BMB (pronounced as "VMV" since these are Cyrillic letters), also reportedly known under the alias TZAR/CARI, or their newer alias Old Pirate, is a developer of bootleg Sega Mega Drive games in the early 2010s for the Russian market. They are closely related to KDS (Kudos), who distributed most of their games. Typically, they go uncredited in their games, but there are enough similarities between their games to be identifiable as a single developer. It's unknown what BMB stands for exactly, but it most likely might be the developer's initials.
With a few exceptions, most of their games are either side-scrolling platformers or clones of Battle City.
The font used in their games are taken from the Russian fan-translation of Super Mario Bros. 3 for NES, released in 1999.
The introductory and ending cutscenes consist of one or more still images, usually with simple writing style.
Most of the assets are directly plagiarized, especially the music, which is also sometimes reused in multiple games at once. This can be explained by BMB using VGM Music Maker's native sound engine. Since they're unable to produce music on their own, a lot of sample songs from both VGMMM and TFM Music Maker, were used as well. As a matter of fact, almost all sound effects are taken from Uwol: Quest for Money.
Some level tiles or collectables are either laid out to spell "BMB" or the background objects contain those letters directly.
Inappropriate and/or graphic Continue and Game Over screens. In reality, few of their games have this, but the ones that do have become well-known to the point that they are perhaps the best-known element of BMB's games.
The Continue screen is typically accompanied by a slightly sped-up version of the title screen music from Uwol: Quest for Money.
In the early-to-mid 2020s, a person under the name "Old Pirate" created accounts for websites such as Patreon and itch.io.[1][2] Old Pirate appears to be a further alias of BMB; with the Patreon account in particular detailing games such as Mario 3: Around the World, and featuring a large majority of BMB-identified titles in the top header image.
The developer now releases new games as freeware homebrew titles online, including a Sega Master System port of Battle City and ports of Shiru's homebrew NES games to the Mega Drive.
The font commonly used for the text is similar to the one in Super Mario World for the SNES.
Some of the songs used in their games are imported from TFM Music Maker, a sister project to VGM Music Maker, both developed by Shiru. This music tracker is capable of creating songs for TurboSound FM, a soundboard created for ZX Spectrum and its' clones which contains an FM synth chip similar to Mega Drive's. Matter of fact, these songs were made by a number of people prominent on the ZX Spectrum demoscene, such as Shiru, Karbofos, and Alone Coder - but none of them got credited. Also at least one song was converted from a Commodore Amiga .mod file: a cover of the Super Mario Bros. overworld theme by Nighthawk.
While not common, another identifying factor of BMB's is background tiles being arranged to resemble small Mario's head from Super Mario Bros.. This shows up in Lego Batman and The Adventures of the Gummi Bears.
Most of their games are made with the SGDK Development Kit.
