Tartan Technology: Let the Games Begin

The similarity between Tomb Raider's Lara Croft and Earthworm Jim is not immediately apparent. Lara Croft is a curvaceous heroine who shoots to kill with a semiautomatic. Earthworm Jim is a spacesuit-clad, bug-eyed invertebrate crawler who flushes his enemies down toilets.

Yet for their creators -- the London-based Eidos (EIDSY Quote) with Ms. Croft and Glasgow-based VIS Interactive with the anelid superhero -- both characters are money-spinners. It would be hard to emulate Tomb Raider's success. It helped lift Eidos' fiscal 1998 pretax profits 130% to $61.4 million. But it is expected that Earthworm Jim's new 3D incarnation on a PC, Sony PlayStation (SNE Quote) and Nintendo 64 this summer will push VIS Interactive into its most profitable period yet.

The Superheroes Impart Super Powers

The U.K. is one of the largest developers of games software in the world. According to the European leisure software industry group ELSPA, exports of games software by British firms in 1997 were worth about $675 million. Scottish developers are estimated to be responsible for about a tenth of Britain's total exports of games. ...