Artillery games are some of the simplest video games to create. Have a select battlefield and challenge players to come up with different strategies to wipe the opposing players from the battlefield. For Team17, the idea was solid, but something new could be added. Their creation, released in 1995, took away the tanks and other army vehicles and substituted cartoon worms. Worms was a fascinating new way to beat your friends in a strategy game.
Take your rag tag crew and position yourself around a landscape while your opponent does the same thing. You would have to pick the right type of attack and try to make sure the other team of worms becomes very close to water. This was an instant kill and could be achieved by changing the landscape. How do you change the landscape? By blowing it up. The skills the worms could use range from bomb attacks to bungee jumps.
Some people missed the fact that levels were randomly generated each time you played. This allowed for hundreds of different games even is the same players were playing. The cartoon style made it seem less real so players could sit back and enjoy themselves. Worms had different themes to the levels, everything from the beach to hell. An easy game to learn, but hard to master. You could spend hours trying to figure out what the best move would be.
Worms had a very long shelf life for such a simple premise. The last game came out in 2016 and that was just the main series. The worms have moved to the world of sports, such as a golf. For a game the developer had a hard time selling to any publisher, it has outlasted every change to the video game world. Play the game, but be warned. It is highly addictive.
