Xeno Crisis

Xeno Crisis is a twin-stick arena shooter developed by the British studio Bitmap Bureau and released in 2019. It was originally crowdfunded as a brand-new game for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive, shipping on cartridge for the 16-bit console decades after its commercial life ended, and was subsequently ported to a wide range of modern and classic platforms including Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, the Dreamcast, and the Neo Geo.

The game casts one or two players as marines fighting through a besieged alien research base, clearing room after room of swarming enemies in the vein of Smash TV and classic run-and-gun arcade shooters, with a heavy debt to the Aliens aesthetic. It is built around tight, readable pixel art, aggressive difficulty, and two-player cooperative play, and it earned a strong reputation as proof that a small modern studio could make a genuinely arcade-grade game on, and for, vintage hardware.

Xeno Crisis was the game that put Bitmap Bureau on the map. The studio, based in southern England and co-founded by design director Mike Tucker, grew from a five-person team on Xeno Crisis into a larger operation handling licensed projects, including Terminator 2D: No Fate and a He-Man title, while continuing to champion physical releases and authentic retro-platform development.

In 2026, marking the studio's tenth anniversary, Bitmap Bureau confirmed new physical editions of Xeno Crisis for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox, with an original PlayStation 1 port also in the works, and revealed that early work on a sequel, Xeno Crisis 2, was underway.