Xenon

Xenon 2: Megablast is known to everyone who owned an Amiga or PC in the nineties. That bassline by Bomb the Bass, that ad, that prestige. But Xenon? Few remember it, and yet it was the one that showed in 1988 what the Bitmap Brothers could do.

It's a vertical scrolling shooter — you fly from top to bottom, or rather straight across the map, mowing down waves of enemy ships and collecting weapon upgrades. Nothing revolutionary on paper. But the Bitmap Brothers already knew back then that presentation is half the success: Xenon looked exceptionally clean for its time, with smooth scrolling and graphics that commanded respect on the Amiga. The DOS version was understandably more modest, but the game had soul there too.

The controls are straightforward — movement, shooting, collecting power-ups. The difficulty, however, is uncompromisingly tough in a way that either hooks today's players immediately or turns them away after five minutes. Enemies come thick and fast, collisions are pixel-perfect, and there's no save state. One wrong move and you start over. Kids in the nineties knew this and took it for granted. Looking back, you can see that part of that difficulty came from design decisions of the era, not from intentional sophistication.

Xenon is important as a starting point. The Bitmap Brothers essentially announced their style with it — pixel-perfect aesthetics, a love for tough gameplay, a sense of atmosphere. The sequel took that basic template and gave it iconic music, so the original stands a bit in the shadows. That's somewhat unfair. As a historical artifact of the vertical shooter genre, Xenon still has something to say, even if it aged in a way that demands a certain tolerance for its era from the player.

Today it will appeal mainly to those who want to see where the Bitmap Brothers started, or who simply love hard arcade shooters without modern conveniences. You can play it easily in your browser, and the first few minutes will immediately show you why this developer dominated the gaming scene a few years later. Don't expect Megablast. Expect the seed.