Level designs are randomly generated based on seeds, with over 55,000 possible level creations. Worms is a 2D artillery tactical video game developed by Team17 and released in 1995.

The Story Behind Worms

The North American release of the PlayStation version was the subject of considerable negotiation, as Sony Computer Entertainment had a policy against 2D games being published for the console. It also served as the final Atari-licensed title ever to be released for the Jaguar; two months earlier, on 13 March 1998, JTS Corporation sold all the assets of Atari Corporation, including the Atari name, to Hasbro Interactive, who would release all of the Jaguar's rights into the public domain a year later. The object and landscape sets used to generate the field are arranged into thematics including forests, Martian terrains, beaches and hell.

The Jaguar version was published by Telegames on 15 May 1998; Telegames announced the release of this version after becoming the last remaining software publisher for the Jaguar. Commercial ports of the game were released for Amiga CD32, Atari Jaguar, Game Boy, Macintosh, MS-DOS, PlayStation, Mega Drive, Sega Saturn and Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

How Worms Plays

During the course of the game, players take turns selecting one of their worms. Some settings provide for the inclusion of objects such as land mines and explosive barrels. Worms is a turn-based artillery game, similar to other early games in the genre such as Scorched Earth.

Each player controls a team of several worms. If a worm is hit with a weapon, they will lose health. Over twenty weapons and tools may be available each time a game is played, and differing selections of weapons and tools can be saved into a "scheme" for easy selection in future games.

Why Players Still Load It Up

Praising the need for both strategy and skill, the multiplayer design, and the randomly generated landscapes, they described Worms as "the kind of game that makes no excuses for its lack of texture-mapped polygons or its minimalist gameplay. Reviewing the Saturn version, Sega Saturn Magazine especially praised Worms's unexpected complexity and the fun of multiplayer mode, and called it "quite simply the most playable game to hit the Saturn so far". Worms was included as one of the titles in the 2010 book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.

GameSpot criticized the slowness of large multiplayer sessions and the imprecision of the keyboard controls, but, like Sega Saturn Magazine, they lauded the combination of surface simplicity and underlying complexity, summarizing that "Like the board game Othello, Worms takes only a few minutes to learn, but may take a lifetime to master." Conversely, the Amiga Power review, written in the style of a magazine personality quiz, whilst praising the detail of the animation, described frustrating imbalances especially in relation to the vaunted 16-player multiplayer mode and was critical of the puerility of the game's humour. By March 1996, its sales had reached almost 250,000 copies, following its release in November 1995. Worms is a fun game with an infectious spirit and near endless replay value." GamePro summarized that "a humorous concept never really pays off in Worms".

Sega spent the Genesis years experimenting constantly — add-ons, peripherals, and a genuinely enormous library that ranged from sports to shoot-'em-ups. Not every experiment worked, but the machine stayed in production far longer than most of its rivals and built a catalogue deep enough to still be worth digging through.

Worms — Frequently Asked Questions