The founder of AMC, Armin Stuermer used to run a VCS high-score club called the VCS Bundesliga, it was a great success and got noticed by Atari who employed Armin as "Captain Atari".

When Atari closed their headquarters in Hamburg in 1984, Armin created the AMC (Atari Micro Club, then Atari Micro Computers) with his friends Rolf Kothe, Rainer Kothe and Holger Kurth. They were known as the AMC Team. They created a magazine, calling it AMC-Soft and a software house called AMC-Verlag.

Any software written by the AMC Team that was released commercially was released under the AMC-Verlag name, but AMC-Verlag also published software by other programmers, for these titles they created the Secret Games label.