At Square Enix's pre-E3 event yesterday, we got a chance to talk with Karl Stewart, global brand director for Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics. We asked him about the reorganization inside the developer (which lead directly to the development of the already impressive Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light), its new approach to managing the Tomb Raider brand and how its new focus is affecting the way other Eidos studios work. We also got a taste of just how outside-the-box its new "experimental team" can go.

Joystiq: This reorganization all happened after the Square Enix acquisition?

Karl Stewart: We had actually been going through the shakeup at the studio prior to it, and really we had already presented that we knew we needed to make a drastic change for the studio and that continuing down the same path wasn't really going to cut it any longer. So Darryl Gallagher had taken over the studio at that time and he had some great ideas about how to sort of retool the studio, and it was around then that Square Enix came aboard, purchased us, so we presented our vision for it and they thought it was the right way to go. And as a result, we continued down that path.

This was after the release of Underworld?

Yeah, this was. Underworld had shipped, the DLC for 360 had already shipped and we just realized that when we started looking at our next game we knew that we needed to take a step back and build the next big title and it wasn't going to come year after year. That's been one of our frustrations: seeing the titles come out year after year after year, so we decided that was the end of that.