The Bitmap Brothers
| Industry | Video games |
|---|---|
| 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 is a British video game developer founded in 1987 by Mike Montgomery, Eric Matthews, and Steve Kelly. The company released its first title, the scrolling shooter Xenon, in 1988. Shortly thereafter, it released Speedball. Prior to publishing its own games (as Renegade Software), early Bitmap Brothers titles were distributed by Image Works and Konami.
The Bitmap Brothers released several games on the Amiga, Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, and other DOS machines. The company came to prominence partly because it developed many different types of games, and most of these titles became highly regarded entries in their respective genres. The Bitmap Brothers' PC games have never matched the sales of their previous Amiga titles, however, even despite garnering positive critical reviews in the press.
Frequently characterized as rockstars, Montgomery, Matthews, and Kelly once posed in dark sunglasses next to Robert Maxwell's helicopter. Maxwell owned Mirrorsoft, the publisher of a number of their games, and was Ghislaine Maxwell's father.
After 2002, the company released ports of several of their games for both the Game Boy Advance and Pocket PC. Since then, it has been licensing its older games to several other companies interested in modern platform ports.