Andreas Tadic
Team17's Swedish half
Programmed Alien Breed, Project X and Superfrog for Team17 — from Sweden, at a British studio, which Amiga Power thought worth remarking on.
Andreas Tadic wrote Alien Breed, Project X and Superfrog with Rico Holmes for Team17 — three of the games that defined what an Amiga action game looked like in the early nineties. Amiga Power introduced the pair by pointing at the map:
Sweden is a long way from Croydon, or Wakefield for that matter, but that’s where you find the second of Team 17’s new development duos. Superfrog, as their game is known, is being developed by Andreas Tadic and Rico Holmes, both of Alien Breed and Project X fame.
Fast facts
- Games: Alien Breed, Project X, Superfrog.
- With: Rico Holmes, as a two-person team.
- For: Team17, of Wakefield.
- Based: Sweden.
A British studio that was not all British
Team17 is remembered as a Yorkshire company, and it was — but Amiga Power’s framing gives the real shape: a Wakefield publisher running development duos, one of which lived in Sweden.
That worked because of what an Amiga game needed. Two people, a shared understanding of the hardware, and disks in the post. There was no need for the programmer to be in the building, and by 1992 there was no need for him to be in the country.
Team17 itself came out of the same continental connection — the company was formed from a merger involving Swedish demo-scene and software people, and its house style shows it. Fast, technically showy, sprite-heavy Amiga games with a demo-scene sense of what the hardware can be made to do is not a British tradition; it is a Scandinavian one, arriving in Yorkshire.
What Alien Breed and Project X were for
Both games are demonstrations as much as games. Project X is a horizontally scrolling shooter of the kind the Amiga was supposedly bad at, done at a speed and a sprite count that argued otherwise. Alien Breed is a top-down two-player shooter that looks and sounds like a film licence Team17 did not have to pay for.
The common thread is using an Amiga as hard as it can be used and making that the selling point — the demo scene’s value system applied to commercial games, which is a fair description of Team17’s whole catalogue.
⚠ Which Team17 this is
The Team17 described above is the company of 1991 to 1993 — independent, Wakefield-based, distributing to 18 countries, and organised as small development duos.
That is not the Team17 of the mid-nineties. From May 1995 the company was exclusively distributed by Ocean, dual-branded under both logos, and reaching 64 countries; by 1996 it was conducting a public row with Amiga Power through legal threats and Usenet abuse. See Amiga Power versus Team17 and the Team17 entry.
Nothing about Tadic’s work changes, but the company around it did, and reading his games’ Team17 and the later one as the same operating environment would be wrong.
Why he matters
Tadic is the continental developer inside the British industry, and a corrective to reading a company’s address as its nationality. The Vault has already recorded the traffic running the other way — Daze and Kompart importing French, German and Finnish games into Britain by 1993. This is the same permeability seen from inside a studio.
Amiga Power’s own reaction is the useful bit of period evidence. It found a Swedish programmer at a Wakefield company worth a sentence of surprise, which tells you it was unusual, and printed his name, which tells you it was not a secret.