By Nigel Cope, City Editor, The Independent
Mike McGarvey grabs a promotional poster of the new Tomb Raider computer game from the wall of his bright, modern office. "This is it," he says excitedly pointing at the scantily clad figure of the Lara Croft character flying through the air over the strapline "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness".
Is that the same woman as last time, I enquire? "No. We have to change the model every year. The whole fame thing gets to them and, well..." he says, his voice trailing off. Whatever can he mean?
Mr McGarvey runs Eidos, the computer games publisher behind the Tomb Raider series. Appropriately, he looks like he's just walked out of Hollywood central casting. Aged 36, the casually dressed Californian has the light tan and uniform features of the all-American boy. It comes as no surprise that he played college-standard American football in his youth before giving it up after a tendonitis problem in his throwing arm. "I was a quarterback," he says sitting in his office in Wimbledon, south-west London. "It's the hero or zero position. But I was too small, really. These guys are six feet nine these days."
In a sense, he is in the hero or zero position again. Eidos has been dogged by a catalogue of errors including missed launch dates, profits warnings and fears over a weak roster of games. Incredibly, the so-called "Golden Age of Gaming", which has seen the Microsoft X-Box and the Nintendo Gamecube being launched into a market already bubbling with the Sony PlayStation2, seems to have passed Eidos by. Its shares are bumping along close to their all-time lows. Things have got so bad that investors must sometimes fear they would one day see the headline "Eidos: GAME OVER" flashing on their screens.