Let's remember Adventureman, the Tomb Raider that never was

2 years 4 months ago

Every so often, Matthew and I will be browsing BBC iPlayer in our never-ending search for something to watch and we'll get served up some clips from the Live From The BBC comedy series. It's a few years old now, first airing in 2016 before finishing in 2018, but there is one particular episode we will watch again and again. That episode is by the Bristol-based comic Mat Ewins, who in this set appears as a self-styled adventurer, film maker and amateur video game maker promoting his latest work Adventureman 7, a sort of budget Indiana Jones meets Tomb Raider kind of deal.

He's one of those comedians who uses a lot of multimedia in their sets, playing daft, self-made videos to help deliver punch lines. There's plenty of that nonsense in Ewins' set here, but for this occasion he also created an entire video game companion piece, styled up as a mid-90s, almost N64 / PS1-style affair in which - unsurprisingly - comedy antics ensue. Matthew and I love it to bits, and I thought that in this, the 25th anniversary year of Lara Croft, we should remember the incredible Adventureman and all of the brilliantly-bad video games he was in we never got to play.

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Author
Katharine Castle