Founded 1990 · Wakefield, England · Founders: Michael Robinson,Martyn Brown,Debbie Bestwick,Andreas Tadic,Rico Holmes,Peter Tuleby · First game: Full Contact (1991)
Formed in 1990 by merging a British Amiga publisher with a Swedish development team, Team17 dominated the Amiga charts and then found a decades-long franchise in Worms.
Team17 was created on 7 December 1990 by merging 17-Bit Software, a British publisher, with Team 7, a Swedish developer. Its co-founders included Michael Robinson, Martyn Brown and Debbie Bestwick, alongside Andreas Tadic, Rico Holmes and Peter Tuleby, and the company was based in Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Its first game, the fighting game Full Contact (1991), went straight to number one in the British charts, and the studio quickly became the leading name on the Amiga. Alien Breed, Project-X, Superfrog and Body Blows followed. By 1993, by Team17's own account, 90 percent of its games had reached the top of the charts and its products together accounted for half of all Amiga game sales. The Amiga's decline might have ended the company, but Team17 had one more idea to sign. Programmer Andy Davidson had built an artillery game prototype in 1994 and showed it at a trade show; Team17 picked it up, retitled it Worms, and released it in 1995. Projected to sell around 60,000 copies, it shipped millions within its first year and became one of the longest-running series in British games. Team17 later became a publisher of independent games, floated on the Alternative Investment Market in May 2018 at a valuation of about £230 million, and in January 2025 rebranded its group as Everplay.
Few developers have been as closely tied to one machine as Team17 was to the Amiga in the early 1990s. Its run of chart-topping action games defined the platform's late commercial period — and Worms, a modest artillery game from an outside programmer, carried the company past the Amiga's collapse.