The new games will join an Amazon TV series that heads into production in 2026. The last mainline Tomb Raider game was 2018's, and after spending a few years in video game purgatory, Lara Croft is coming back in two new games. At The Game Awards 2025, Amazon Game Studios announced that will reimagine of one of the hero's early adventures in 2026, and will continue the series in 2027. And yes, it seems like dinosaurs will be in the mix. A new Tomb Raider game has been in the works officially since at least 2022, when Amazon announced that it would be publishing the next game in the series.

Three years ago, on a drab, chilly summer day in the Dutch port of Den Helder, Amazon made an extravagant pitch for its first-ever big-budget video game, Breakaway. The event, streamed live on Twitch, was an esports tournament with a twist: It would take place on a 355-foot-long naval patrol ship, the kind that hunts down pirates and drug smugglers in the Caribbean. On the upper decks, sailors stood taut as the camera ogled the vessel's 76mm cannon. Then a pair of emcees from Amazon Game Studios, occasionally shouting over the thrum of passing helicopters, introduced the competitors. They were down below, huddled around high-end monitors--headsets on, knees jiggling anxiously, cans of Red Bull cracked open.

Amazon enters the crowded games industry in full force Wednesday with its release of Crucible, the first big-budget PC game to come from Amazon Game Studios. Crucible is a promising mainstream introduction for the eight-year-old studio, which until now has had a large question mark hanging over its head. Crucible is a third-person team shooter that takes place on a large junglelike planet in a sci-fi future. As one of a diverse cast of heroes called "hunters," players mine resources from reptilian monsters and go head to head to capture points in their choice of three competitive modes. In a preview session hosted by Amazon Game Studios earlier this month, WIRED spent three hours playing the game and interviewing its designers.

Director Peter Jackson on Amazon's "Lord of the Rings" series: "I'd like to try to be of assistance." Amazon has landed a prime franchise on which to build an online game: the Lord of the Rings. Amazon Game Studios will jointly develop the free online game with Hong Kong-headquartered Leyou Technology Holdings, which owns several game studios including Digital Extremes, maker of sci-fi role-playing action game "Warframe." There is no release date for the console and PC game, a massively multiplayer online action title à la "World of Warcraft." Last year, Athlon Games, an L.A.-based Leyou subsidiary announced it had reached a deal with Middle-Earth Enterprises to create a game based in J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit-laden universe during the time before the events in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.