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Industry | Video games |
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Founded | 1987 |
Headquarters | Wapping, United Kingdom |
Key people | Mike Montgomery Eric Matthews Steve Kelly Mark Coleman Dan Malone Ed Bartlett John Phillips Jamie Barber John Kershaw Steve Cargill |
Products | Xenon series Speedball series The Chaos Engine series |
Website | bitmap-brothers.co.uk (archived) |
The Bitmap Brothers are a British video game developer founded in 1987.[1] The company entered the video game industry in 1988 with the scrolling shooter Xenon. They quickly followed with Speedball. Prior to becoming the publisher of their own games (under Renegade Software), early Bitmap Brothers titles were distributed by Image Works and Konami.
The Bitmap Brothers released several games on the Amiga and Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes[2] and DOS, and were one of the most successful companies on those platforms. They became known in particular for releasing games from a variety of different genres that usually came to be regarded as leaders in their respective fields. Their PC games have never matched the sales of their previous Amiga titles, despite garnering positive critical reviews in the press.
They publicized themselves as rock stars, and were featured in the press posing in dark glasses standing next to the helicopter of Robert Maxwell, the owner of Mirrorsoft, the publisher of a number of their games.
After 2002, the company also released ports of several of their games for both the Game Boy Advance and Pocket PC platforms, and since then they have been licensing their old games and properties to several other companies interested in attempting re-releases for modern platforms.