There was a Tomb Raider game released for the Game Boy Advance in 2003. Subtitled “The Prophecy,” it was a sidescroller much like its Game Boy Color predecessors, because no one figured a 3D Tomb Raider could be done on the underpowered handheld. Turns out they were wrong.
Programmer Xproger shocked everyone last weekend when he uploaded a video of the original Tomb Raider (the 3D one) running on the GBA. There is no extra hardware involved here, no cheating, no wires. The game was running off the original GBA’s power.
You might be wondering how (just like we are). The GBA had rotation and scaling abilities that were just a cut above what a SNES could do. This could be fashioned into 3D areas if a coder was inventive enough. There were several first-person shooters released for the GBA and a couple 3D racing games. But there was nothing on this level; nothing pushing this many polygons at once (okay fine, there was that insane Asterix game from Europe).
What helps here is OpenLara...
