Worms

About the game

Worms weaponised the school lunch break. Teams of four fatalistic invertebrates take turns lobbing ordnance across destructible 2D battlefields, where victory hangs on grenade timing, rope physics and reading the wind — and defeat arrives via your own bazooka drifting back onto your own worm. The arsenal escalates from shotguns and dynamite to the banana bomb, exploding sheep and the Holy Hand Grenade, each more disrespectful than the last.

Andy Davidson built the prototype on an Amiga and Team17 published it into a phenomenon; the archive documents the spread — DOS, Mac, Amiga, Saturn, Genesis, Jaguar and beyond. Its hot-seat multiplayer is the true engine of its immortality: four players, one keyboard, and alliances collapsing in real time as the terrain erodes to a few pixels above the sea.

Beneath the comedy sits precise turn-based design — action points, weapon trade-offs, terrain as a resource to be destroyed strategically. The formula proved so durable that its sequels changed remarkably little for decades, because there was remarkably little to fix.

Technical notes

2D pixel-destructible terrain with per-pixel collision and ballistic wind physics; hot-seat multiplayer as the core mode. The archive lists DOS, Mac, Amiga, Saturn, Genesis and Jaguar releases.