Amiga Power promised from its first issue to use the whole of its percentage scale. Team17 made some of the best-selling Amiga games of the early 1990s. In 1995 the two fell out in public. Team17 stopped sending the magazine its games. Amiga Power said Team17 also threatened to sue it and asked the magazine’s sister titles to help keep games away from it. For the last year and more of its life the magazine bought Team17’s games in the shops and reviewed them anyway, sometimes very favourably.
Almost all of the evidence comes from one side. Amiga Power told the story in its own pages as it happened, and its former staff retold it to the journalist Simon Parkin in 2016. No statement from Team17 about the dispute appears in the period magazines, and in 2016 Martyn Brown, one of its founders, declined to be interviewed for Parkin’s history of the company. What follows is Amiga Power’s account, attributed to the people who gave it.
Before 1995
The two had got on well enough. Amiga Power’s 1991 review of Alien Breed gave it 82%. In July 1993 the magazine offered new subscribers a free copy of Team17’s Body Blows (“AP rated 89%”) or Superfrog (“AP rated 78%”), and it gave Alien Breed II 81% that December.
Stuart Campbell, who had been the magazine’s deputy editor, remembered it differently in 2016. “They were more or less always a bit grumpy at us over review scores, because we’d fawn over some of their stuff less than other mags,” he told Parkin, naming Overdrive, Project-X, F17 Challenge and Superfrog. Parkin wrote that typing “AMIGAPOWER” into Alien Breed 2 brought up a snide message about the magazine’s reviews, and Campbell said Team17 “even began naming the really bad CPU opponents in games like Arcade Pool after our staff”.
The Disseminator
In January 1995 Amiga Power gave Alien Breed: Tower Assault 46%. Three months later, in its April 1995 issue, it gave Team17’s racing game ATR 38% and its bowling game Kingpin 47%. The ATR review called it “a stunningly poor game”. The same issue printed a new feature, The Disseminator:
AMIGA POWER TELLS THE TRUTH ABOUT GAMES. We are not afraid to reprint the scores we have given in previous issues because WE ARE ALWAYS RIGHT. This THE DISSEMINATOR does, along with the scores of our supposed rivals. Study it closely, compare it with your own experiences of games, and perhaps identify DISTASTEFUL PATTERNS.
Below it was a table of recent games with the scores from The One, Amiga Action and Amiga Power. These rows are taken from it:
| Game | The One | Amiga Action | Amiga Power |
|---|---|---|---|
| ATR (Team17) | 85% | 88%* | 38% |
| Kingpin (Team17) | 78% | 84% | 47% |
| Tower Assault (Team17) | 86% | 91% | 46% |
| Rise of the Robots | 59% | 92% | 5% |
| Valhalla: Before the War | 44% | 94% | 19% |
| Sensible World of Soccer | 90% | 95% | 95% |
| Shadow Fighter | 91% | 90%* | 91% |
The asterisks made the insinuation. They marked a game “illustrated on the cover of the issue it’s reviewed in, possibly as an ‘exclusive’”, which suggested that the rival magazines had traded high marks for cover stories. The Team17 games were not the widest gaps in the table: Rise of the Robots and the two Valhalla games were further apart. Nor did Amiga Power always mark lowest. It agreed with its rivals about Sensible World of Soccer and Shadow Fighter, and it had given Aladdin 86%.
Team17 stops sending games
Amiga Power‘s news pages in July 1995 reported that Team17 was trying to stop the magazine reviewing its games. The September issue gave its letters pages to readers’ replies, noting that “no one wrote in supporting Team 17’s actions”. In November it reported that the staff of Amiga Format, in the next office, had signed “nondisclosure documents” before being shown Alien Breed 3D. When the magazine reviewed Worms in January 1996, its reviewer explained that he had bought his copy, “Team 17, of course, still being unwilling to send us copies of their games to review”. An advertisement for Worms from Team17 and Ocean ran in the same issue.
Jonathan Davies, the magazine’s editor in 1994–95, told Parkin in 2016 that Team17 “made the other mags at Future Publishing promise not [to] lend us their copies. So to review their games – even the really good ones like Alien Breed 3D – we basically had to go out to the shops and buy them.” He added that the fresh air “probably did us good”, but that their reviews often appeared well after everyone else’s.
The lawsuit
Two Amiga Power writers described a legal threat over the April 1995 reviews. Reviewing Alien Breed 3D II in September 1996, Jonathan Nash wrote of Team17’s “ridiculous lawsuit claiming malicious falsehood over the reviews of the terrible ATR (AP48, 38%) and the 9%-less-terrible Kingpin (AP48, 47%)”. Campbell told Parkin: “Team17 issued a lawsuit demanding that the reviews be officially retracted and the issue withdrawn from sale. The suggestion was laughed out of the office.” Parkin wrote that the lawsuit “never amounted to anything”. Both accounts come from the magazine’s side, and no court record or Team17 statement about the claim has been published.
Jokes in print
The magazine did not let the subject drop. Its competition rules in December 1995 excluded Future staff and “Neither do Team 17”. In February 1996 it reported that Team17’s new website had refused it access with the message “INSTRUCTED TO REFUSE YOU ACCESS”, so, it said, it “pretended to be Amiga Format” and took the preview pictures anyway.
The best-known joke came in a positive review. Nash gave Alien Breed 3D 91% in December 1995, having bought it for £20, and ended his review: “It’s a ripping game, and an amazing accomplishment. It’s extra-special and it’s outdone Gloom. Good work, Team 17. You whining childish hatemongers.”
Usenet, and the end
That phrase carried into the last round. In the magazine’s final issue, in September 1996, Nash described a thread on the comp.sys.amiga newsgroup in April 1996 about the “wheezing decline of AP”. Marcus Dyson of Team17, who had once worked on Amiga Format, gave what Nash called “his individual, unendorsed, independent opinion of the mag”. When someone quoted Nash’s “whining childish hatemongers” line, Nash wrote, Dyson answered him with “amazingly poisonous personal abuse”. Nash printed the Dejanews address where the thread could be read. Dyson’s own posts were not reprinted in the magazine.
Nash’s review gave Alien Breed 3D II 59% for the 2MB version and 54% for the 4MB version. It appeared in the last issue of Amiga Power. In the same issue, the magazine’s news pages said that Team17’s Amiga projects were “becoming thinner on the ground”.
Afterwards
Twenty years later, Campbell rejected the idea that the magazine had a vendetta. “I feel the same about them as I feel about most publishers, which is that they made some brilliant games, some so-so games, and some awful games,” he told Parkin. He praised Addiction Pinball, Ultimate Body Blows and Qwak, but thought Team17 “far better at making games look good than play well”.
Sources
- Amiga Power issue 8, December 1991: Alien Breed review, 82%.
- Amiga Power issue 27, July 1993: subscription offer with Body Blows or Superfrog.
- Amiga Power issue 40, August 1994: Alien Breed 2 recalled as “AP32, 81%”.
- Amiga Power issue 46, February 1995: Tower Assault recalled as “46% last month”.
- Amiga Power issue 48, April 1995: The Disseminator; the ATR and Kingpin reviews.
- Amiga Power issue 53, September 1995: letters pages on “Team 17’s curious behaviour”, referring to the news in issue 51.
- Amiga Power issue 55, November 1995: news item on Alien Breed 3D and Amiga Format’s nondisclosure documents.
- Amiga Power issue 56, December 1995: Alien Breed 3D review by Jonathan Nash, 91%; competition rules.
- Amiga Power issue 57, January 1996: Worms review; Worms advertisement.
- Amiga Power issue 58, February 1996: Alien Breed 3D II preview.
- Amiga Power issue 65, September 1996, pages 14–16: Alien Breed 3D II review by Jonathan Nash; news pages.
- Simon Parkin, “Worms or bust: The story of Britain’s most tenacious indie games company”, Ars Technica, 12 June 2016 (web, secondary): interviews with Stuart Campbell and Jonathan Davies; Martyn Brown’s refusal to be interviewed.