Andreas Tadic | Code Like It's 198x

Andreas Tadic wrote the code for most of Team17’s first hits, and he did it from Sweden. In July 1992 Amiga Power introduced him and the artist Rico Holmes with a line about geography: “Sweden is a long way from Croydon, or Wakefield for that matter, but that’s where you’ll find the second of Team 17’s new development duos.” By then the pair had made Alien Breed and Project-X, and Team17’s first full-price games had gone to number 2 and number 1 in the Gallup Amiga chart.

Fast facts

From: Sweden, and still working there while writing for Team17.
Games: Full Contact (1991), Alien Breed (1991), Project-X (1992), Alien Breed Special Edition 92 (1992), Superfrog (1993) and Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues (1993), all for Team17; before those, Miami Chase for Codemasters.
Worked with: Peter Tuleby, another Swedish programmer, the artist Rico Holmes and the musician Allister Brimble.
Before games: music software for the Amiga, sold through 17-Bit Software’s public-domain library.

From 17-Bit’s music disks to Team 7

Tadic’s name reached British Amiga owners before any of his games did. In 1989 17-Bit Software, the Wakefield public-domain library that later became half of Team17, advertised a “music creation pack featuring music composing utilities by Brian Postma and Andreas Tadic”, both of which, the advert claimed, rivalled SoundTracker. In June 1990 Amiga Computing’s public-domain column rated “Andreas Tadic’s Game Music Creator” as “light-years better than the SoundTracker guru-alikes”. It could take notes from a MIDI keyboard, or turn the Amiga’s own keyboard into a two-octave piano.

Simon Parkin’s 2016 history of Team17 tells how Martyn Brown of 17-Bit put Tadic in touch with Rico Holmes, whose artwork 17-Bit was already distributing. With Peter Tuleby they called themselves Team 7. CU Amiga described Tadic and Tuleby in 1991 as “Swedish coders” who “first worked together on Codemaster’s Miami Chase”, a budget driving game, before Full Contact. When 17-Bit and Team 7 joined up in December 1990, Team 7’s three members were part of the new company from the start.

Full Contact and Alien Breed

Team17’s first game, the £9.99 beat-’em-up Full Contact, carried Tadic’s name as its programmer when Amiga Action reviewed it in August 1991. The same month Amiga Computing printed a publicity photograph of the development team on the bonnet of a sports car: “Andreas Tadic (programmer), Rico Holmes (artist), Peter Tuleby (programmer) and Martyn Brown (Team 17 leader)”. Team17 apologised in the caption for the sunglasses.

CU Amiga reported that Tadic and Tuleby had been “hard at work on Alien Breed since August, 1990”, with in-game graphics by Holmes, sound by Brimble and an intro by the German public-domain artist Tobias Richter. Amiga Power’s review in December 1991 named Tadic and Tuleby as the authors, gave the game 82%, and called it “a very sophisticated game exploiting the ability of the Amiga to its fullest”. It entered the Gallup chart at number 2. In January 1992 Amiga Power profiled Team17 as a company of ten full-time staff, and named Tadic and Holmes as the best known of them.

Project-X

Project-X, a horizontally scrolling shoot-’em-up for Amigas with a megabyte of memory, came out in the spring of 1992 at £25.99, with Tadic credited as author. Amiga Power’s reviewer admired it, “it looks and sounds undeniably beautiful”, but found its “insane, unfair difficulty level” hard to forgive. The buyers disagreed. The next issue’s chart page reported that Project-X had gone to number 2 after two days on sale and to number 1 after eight, and marvelled that a game “from an almost-unknown (and very new) programming/publishing set-up” had done it with word of mouth instead of a big advertising campaign. The One’s round-up the same summer called it “THE best shoot’em-up on the Amiga”.

Superfrog and Alien Breed II

Tadic and Holmes then made something softer. Superfrog, a platform game, was started in the middle of 1991, according to The One’s preview in December 1992, which described its makers as “the same Sweden-based duo that produced Alien Breed and Project-X”, with Martyn Brown as project manager and Brimble on sound. Tadic was already thinking further ahead: “Super Frog 2 on the A1200 is going to be amazing,” he told CU Amiga in February 1993. No sequel appeared. Amiga Power reviewed Superfrog in 1993, crediting Tadic, Holmes and Brimble, and gave it 78%.

Their next job was Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues, made in public. From June 1993 The One ran a monthly Team 17 diary on the game’s development, and Tadic appeared in it every month: writing a new map editor, being taken off it to rework Project-X for a budget re-release, then pulling the whole game together in time for its deadline. Amiga Power gave Alien Breed II 81% in December 1993.

After the Breed games

Tadic and Holmes did not write the next Breed game. CU Amiga reported in August 1994 that they had “taken a backseat” on Alien Breed: Tower Assault, and Martyn Brown later told Amiga Action that “none of the original team worked on it”. Instead the pair started King of Thieves, which The One covered in a Work in Progress feature in the autumn of 1994 with a planned release at Easter 1995. It combined arcade sections with the conquest of a map; Team17’s Alan Bunker described it to Amiga Power as “put together by the same people who did Alien Breed”.

King of Thieves was never released. Amiga Action reported in March 1995 that it had been dropped and that Holmes and Tadic were due to start a new, secret project. In November 1996 CU Amiga asked Brown why little had been seen from the two after their early hits. “Sadly, the next project after AB2, King Of Thieves, didn’t work out,” he said, putting it down to complacency after two very successful years, “even though they are both still very capable.” Public sources say little about Tadic’s work after that.

The Team17 he had worked for changed in the same years. From 1995 it was distributed by Ocean, Worms went out on many formats, and it had a long public row with Amiga Power, told in Amiga Power versus Team17.

Sources

The One issue 13, October 1989, and Amiga Computing, November 1989: 17 Bit Software advertisement for the music creation pack with utilities by Brian Postma and Andreas Tadic.
Amiga Computing, June 1990 (volume 3, number 1): public-domain column on Game Music Creator.
Amiga Action issue 23, August 1991: Full Contact review, “Team: Andreas Tadic”.
Amiga Power issue 5, September 1991: Gallup Amiga chart (Full Contact, £9.99).
Amiga Computing issue 39, August 1991: Alien Breed preview with the Team 17 photograph and caption.
CU Amiga, October 1991: Alien Breed preview, “Team Talk” panel on Tadic, Tuleby, Holmes, Brimble and Richter.
Amiga Power issue 8, December 1991, pages 52–53: Alien Breed review by Rich Pelley (authors Andreas Tadic and Peter Tuleby; 82%).
Amiga Power issue 9, January 1992: Crib Sheets profile of Team 17; Gallup chart (Alien Breed at number 2).
Amiga Power issue 13, May 1992: Project X review (author Andreas Tadic, £25.99).
Amiga Power issue 14, June 1992: Gallup chart and commentary (Project X new entry at number 1).
The One issue 45, June 1992: Superfrog news item and Project-X round-up.
Amiga Power issue 15, July 1992: Superfrog preview (“Sweden is a long way from Croydon”).
Amiga Power issue 18, October 1992: previews of Alien Breed: The Special Edition and Superfrog (authors Tadic and Holmes).
The One issue 51, December 1992: Superfrog preview (initiated mid 1991; Tadic, Holmes, Brimble, Brown).
CU Amiga, February 1993: Superfrog preview, quoting Tadic on Superfrog 2.
Amiga Power issue 26, June 1993: Superfrog review (Tadic, Holmes, Brimble; £26.99).
Amiga Power issue 27, July 1993: subscription offer with Superfrog (“AP rated 78%”).
The One issues 56–62, May–November 1993: announcement and monthly instalments of the Team 17 Alien Breed 2 diary.
Amiga Power issue 32, December 1993: Alien Breed II review (Tadic, Holmes, Brimble, Brown).
Amiga Power issue 40, August 1994: Alien Breed 2 recalled as “AP32, 81%”.
CU Amiga, August 1994: Alien Breed: Tower Assault preview.
The One issues 71 and 74, August and November 1994: King of Thieves news and Work in Progress.
Amiga Power issue 44, December 1994: King of Thieves preview, quoting Alan Bunker.
Amiga Action issue 68, March 1995: Alien Breed 3D feature (Brown on Tower Assault; King of Thieves dropped).
CU Amiga, November 1996: interview with Martyn Brown.
Simon Parkin, “Worms or bust: The story of Britain’s most tenacious indie games company”, Ars Technica, 12 June 2016 (web, secondary): Brown introducing Tadic to Holmes; Team 7.