No wonder the big companies are always moaning about the shortage of good IT staff. All the good programmers are going into the games industry. Eidos Plc, the producer of the Tomb Raider series, announced Friday it was to publish titles from Elixir Studios Ltd, a small UK games outfit which boasts no less than four programmers who hold double first-class computer science degrees from Cambridge University. One of them turned down a job at Anderson Consulting to make games. A spokesperson for Elixir said: It seems more and more IT academics are going into the games industry. It’s not just restricted to the hackers anymore. Even one of the programmers of Tomb Raider was a PhD computer scientist. London-based Eidos reported revenues of 47.5m pounds for the second half of 1998, a 118% rise. It will publish ElixirÆs first three games, which will be strategy simulations, starting in 2000.