Destructible terrain is a landscape that the game edits while you play. A shot takes a bite out of a hillside, a digger leaves a tunnel, and every later shot has to reckon with the new shape. The idea grew out of the artillery game, two guns on either side of a hill, and reached its best-known form in Team17’s Worms (1995). The Amiga press saw it as an old game with new tricks. Amiga Power’s review put it bluntly: “underneath it all, Worms IS Scorched Tanks. The addition of tunnel-digging meets with our approval, as does the dynamite.”
Fast facts
- Ancestor: the artillery game: angle, power, wind and a hill in the way.
- Scorched Earth: Wendell Hicken’s shareware game for the PC, reviewed in 1993 as “a modern version of one of the oldest computer games around”, with randomly generated terrain and up to ten players.
- Scorched Tanks: Michael Welch’s public-domain artillery game for the Amiga, given away on Amiga Power’s cover disk in September 1994; the game Worms was most often compared to.
- Lemmings (1991): four of its eight skills remove scenery: the bomber, basher, miner and digger.
- Worms (1995): Andy Davidson’s game, written mostly in Blitz Basic and shown to Team17 at the ECTS trade show in London in September 1994. Its levels were pictures, 960 by 350 pixels.
The artillery game
The shape is old: two tanks, a hill, and a shot that has to clear it. Computer Gaming World’s shareware column called Wendell Hicken’s Scorched Earth “a modern version of one of the oldest computer games around”, and described what the modern version added. “Play begins with the random generation of the current level, creating the terrain and determining the location of the player’s tank and that of the enemy”, with up to ten players, and every shot demanded “accurate adjustment of angle and power of fire, and compensation for wind velocity and intervening objects”. The reviewer counted 63 pages of documentation and called it “the most configurable version of this game I have come across”. COMPUTE’s SharePak listing of version 1.2 sold it as a “256-color VGA artillery game” with configurable “weapons, defense mechanisms, weather, economics, terrain, and much more”. Registration cost $10.
Many PC owners already had a version. After Worms came out, PC Gamer called it a “wriggly update to the old classic ‘Gorilla.bas’ that came free with earlier versions of MS-DOS”, and a reader of Sega Saturn Magazine described the same QBasic game: “two apes stand upon randomly sized skyscrapers and lob explosive bananas at each other after specifying angle and velocity”.
On the Amiga the formula circulated as public domain software. Amiga Power put Michael Welch’s Scorched Tanks on its issue 41 cover disk in September 1994, “top ballistic fun for anything up to four players”, and noted that it belonged to a long line: “We’ve seen many of these ‘shoot the tank at the other side of the hill’ type games over the years, but this one’s got more fiddly bits, add-ons and features than all of them put together.”
Lemmings
DMA Design’s Lemmings (Psygnosis, 1991) made terrain editing a puzzle rather than a side effect of gunfire. Half of its eight skills cut into the level. The One’s skill list defined the basher as digging “horizontally through the first appropriate surface”, the miner “diagonally down through the floor” and the digger as burrowing “vertically”, while the builder added a bridge “only twelve tiles long”. Amiga Computing’s review called the basher “a destructive fellow. His role in life is to bash a tunnel through an obstacle”, noted that the “suicidal” bomber “can be useful for blowing away” parts of the level, and described the nuke: “every Lemming explodes taking most of the scenery with them!”
Worms
Worms began as Andy Davidson’s own game, Total Wormage. Amiga Computing’s 1997 profile tells how, “bored witless during his A levels”, he started “a game in which teams of little worms did battle with each other”, tried it out on customers at the Amiga shop where he worked, and took it to Team17’s stand at a trade show in 1994: “within five minutes of presenting his two skanky looking diskettes to the Team 17 stand, they offered to sponsor and market the project”. Davidson’s own accounts, in Amiga Format and Amiga Computing, name the show as the ECTS in London in September 1994. He had written the game with Blitz Basic, the language Amiga Format had given away on its cover disk, and entered it in the magazine’s programming competition, which it did not win; Blitz Basic’s adverts later led with “The Language Used To Write Worms!”
Reviewers placed it in the artillery line without hesitation. Amiga Power’s April 1995 preview saw “a sophisticated evolution of Scorched Tanx from AP41’s coverdisk. Imagine, if you will, a randomly-generated landscape, like the ones in Scorched Tanx only more intricate, with trees, bridges and other obstacles. Now mentally litter it with worms, equivalent to the ‘tanx’.” CU Amiga’s preview called it “a variation on the old Tanks theme” in which “your task is to destroy an enemy that is hiding somewhere in a generated landscape”. Jonathan Davies’s review in Amiga Power opened with “it’s Scorched Tanks, the PD game where you take it in turns with Player 2 to fire cannonballs at each other’s tanks”, welcomed the tunnel-digging and the dynamite, and complained that most of the other additions “detract from a game that thrived on simplicity”: “Mutton dressed up as lamb, basically.”
Others thought the landscape was the whole point. Amiga Format counted “eight different terrain types in all (A500/600 owners can’t access all of them) which make a considerable difference to the way Worms plays”, each with its own character, from low gravity on the alien world to good cover in the forest, and judged that “mastering the art of using terrain to best effect is part of the battle toward mastering Worms”. Davidson told Amiga Computing that “no two Worms games will ever be the same, but with rendered games you’ll never get that much variety”. Worms: The Director’s Cut went further: “by enabling players to decide the battlefield, the lethality of the weapons and even the speech of the individual worms, Andy Davidson has designed the game so it can be tailored exactly to the requirements of the individual”, and its “graffiti mode”, in Amiga Computing’s words, offered “a billion levels”.
How it works
A game like this treats the landscape as a picture rather than as a grid of tiles. Worms made that visible: Amiga Format told readers they could “create your own levels using Deluxe Paint, or your own paint package of choice. You just have to make sure the super bitmap is the right size (960 x 350).” Whatever is drawn becomes ground. An explosion or a tunnel removes part of the picture, and the worms walk, fall and take cover according to what is left, so a crater changes the battlefield the moment it appears and there is no separate map to keep in step.
Taking the idea into three dimensions was much harder. When Team17 made Worms 3D (2003), Martyn Brown told Retro Gamer, “We could have just done a simple height map approach, like Hogs Of War”, but the team wanted “the 2D game in three dimensions”. Its engine combined polygons with voxels, which the magazine described as “basically 3D pixels”, so that every explosion could still blow part of the terrain away.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 110, September 1993, pp. 76–78: shareware column, Scorched Earth (the oldest computer games, random terrain, ten players, angle, power and wind, 63 pages, $10 registration).
- COMPUTE issue 154, July 1993: SharePak listing, Scorched Earth 1.2.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 34, September 1996, p. 114: Worms and Gorilla.bas. Sega Saturn Magazine issue 7, May 1996, p. 27: reader’s letter on Worms and Gorilla.
- Amiga Power issue 41, September 1994, p. 7: cover disk notes, Scorched Tanks by Michael Welch.
- Amiga Computing issue 36, May 1991: Lemmings review and skill key. The One for ST Games issue 32, May 1991, p. 7: Lemmings skill list.
- Amiga Computing issue 108, January 1997, p. 80: Andy Davidson profile (“bored witless”, the Amiga shop, “two skanky looking diskettes”, graffiti mode).
- Amiga Format issue 67, January 1995, pp. 35–37: Davidson, the Blitz Basic competition and the ECTS. Amiga Computing issue 88, July 1995: Davidson on the ECTS in September 1994 and on variety.
- Amiga Format issue 104, December 1997: Worms written with the Blitz Basic cover disk. Amiga Format issue 82, March 1996, p. 10: Blitz Basic advertisement.
- Amiga Power issue 48, April 1995, p. 12: Worms preview. CU Amiga, September 1995, p. 36: Worms preview. Amiga Power issue 57, January 1996, pp. 30–32: Worms review by Jonathan Davies.
- Amiga Format issue 79, Christmas 1995, pp. 49–50: Worms review (the terrain types; levels in Deluxe Paint and the 960 by 350 super bitmap).
- Amiga Computing issue 107, Christmas 1996: Worms: The Director’s Cut review.
- Retro Gamer issue 41, 2007, p. 72: the Worms series and Worms 3D (Martyn Brown; polygons and voxels).