Team17 is one of Britain's longest-running independent games companies, a developer and publisher based in Wakefield, England whose name is tied to the Commodore Amiga and, above all, to Worms. The studio was officially formed on December 7, 1990 through the merger of two groups. One was 17-Bit Software, a Wakefield label Michael Robinson had set up in 1987 within his Microbyte computer retail chain to publish young independent developers. The other was Team 7, a Swedish development group made up of Andreas Tadic, Rico Holmes and Peter Tuleby. Martyn Brown and Debbie Bestwick, both from Microbyte, were part of the founding group, and the new name combined the names of the two teams. Its debut, the fighting game Full Contact (1991), reached the top of the British sales charts. A run that included Alien Breed, Project-X and Superfrog meant 90% of its games had reached number one by 1993. That year Team17 games together accounted for half of all Amiga game sales, and the studio shared the Golden Joystick "Software House of the Year" award with Electronic Arts. The defining moment came at the 1994 European Computer Trade Show in London, where programmer Andy Davidson showed Team17 the artillery game he had first entered in an Amiga Format contest as "Total Wormage." Worms came out on the Amiga in 1995 through Ocean Software and was then ported to the Mega Drive, SNES, MS-DOS, PlayStation and more. Ocean had expected 60,000 sales before launch, and the game went on to ship millions of copies in its first year. Bestwick has said it saved the company. Sixteen new Worms games followed between 1995 and 2010, and with more than 20 entries in total, the series of turn-based invertebrate warfare is still at the heart of what Team17 makes.
In 2010 Team17 stopped working through third-party publishers and began publishing its own games through digital distribution. A management buyout that year saw Robinson and Brown leave, making Bestwick chief executive and sole manager, and the company acquired Iguana Entertainment in December 2011. In 2013 Team17 launched an indie publishing label, starting with Just a Pixel's Light. It opened a Nottingham publishing office in May 2014 and won "Publishing Hero" at the 2015 Develop Awards. The Escapists, designed by Chris Davis of Mouldy Toof Studios, sold more than a million copies within a year of its 2015 release. After a £16.5 million investment from Lloyds Development Capital, Team17 acquired Mouldy Toof and the Escapists franchise in 2016. The group listed on London's Alternative Investment Market in May 2018. It published hits such as Hell Let Loose, whose rights it bought in June 2023, and My Time at Portia, and it bought Golf With Your Friends from its developers in January 2021. It also grew through acquisitions: Yippee Entertainment, StoryToys, the German simulation publisher Astragon and The Label, which was renamed Team17 USA. Steve Bell succeeded Bestwick as CEO on January 1, 2024, and the parent group now operates as Everplay, with Team17 alongside StoryToys and Astragon. For players, the catalog still has the sense of mischief the studio showed in the Amiga years. Worms W.M.D (2016), developed and published by Team17 itself, gives the series a hand-drawn 2D look and adds crafting, vehicles and buildings to Davidson's original concept. The publishing side brings other studios' work to a wider audience, including the Nintendo Switch dungeon crawler Crown Trick.
