If you were a PC gamer in the mid-90s, your world was likely defined by three things: the whirr of a CD-ROM drive, the anxiety of conventional memory management, and the moment you first saw a digital woman backflip off a ledge in a grey leotard.

But here is the secret of the PC version:

So go ahead. Boot it up. Walk to the edge of a cliff in Peru. Hold Action + Down + Jump. Backflip into the void.

There were no tutorials. No on-screen prompts. You learned through death. You learned that tapping "Down + Jump" made you backflip off a ledge. You learned that holding "Shift" while walking prevented you from falling off an edge (mostly). This wasn't a game; it was a trust fall with your keyboard. The PC CD-ROM audio was glorious. The main theme by Nathan McCree—that iconic, cinematic orchestral swell—hit harder through a pair of Creative Labs Sound Blaster speakers than any TV speaker.

Core Design releases Tomb Raider for the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. But for the true believers? The PC port, arriving just a month later, was the revelation. While console gamers were squinting at CRT televisions, PC owners were about to have their jaws unhinged by SVGA graphics, a keyboard control scheme that broke fingers, and a sense of isolation that has never been replicated.