At the time, the two companies consisted of and were led by Michael Robinson, Martyn Brown and Debbie Bestwick, and Andreas Tadic, Rico Holmes and Peter Tuleby, respectively.

In 1990, Wakefield-based entrepreneur Michael Robinson was the manager of Microbyte, a United Kingdom-wide computer retail chain, and 17-Bit Software, a video game publisher.

[1] Robinson agreed to undergo the venture and moved Debbie Bestwick from her position as sales manager of Microbyte to commercial support for 17-Bit Software.

[1] According to Stuart Campbell, deputy editor for the magazine at the time, Overdrive, Project-X, F17 Challenge and Superfrog were among the games that received negative reception from Amiga Power between 1992 and 1993.

[1] As a response to their reviews, Team17 began implementing derogatory Easter eggs into their games, which included the cheat code "AMIGAPOWER" unlocking a critical statement regarding the magazine's review policy in Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues (1993) and the easiest-difficulty bot opponents in Arcade Pool (1994) being named after Amiga Power staff.

[1] Following the deal struck between the two parties, Team17 promptly lost Davidson's contact details and were forced to call Amiga Format to retrieve them.

[1] Once they had retrieved his details, Team17 and Davidson started to jointly develop a commercial version of his game, though retitled Worms, a title that appeared more straightforward.

[1] Worms was released in 1995 for Amiga and later ported to Sega Mega Drive, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, MS-DOS, PlayStation, among various other platforms.

[4] The company hired Paul Bray and Alan Perrie to act as finance and operations director, and head of global marketing, respectively.

[9] In 2013, Bestwick and Bray sparked the idea of returning Team17 to its roots by adding an indie game publishing component to the company.

[10] The activity was broadened to mobile game publishing in March 2014, with Hay Ewe by Rocket Rainbow announced to have been slated for a release on iOS in the second quarter of that year.

[14] One of the label's most successful titles was The Escapists: The game, designed by Chris Davis, a former roofer and founder of Derby-based Mouldy Toof Studios, sold over a million copies within one year of release.

[20] In March 2018, Team17 tasked stockbrokers from Berenberg and GCA Altium to prepare an initial public offering (IPO) valuing Team17 at £200 million.

[29] The company bought out Golf with Your Friends, which it had published, from developers Blacklight Interactive in January 2021, planning to release further downloadable content (DLC) for it.

[36] In early 2022, Team17 announced MetaWorms, a non-fungible token (NFT) project to sell procedurally generated images of characters from Worms as digitally owned objects on a blockchain.

[37] Eurogamer reported that many employees were unaware of the project and were blindsided by its announcement, including the social media team which suffered online abuse and harassment from the public.

[38] The conflict between management and employees over MetaWorms also revealed long-term complaints over low pay, long overtime hours, and increasing workloads since the company's 2018 IPO.

Under pressure to sign and clear more publishing deals, various teams including quality assurance (QA) and user research felt that products were being shipped in an incomplete, rushed, or buggy state due to the time crunch.

Another source of conflict was the human resources (HR) department, which was accused of covering for sexual harassers and manipulating the company's reviews on Glassdoor, a job search website.

They likewise took issue with Bestwick's management as CEO, for being a major source of overtime pressure and for turning a blind eye to harassment in the company.

[40] In March 2023, Team17 announced a realignment that resulted in the redundancy of employees from the art and design teams as part of the company's focus on publishing and third-party development.