Creating the Smells of Tomb Raider

As a long-time Tomb Raider fan, I enjoyed creating eight smells based on the levels of Tomb Raider (1996) to celebrate its 30th anniversary! The idea was that the scents might add a deeper feeling of immersion as I played the game.

The smells are blended scent oils, developed using AromaPrime's facilities out of hours. They include:
• Croft Manor: A woody scent with a slight dustiness, inspired by Croft Manor's wooden panels, wooden doors, wooden beams, wooden crates and old carpet.
• Cave: A fresh, slightly sweet scent, imitating an ice-cold breeze that has picked up the earthiness of the wolves, bears, bats and old city.
• Lost Valley: A humid, green, muddy scent smell with a hint of blood. According to work with the Natural History Museum, T-rexes smelt of meat rotting between their teeth.
• Colosseum: The stench of gore, lions, gorillas and gunsmoke under the intense heat.
• The Cistern: A damp, filthy fetor representing rats, crocodiles and gloomy depths of stagnant water.
• Khamoon: The fragrant yet sickly aroma of Ancient Egyptian embalming fluid, incense, resins and funerary oils, based on research into the smells of real Egyptian mummies. Lifted by a smoky undertone.
• Natla's Mines: The dirty, oily fumes of machinery, enveloped by the smoke of distant lava.
• Atlantis: A reek that pollutes the air in a nightmarish palace of flesh and fire!

Coming up with these smells, it struck me just how much of an ordeal Lara's nose must go through. Few of the levels in Tomb Raider must smell particularly nice, or even tolerable, mostly because of the close encounters Lara has with odious enemies. Plenty of warm dinosaur, lion and mummy breath...

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When you are playing a game, you do not necessarily give any thought to its smellscape, but as soon as you start to imagine the smells, it brings the situations to life in a visceral way. Just think about breathing in the muggy air of Atlantis, with its fleshy, pulsating walls and giant, bursting egg sacks. Imagine how horrifying the stench must make the place. When you inhale the very same air as the playable character, through interpretive smells like these, your connection to what they are experiencing deepens on an emotional level. I applaud the other creatives who have developed diffusers that synchronise with video games and VR.

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I wonder how closely the smells I have made will match the levels in Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, the remake of the original game coming out later this year!

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