The Early Days

Team Mango began when a group of Amiga enthusiasts decided to go a little further than simply playing games, and started to make them. Founder Gareth Williams had been coding for a number of years before forming the Team, having learnt to program on the BBC Micro. He was first introduced to the Amiga in 1989 and discovered the joys of AMOS shortly thereafter.

Gareth wrote a Snake clone using AMOS Professional before going on to create the first version of Team Mango's only fully-completed game, Gloss Finish. It was in his first year of high school, 1994, that Gareth met Adam Bartlett and found that, along with another old friend, Peter Hardy, they all had the Amiga in common and the creative skills to produce games.

However, it was not until 1996, when the Team met Alvaro Thompson and Gareth started to learn Blitz Basic 2 that Team Mango really began. With Gareth at the helm, Peter on graphics duties, Adam working his musical magic with OctaMED and Alvaro on documentation and support (and providing a bedroom to work in!), the Team began working on their first collaborative effort Chainsaw Mania.

Chainsaw Mania never saw a release, and the Team went on to create their first full release, Gloss Finish. Written in Blitz 2, it had several upgrades from Gareth's original AMOS version including a level editor, scrolling levels, three paint colours and lots of enemy types. The Team released the game on floppy and it included a hard drive installer and full documentation - things that were way ahead of their time in Amiga public domain games. The game was featured in Amiga Format's "Reader's Games" section.

Shortly after Gloss Finish, the Team started work on their second title, Gravsheep. Gravsheep never saw a release despite being 80 or 90% complete. We're not sure what happened there, but as it was coming up to GCSE (UK high school exams) time, the Team probably had other things on their minds.

In the summer of 1997 shortly after exams were done, Gareth wrote a solo game Psychoblast, which was a hectic mouse-controlled shoot-em-up. The game was done in less than a month and again featured in Amiga Format's "Reader's Games" section. The game was also released on the magazine's CD-ROM coverdisc in the same month, which resulted in the game being preserved in downloadable coverdisc collections. We believe it's still out there to this day.


Commercial Near-miss and The End

The Team started on their most ambitious project to-date, Skimmers, in the same year. The game was designed for the Amiga 1200 and made use of the AGA chipset to allow for the colourful graphics that the Team were getting from outside artists. Skimmers was a top-down futuristic racer with floating cars (Skimmers) that had upgradeable weapons. Adam worked on a version for other Amigas that used scaled-down levels and graphics. Skimmers attracted the attention of a couple of commercial publishers and was previewed in CU Amiga magazine.

Neither release saw the light of day and the Team slowly drifted apart to go their separate ways in life. University and employment saw the Team moving away not only from their homes, but also from the Amiga platform as the PC became necessary for gaming and work alike.


Downtime

Gareth continued to develop games as a hobby through university, college and throughout his working life. His first PC game Fatrock was a boulderdash clone written in C++ using DirectX. In 2001-2002, he wrote a couple of 3D OpenGL games, Rollminator and Cuberoids. Both games are still floating around out there on the internet somewhere. Gareth vowed never to do any 3D games development again.

Gareth then co-founded a local gaming community which took all of his spare coding time away as he worked on various iterations of a website to support it. He maintained a heavy interest in the games industry, writing articles and reviews for the same site. During this time, he also dabbled with development for the Nintendo GBA and DS through the use of flash carts, but never took it too seriously.


XNA and Indie Games

In 2006, Microsoft released the first version of XNA Game Studio and the tools to run code on the Xbox 360. At the time, Gareth was already using the .NET framework and C# in his day job, and getting back into games development seemed like a natural thing to do. The second version of Gravsheep was born. Gareth was heavily involved in a band at the time and didn't have a vast amount of spare time so it wasn't until early 2009 that Gravsheep saw a release on the Indie Games platform. Gareth decided to release Gravsheep under the Team Mango moniker, and so the Team was re-born albeit with just the one member. Nevertheless, Team Mango was back!