Just In: Xenon 2, When the Bitmap Brothers Came to the Game Boy

Some Game Boy cartridges arrive carrying reputations far larger than the little grey screen can contain. This arrival is one of them: Xenon 2, a handheld conversion of a computer game so stylish that it became a byword for a whole design sensibility, and one with a genuine link to the British dance charts.

Bomb the Bass on a Game Boy: turn the volume up, lower your expectations, enjoy anyway

What It Is

Xenon 2: Megablast is one of the more technically ambitious vertical shooters on the original Game Boy, a handheld conversion of a well-known computer game by the Bitmap Brothers. The original came from one of the most stylish European development houses of its era and was celebrated for its audiovisual identity, including a famous connection to the Bomb the Bass track Megablast. Carrying that heritage onto monochrome handheld hardware gives the Game Boy cartridge an unusually prestige-driven appeal for a shoot 'em up.

Style, Substance and a Dancefloor Hit

The Bitmap Brothers were the closest thing the late-1980s European computer scene had to rock stars. Working on the Amiga and Atari ST, the studio behind Speedball 2, The Chaos Engine and Gods cultivated a sleek, metallic, unmistakably cool visual style, and were famously photographed like a band rather than a software house. Xenon 2 was one of their signatures, and its soundtrack leaned on Megablast by Bomb the Bass, a real chart act, blurring the line between a video game and the acid-house culture of the moment. Few shoot 'em ups have ever arrived with quite so much attitude.

The fascination of the Game Boy version is watching all that swagger squeeze through the eye of a needle. Gone is the colour, gone is the thumping licensed music in its full glory, and yet the conversion still tries to carry the original's dense, moody atmosphere onto four shades of grey and a tiny speaker. Ambitious computer-to-handheld ports like this are a special sub-genre for collectors, because they capture the moment a piece of prestige European computer culture was translated, however imperfectly, for a pocket. It makes the humble cartridge a bridge between two very different worlds.

Why It Joined the Collection

The Game Boy's library is full of quiet conversions of famous computer games, and Xenon 2 is among the most pedigreed of them, a Bitmap Brothers classic with a dancefloor heritage, reborn in monochrome. It represents a whole strand of the console's history, the European home-computer scene feeding its hits into the handheld, and it stands out for the sheer reputation it carries. Preserving it keeps a stylish, unlikely chapter of the Game Boy's story on the shelf.

Xenon 2 is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.