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Europress was formed by Derek Meakin in 1965, it began by publishing magazines and newspapers, then during the 1980s as an expansion of their magazine publishing business, they became involved in the rapidly-growing software industry. During the late 1980s Europress purchased Mandarin Software, and the company was later renamed Europress Software, their output included a high proportion of educational material, such as the Fun School series.

The publishing business was purchased by IDG and became IDG Media towards the end of 1994. A reorganization of the titles promptly followed, with the Atari, Amiga and Acorn divisions each losing one or more titles along the way.

Their software publishing business was purchased by Hasbro Interactive in 1999. At first, the studio prospered and expanded. It was able to produce titles using some of the brands owned by Hasbro, even producing two for Hasbro Germany. A little over a year later, Hasbro Interactive was losing money and was sold to Infogrames for a small amount; Infogrames gained ownership of all the Hasbro brands. However, Infogrames were not interested in the educational multimedia, which was Europress's focus, and ignored the company for several months. Ownership was then returned to the Meakin family. They ran the company for little over a year before it went into liquidation. A major factor in this was Granada TV's ignorance of their rights over Countdown. They had encouraged Europress to produce a Countdown CD Rom, but only weeks before the launch, with large pre-orders, they discovered that they did not have the interactive rights.

Derek Meakin sold the rights to the Europress brand name to Atari, who then sold them to Koch Media in 2002. Meakin then cofounded Meakin Enterprises with Chris Phillips.

Past magazines that have since ceased publication include: Amiga Computing, Atari User, Atari ST User.