By the end of the 1980s, the story of the video game industry had become a Homeric epic. There was the rise and fall of Atari, the American company that defined both the art and commerce of video game development, placing games consoles in millions of homes and striking multi-million dollar deals with Hollywood before a market collapse saw the beleaguered company's games and machines literally buried in sand.

There was the Eastern saviour Nintendo, the century-old playing card manufacturer whose bright-eyed employee, Shigeru Miyamoto, designed games of such striking quality that they brought the industry back from the brink of oblivion. In the UK, a gaggle of nerdy young men, including David Braben, Peter Molyneux, Archer Maclean, and Jeff Minter, found fame by using the computer games they programmed in their bedrooms to escape Britain's troubles both at home (industrial strikes, economic shudders) and abroad (IRA bombings, war in the Falklands).

By 1990 things had begun to stabilise. The British games scene became defined by regional publisher-developers that operated out of computer shops or remote business parks. They burned games onto discs and cassette tapes before selling them from newsagents and computer stores. 17-Bit Software was one such outfit, based in a cramped office above an amusement park in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. A local entrepreneur, Michael Robinson, who also ran a popular chain of computer retail shops called Microbyte, started the company. His idea was simple yet ingenious: find the next generation of talented young game developers, sign their games the same way record labels sign bands, and sell their games through Microbyte stores.

Nineteen-year-old Andreas Tadic, a hobbyist programmer from Olofstrom, Sweden, was one of the first game-makers to appear on 17-Bit's radar. Tadic had just made a shoot-'em-up for the Amiga called HalfBright. (He later described the game as "technically impressive, but shite-looking.") Martyn Brown, who worked for Microbyte, called Tadic and suggested that he meet a young artist named Rico Holmes. They immediately became friends and, along with Swedish programmer Peter Tuleby, called themselves Team 7. Their first project was a Miami Vice-inspired racing game featuring a sunglasses-wearing and buzz-cut cop named Don Ferrari.

Miami Chase was published as a budget title by Codemasters, another upstart British company. It earned a highly-prized 82 percent review from famed British games magazine Amiga Power. Brown, who had followed the game's development keenly, suggested to Robinson that 17-Bit Software should not only publish games but make them, too. Brown even had a ready-made team: Holmes as artist, Tadic and Tuleby as programmers, and himself as project manager. Robinson agreed and moved Debbie Bestwick from her position as Microbyte's sales manager to commercial support for the new endeavour. Bestwick would eventually become the new company's CEO.

Finally, the group settled on a name for the company, merging the Swedes' "Team 7" with "17-Bit" to create Team17. Twenty-five years later, Team17 is one of the only British publishers from the era to survive and stay independent.

"My role would change from day to day," says Bestwick today. "Some days I'd be testing games, others designing, others looking over legal documents. The worst job came whenever we finally finished a new game. We would have to physically pack all of the components—the art, the instructions and so on—into the game boxes. It was all part of start-up life on a tiny budget."

Retail experience with Microbyte allowed the members of Team 17 to know what genres of games would sell well. But it was Tadic and Holmes' talent for programming and art that turned the concepts into bankable realities. Many of the company's early games, such as Full Contact, Alien Breed, Superfrog, and Project-X, were immediate hits. Within two years, Team17 had become the premier developer of games for the Amiga. No less than 90 percent of the studio's games reached the number one spot in the sales charts, while the studio's output accounted for more than 50 percent of all game sales on the platform.

In 1993, Team17 won a Golden Joystick award for "Software House of the Year," which they shared with EA, an American publishing company many times their size. But with success came hubris.

"We were a bunch of kids learning the hard way," says Bestwick, adding that the majority of stories from those early years are unprintable. "We had no real business leadership. If I can pass any advice onto any studio, person, or team that has a massive hit game today, it's this: don't take it for granted, keep your feet on the ground, and don’t act like a bunch of rock stars."