Amiga Power versus Team17
The Disseminator, and a press war in public
Amiga Power printed its rivals' review scores beside its own to imply they were dishonest — and its running conflict with Team17 escalated from a 45-point scoring gap to legal threats and Usenet abuse.
Amiga Power built its identity on scoring games lower than everyone else and saying so. Its long-running argument with Team17 is the clearest case, and the magazine documented it in its own pages — including a regular feature that printed rival magazines’ scores in a table beside its own.
The Disseminator
Amiga Power 56 carries the feature under a hard-boiled framing — “Slack reviewers and THOSE WHO LIE cower in their grimy rooming-houses. The Disseminator is abroad” — above a line implying the competition took money, phrased as a joke about libel: “it’s probably libellous to say they took silly [money] so we won’t”.
The table itself is the argument:
| Game | The One | Amiga Action | Amiga Power |
|---|---|---|---|
| ATR | 85% | 88% | 38% |
| Fears | 87% | 92% | 40% |
| Brutal | 69% | 90% | 27% |
| Kingpin | 78% | 84% | 47% |
| Rise of the Robots | 59% | 92% | — |
| Sensible Golf | 81% | 90% | — |
| Behind the Iron Gate | 78% | 52% | 55% |
| Citadel | — | 67% | 67% |
Two of those — ATR and Kingpin — are Team17’s, and they carry the widest gaps in the table: fifty and thirty-seven points below what a rival gave the same game.
Note the two rows at the bottom. Behind the Iron Gate and Citadel show AP agreeing with its rivals, which is what makes the feature an argument and not a boast. The claim is not “we always score lower”; it is “we score the good ones the same and the bad ones honestly”.
What happened next, in AP’s account
By 1996, reviewing Alien Breed 3D 2, the magazine sets out the escalation itself. This is Amiga Power’s telling of a dispute it was party to, and is recorded here as such:
- AP’s writer Jonathan Nash called Team17 “whining childish hatemongers™” — the magazine’s own summary of how the row was conducted.
- A threatened lawsuit over the ATR and Kingpin reviews, which AP characterises as ridiculous.
- A campaign, as AP describes it, to have sister magazine Amiga Format sign documents pledging to withhold review copies from AP before being permitted to review Team17 games.
- Public abuse on Usenet, with AP pointing readers at a Dejanews archive URL so they could read the exchange for themselves.
That last detail is the period’s tell. In 1996 a magazine could settle an argument by printing a link and letting readers judge — the first time the press’s own conduct was independently checkable by its audience.
Which Team17?
⚠ The Team17 of 1996 was not commercially the Team17 of 1992, and the feud ran across both.
CU Amiga, May 1995, reports the change:
Team 17 have signed a deal with Ocean Software to exclusively distribute their games on all formats… both Ocean and Team 17 retain their own separate identities… will increase the Team’s software distribution from their current 18 countries to 64… In the future, games which fall under the deal will be branded with both the Ocean and Team 17 logos.
The magazine then asks the obvious question in its own words — “Will Team 17 be swallowed up though?” — and prints the answer from Team17’s PR manager Alan Bunker: “Team 17’s branding will be maintained and we are still 100% independent”.
So by the time of the Alien Breed 3D 2 row, Team17 was a year into exclusive distribution by Ocean, dual-branded, with Ocean’s cash and a reach three times larger. The Swedish two-person development duos of the Andreas Tadic era and the company conducting a press dispute through lawyers and Usenet are the same legal entity operating under different commercial conditions.
That is worth stating because it changes what the feud is evidence of. A small Wakefield studio falling out with a magazine is a personal row. A studio inside a major publisher’s distribution machine falling out with a magazine is a structural conflict about what reviews are for — and it is exactly the point at which a publisher acquires both the motive and the leverage to care about a 38%.
⚠⚠ A related claim this library cannot support. Ocean is sometimes said to have influenced review scores commercially. Nothing in this corpus evidences that — the searches return only readers writing about buying Amigas. Amiga Power’s own insinuation in The Disseminator is aimed at rival magazines taking money, and names no publisher. The Ocean distribution deal is documented; any claim beyond it is not, and is recorded here as unverified, not repeated.
Why it mattered
A review score is a commercial instrument. Publishers bought advertising in the magazines that reviewed them, and a 38% on a game with a marketing budget behind it costs somebody real money. Most magazines managed that tension by scoring generously; AP’s answer was to score honestly and then publish evidence that its rivals did not.
Whether it was right is a separate question from whether it was unusual, and it was unusual. The same instinct runs through the era’s better journalism — CRASH publishing from Ludlow instead of London, as the Roger Kean entry sets out, kept a similar distance for structural reasons.
It also cost something. A magazine at war with a major publisher is a magazine that struggles for review copies, cover-disk demos and access — and AP was fighting one of the most successful British studios of the period, whose games its readers wanted to read about.