Team17 Software Limited

Overview

Team17 was born in December 1990 from 17Bit Software (that bit better than the rest!) when a group of young, designers and developers thought that they could do better than most releases of the time. In the beginning, they also shortly used the name Team 7 International during the development of their first games, Miami Chase and Full Contact.

The European home computer market leader was the 16Bit Commodore Amiga computer and it was experience and affection for this machine that inspired the team to develop games as good as they knew the machine - and were capable of personally.

In June 1991, Team17 released Full Contact , a beat-em up which rocketed to the top of the Gallup charts and stayed there for weeks, this was to set a trend for the company and more success followed with Alien Breed , Assassin , Project X , Superfrog , Body Blows and Alien Breed 2 all becoming fantastically successful titles which earned Team17 an outstanding reputation for classy, highly playable games. This culminated in a joint software-house of the year award in 1993, when the prize was shared with the giant Electronic Arts.

The success didn't stop there and the desire and hunger to produce bigger and better games went on, the company underwent rapid expansion as they outgrew office after office - until in 1995 they moved into their present headquarters, a 16,500 sq.ft modern office complex.

Their desire to take their games to the four corners of the globe saw them tie in with Ocean Software in Manchester. With Ocean they expanded onto console platforms, developing on PlayStation, Saturn, Atari Jaguar, CD32, Phillips CDI, Megadrive, Super Nintendo, Game Boy and even the Virtual Boy.

More success was to follow when in 1995, they released Worms to the world!

Worms is their best selling title to date, which has sold over one million units and has won a line of prestigious awards. Worms has also continued to be a massive hit on the PlayStation, earning an award from the Sony development community as a reward for the best arcade-strategy game on the system.

They currently have about 60 staff members working on a variety of projects in their Ossett HQ.


Contributed by Roger Wilco (1064) on Nov 14, 2002.