Worms Reinforcements

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. During the course of the game, players take turns selecting one of their worms. They then use whatever tools and weapons are available to attack and kill the opponents' worms, thereby winning the game.

Worms may move around the terrain in a variety of ways, normally by walking and jumping but also by using particular tools such as the "Bungee" and "Ninja Rope", to move to otherwise inaccessible areas. Each turn is time-limited to ensure that players do not hold up the game with excessive thinking or moving. The time limit can be modified in some of the games in the Worms series.

Worms was the brainchild of Andy Davidson, a then-unknown computer shop employee and fan of Amiga microcomputers since 1987. He began work on the project in 1990 under the name Artillery, based on previous tank games from the 8-bit era using a Casio graphing calculator as an experiment for his own amusement. Davidson later moved development of Artillery to the Amiga in August 1993, which allowed to expand his idea further, leading him to introduce new elements and a graphical style to distinguish his project from its spiritual predecessors. Davidson wanted to achieve the same animation quality and humour seen in Lemmings, which led him to employing worms as characters for his project after various character design experiments through Deluxe Paint.

With the addition of worms as characters, and inspired by a Blitz BASIC programming competition held by Amiga Format magazine, Davidson renamed his project from Artillery to Total Wormage (possibly in reference to Midway's Total Carnage). Featuring 55,000 levels, publications compared it with both Lemmings and Cannon Fodder due to its visual style and themes, which Team17's project manager Marcus Dyson later claimed was planned from start. However, Davidson's entry neither won the competition or reached any place for classification. Davidson then pitched his project to multiple publishers with no success, before showcasing his game during ECTS in September 1994, where he met Team17 co-founder Martyn Brown, who would make an offer on-the-spot to develop and publish it.

Worms was a commercial success. By March 1996, its sales had reached almost 250,000 copies, following its release in November 1995. Across all its ports, the game ultimately sold above 5 million units by 2006.

Worms sharply divided critics. 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".