Gard was keen to animate the character realistically, an aspect he felt the industry at the time had disregarded. He sacrificed quick animations in favour of more fluid movement, believing that players would empathise with the character more easily. Lara's dual-wielding of pistols was inspired by the film "Hard Boiled" and an "Æon Flux" short. In the first "Tomb Raider", Croft's three-dimensional (3D) character model is made of around 230 polygons. The character's braid was removed from the model, but added back for subsequent iterations. Gavin Rummery, programmer on the first two "Tomb Raider" games, explained, "It had been dropped from the original because it just didn't work properly with all the acrobatic moves—it was more like she had an electric eel attached to her head that had a life of its own. But on TRII I came up with a way to get it working and was really pleased how natural it looked." Although widely reported that, while adjusting the character model, Gard accidentally increased the breasts' dimensions by 150 percent and the rest of the creative team argued to keep the change, Gard has stated that the notion "came out of a silly remark made in an interview". Core Design hired Shelley Blond to voice Croft after the game entered the beta phase of development. Gard left Core Design after completing "Tomb Raider", citing a lack of creative freedom and control over marketing decisions related to the ideas he developed (especially Lara Croft).