Eidos marketed Lara Croft as a celebrity in 1997

The persona

Lara Croft is the player character of Tomb Raider, published by Eidos Interactive, part of the publicly listed Eidos plc. She debuted in the 1996 game, and by autumn 1997, following the original title's commercial success, Eidos's own marketing department was actively presenting her to the press as a celebrity in her own right rather than only as a game character. Two Business Wire releases issued by Eidos Interactive on 2 October 1997, preserved via the Wayback Machine's capture of Eidos's own site, document that positioning directly.

What the documents establish

The first release reports that Lara Croft was named to TIME Digital magazine's "Top 50 Shakers in the Digital World," ranked No. 47 alongside Bill Gates, Andy Grove and Steve Jobs, and states she was "the only video game character to make this exclusive list." Eidos's own vice president of marketing, Paul Baldwin, is quoted calling her "a pop-culture icon" and "a cyber-celebrity impacting the public," and the release adds that she had by then appeared on the covers of more than 40 magazines worldwide, with the original game selling over 2.3 million copies. The second release, issued the same day, announces a multi-million-dollar marketing push for Tomb Raider II built on "national cross-promotions with MTV and Pepsi," alongside national television, radio and print advertising, and it again describes Lara Croft as "a celebrity in her own right."

Character versus company

These are Eidos's own statements about its own product, not independent confirmation that any modelling agency or outside brand formally signed Lara Croft to an endorsement contract. What the documents support is narrower and still notable: a publisher deliberately marketing a fictional character using celebrity-endorsement language and arranging real cross-promotional tie-ins with established consumer brands, months before most companies treated a game character as capable of carrying advertising in that way. The "cyber-celebrity" framing was Eidos's chosen marketing language, attributed here to Baldwin and the company, not to Lara Croft as an independent voice.

What to watch

• Did any outside brand beyond MTV and Pepsi formalise a distinct endorsement arrangement built around Lara Croft in this period?
• How did the TIME Digital ranking's framing of a "cyber elite" of individuals apply, in the magazine's own terms, to a fictional character?
• Which later virtual-persona brand deals cite this Tomb Raider II campaign as a direct precedent?

Read together, the two releases show Eidos treating its own character as marketable celebrity property a full two decades before that became a routine move for virtual personas built for social platforms.