BAFTA recently gave out awards for most iconic video game characters. The list is pretty spotty, you can tell a public poll was involved, but Lara Croft was at the #1 spot and someone in Discord said to my face that Lara "wasn't really relevant until her reboot."
Ah yes, the biggest gaming icon of the late 90s. The star of one of the PS1's flagship titles. The female lead in gaming with more sales & household recognition than Samus Aran. The character who got used in dozens of commercials ranging from food to phones to cars. The character who's voice actor posed in Playboy following the game's success.
Yeah, nobody cared about Lara Croft until 2013.
Say what you want about the underlying framing, but I bet you couldn't name 3 more characters whose impact on society permeated this deeply.
If anything, the reboots never even came close to the original craze.


