or rearranged for this game, including many animations. As stated below, the very first prototype known of the game depicts Lara with a braid and sunglasses in an unknown tomb with several animals, and armed with tools like an electronic map, grenades, and dynamite, which are not present at all in the final game. Level filenames indicate that an entire area, Level 9* , was cut out (this would explain why you gain two passport stamps rather than one upon entering Natla's Mines) - this level, or set of levels, would likely have shown all three Scion pieces in your inventory. Finally, Atlantis was going to feature more enemies, including a skinless fish and an Atlantean dinosaur. Models for most of these still lurk within the game's prototypes.
- Pop-Culture Urban Legends: For years, fans and media outlets claimed that Lara Croft's distinctively large breasts were the result of a coding error — in which an attempt by Toby Gard to resize them by 50% ended up doing so by 150% — that got left in. However, a 2021 article
by TheGamer investigated the rumor, and learned that it was actually a joke Gard made during an interview that got taken at face value, not helped by an April Fools' Day article from GameSpot three years later that repeated the claim but attributed it to a nonexistent developer. - Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The dev team were, according to themselves, assembled from people who simply didn't have anything else to do at that moment and put under the leadership of Toby Gard. Special mention should go to Gavin Rummery and Neal Boyd, as it was their first game project ever. Despite this the team proved to be highly efficient and it was Rummery who wrote the iconic room building tool, fundamental for the entire series.
- What Could Have Been:
- The protagonist was conceptualized as a man, before Core started worrying about how much they would be sued for. After settling on a heroine for the game she was originally envisioned as a Spicy Latina character named "Laura Cruz", who was rather militaristic, with Cruz being an outright mercenary. It was decided to make her British in order to appeal to the home market more.
- In this early beta FMV, from when it was still Laura Cruz, a Moai head from Easter Island instead of an Egyptian temple is shown when she combines the Scion, implying the location of the third and final piece. Also, a journal on a boat shows the name of "Arthur Hamilton Graves", who was originally intended to be the antagonist before Jacqueline Natla.
- One mechanic was "Permadeath" that was scrapped early on.
- Lara was originally intended to have her iconic braid in gameplay, but the programmers couldn't get it to work right. They managed it by the sequel, though.
- In Unfinished Business, the Atlantis levels originally came first, before the Egypt ones. This was revealed by the level designers, and is also evident in the way Lara slides down a slope in the beginning of Atlantean Stronghold (the same slope as the one at the end of The Great Pyramid). The 2024 remaster changes the order back again.
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