On Repeat, Regrettably A stranger in Hamburg rebuilt the Tomb Raider theme, twice
I have had a cover of a video game menu theme from 1996 on loop for days now. Not ironically, not as background noise while I do something more respectable – on loop, with the good headphones, doing that thing where you drag the playhead back to 0:00 because you missed the first eight seconds thinking about the last eight seconds.
Nathan McCree wrote the original for Tomb Raider, and he wrote it small: a flute, some strings, a handful of bars that had to fit on a PlayStation disc and still convince a kid that something very old was buried in the dark and nobody was coming down there with him. The score takes its cues from English classical music, which is exactly why it never sounded like game music. It sounded like a cathedral that got lost somewhere in Peru.
12 notes and a room that isn’t there. I love it stupidly.
30 years later a German producer picked it up. Twice.
Ambyion is a producer out of Hamburg, putting out chillout and electronica under that name since 2017 – the sort of catalog that ends up on Beatport compilations and in the background of other people’s videos, licensed through Musicvine and Uppbeat. Which means the man makes his living writing music designed to be unobtrusive, and then in his own time goes and does this to a melody most people last heard through a CRT.
Tomb Raider Main Theme (Ambyion Remix), 2021
This is the one I found first, uploaded in September 2021, and it did the damage. Relaxation in the medical sense. An exit door out of an ordinary stressful day, and what’s behind the door is this: a tethered hot air balloon on a gray but still hot afternoon, drifting silently through low-hanging mist over the rooftops of a hilly jungle, vague outlines down there of overgrown buildings and landmarks belonging to civilizations that stopped being anybody’s a very long time ago, the smell of wet green and something flowering, the chirping and buzzing and twittering going on far below you, and otherwise nothing at all. Peace of mind. Plus the small delicious problem of not knowing where the air currents are taking you, or what is waiting once you get there.
Four years later he went back to it, rebuilt it properly, and put it out on every streaming platform on 8 August 2025 as Tomb Raider Theme (Official Cover) – ≈3:46 of it. Same melody, new build. (Official as in officially his, I assume, not as in Crystal Dynamics sent a fruit basket).
Tomb Raider Theme (Official Cover), 2025
The rework wins for me, and it wins by being softer. Gentler in the quiet passages, more intense in the main ones, rounder and more shapely exactly in the places where that matters – like, hmm, like the body of a crush you keep finding excuses to look at. Or, keeping it inside the franchise: like the polygon count of the original Lara next to the remastered one. Both beautiful on their own terms. One of them just has curves the 1996 hardware wasn’t allowed to have.
It’s on all the usual platforms, so you don’t have to keep a YouTube tab open like an animal.
The timing is unfair, by the way. I only finished Tomb Raider 1 and Tomb Raider 2 this year, three decades after it beat me the first time, and I am still not entirely out of that hole (thus, TR3). So a stranger in Hamburg has been scoring my summer with a menu screen I once stared at because I was too scared to press start.
And then I drag it back to 0:00 again.
