In the last week before its Christmas 1995 issue went to press, Amiga Format’s office nearly stopped working. What began as a few friendly games of Worms “ten minutes before ‘going home’ time” turned into what the reviewer, Steve McGill, called “epic battles”: the production editor favoured homing missiles and dynamite, the technical editor cluster bombs and the fire punch, and the editor won by patient use of the terrain. The magazine gave it 90%. The same issue admitted something awkward. Worms had started life as an entry to Amiga Format’s own programming competition, and the judges had not noticed it.
Fast facts
- Creator: Andy Davidson, who designed, drew and programmed the original on his own.
- Developer: Team17, Wakefield. Producer Martyn Brown; music and sound by Bjørn Lynne.
- Publisher: Ocean, at £29.99 on the Amiga.
- Released: late 1995 for the Amiga, PC and PlayStation, then the Saturn, Mega Drive, SNES, Game Boy and others.
- Written in: Blitz Basic 2, with some assembler, on the Amiga.
From a calculator to Total Wormage
Davidson told Retro Gamer in 2005 that the game began in 1990 as Artillery, a version of the old two-tank games, on a Casio graph-plotting calculator. On the Amiga he let the players walk around the landscape and gave them teams, which “changed the gameplay quite substantially”. Tanks, he told The One in 1995, “got a little bit boring after a while”. He wanted the little figures to jump and dig, and to be about as big as the characters in Lemmings, which he admired for how much it did with so few pixels. Worms were small, easy to recognise and, he said, “just about the only type of creature that hadn’t been in a game”. The project became Total Wormage.
He built it at college in Bournemouth and in the Amiga shop where he worked, trying each version on customers. It was, he said, meant to be different every game, which is why it generated its landscapes at random, and meant to be social: players were supposed to wind each other up. When his form teacher banned it because students were skipping lessons to play, he started to think about getting it published.
The competition that missed it
The chance came from Amiga Format. Its November 1993 issue gave away a working copy of Acid Software’s Blitz Basic 2 on the cover disk and, with Acid, offered two Amiga 4000/030s for the best game or program written in it. “We’re not asking you to be original either,” the magazine said; it only wanted a game that was hard to put down. According to The One, Davidson started serious work on Total Wormage in August 1993 and entered it in February 1994. “Some of it’s in Blitz, but some of it’s in assembler,” he explained. “And it didn’t win, which was rather gutting.” The winners, named in July 1994, did not include him. He also sent a copy to Acid in New Zealand and heard nothing.
As a last attempt he took the disks to the ECTS trade show in London in September 1994. “They stuck it on for five minutes and said: ‘do you want to publish it?’” he told Amiga Format. “I almost fell over with surprise.” Marcus Dyson, a former Amiga Format editor who was by then Team17’s development co-ordinator, told the magazine that someone walks in “with a peach” once or twice a year, and called it “sort of Cannon Fodder meets Lemmings”. Amiga Format described Davidson at the time as a 21-year-old Amiga enthusiast who worked in a computer shop.
Dyson later told Retro Gamer that the competition caused one more fright. Entries became the property of the magazine’s publisher, Future, so he rang Future’s Greg Ingham and asked whether he objected to Team17 using the game. Ingham did not.
Making Worms
Team17 first planned it as a budget game. What changed its mind, according to Retro Gamer‘s account, was the magazines’ reaction: at one, staff left the power on in the building so that the Amiga could keep running after Team17 took the disks back. Alan Bunker, Team17’s PR man, took it to The One three times. Davidson moved to Wakefield to finish it. He said it was about 75% done when Team17 saw it, and he was left to develop the Amiga version his own way while Team17 handled the other formats; he added the sheep and custom levels in that time. Martyn Brown said that deciding on the cartoon style “took months of experimenting”. Bjørn Lynne wrote the title track and in-game music, and the worms’ voices in the 1995 game were Davidson’s own, re-recorded for better quality.
The sheep, the first unconventional weapon, began as a doodle in Deluxe Paint. Davidson gave it simple rules, such as jumping holes and turning round when it got stuck, and a friend, Ben Wilson, supplied the bleat. The Concrete Donkey, another of his additions to the series, came from a childhood garden ornament that he had chipped at with a stone to see whether there was a real donkey underneath.
How it played
Each team of worms takes turns across a landscape that every explosion eats away. A shot has to account for angle, power, gravity and wind, and a worm that misjudges a jump can drown. Amiga Format counted fifteen kinds of weapon, six utilities (from teleports to underground digging) and eight terrain types with different gravity, traction and cover, and said the landscape generator could produce over four billion different battlefields. Players could also draw their own levels in Deluxe Paint; Davidson got the idea when he realised a level did not have to be a landscape, and had worms blowing chunks out of the Team17 logo and Madonna’s head at ECTS. Every weapon could be switched off, limited or made infinite, and round and turn times set.
Naming the worms was part of the fun. Davidson’s own team, he told The One, usually included Joanna Lumley and the Cookie Monster. On the Amiga, typing “TOTAL WORMAGE” on the title screen turned on a sheep mode with extra weapons, a nod to the original name.
Amiga Format rated its graphics and sound 7 out of 10, “functional, passable and effective”, and its addiction and playability 9: “Minutes to learn, an infinity to master.” Davidson’s own view, given to Amiga Computing at that autumn’s ECTS: “It doesn’t matter how many silicon graphics you chuck at a product, it’s gameplay that matters.”
Sequels
Worms reached the Amiga, PC, PlayStation, Saturn, Mega Drive, SNES, Game Boy, Mac and, in 1998, the Atari Jaguar. Marcus Dyson told Retro Gamer that Sony at first refused it under a “3D games only” policy before relenting. A PC expansion, Worms Reinforcements, followed in 1996 and was combined with the original as Worms United.
On the Amiga the series ended with Worms: The Director’s Cut (1997) for the A1200, in which Team17 gave Davidson “free rein”, in Dyson’s words. It added weapons such as the Old Woman and the Mad Cow, but Dyson said it sold only 4,000 copies at retail, and Team17 stopped making Amiga games. Worms 2 (1997, published by MicroProse) and Worms Armageddon (1999) followed on the PC and consoles. Davidson left Team17 after Armageddon; he told Retro Gamer that he had argued against moving the series into 3D, which it did with Worms 3D in 2003.
Team17 has kept the series going since, through Worms 4: Mayhem (2005), Worms W.M.D (2016) and the online Worms Rumble (2020), and released Worms Armageddon: Anniversary Edition in 2024. Retro Gamer put the original’s sales at more than five million in 2005. Davidson returned to Team17 in 2012 for Worms Revolution, and in August 2026 released a free expansion pack for Worms: The Director’s Cut on the Amiga, made with Ben Paddon.
Sources
- Amiga Format issue 52, November 1993: Blitz Basic 2 on the cover disk, and the Acid Software and Amiga Format competition for two Amiga 4000/030s. Issue 61, July 1994: the competition winners.
- Amiga Format issue 67, January 1995, pp. 35–37: getting a game published (Davidson at 21 in a computer shop; the competition and Acid; ECTS; Marcus Dyson’s quotes).
- The One issue 78, March 1995, pp. 25–27: “War of the Worms”, work-in-progress feature by Andy Nuttall (Alan Bunker; tanks; Lemmings; August 1993; Blitz and assembler; the competition in February; ECTS; Joanna Lumley and the Cookie Monster).
- Amiga Computing issue 93, December 1995: ECTS report, with Davidson on originality and gameplay.
- Amiga Format issue 79, Christmas 1995, pp. 49–50: Worms review by Steve McGill, 90% (weapons, utilities, terrains, four billion landscapes, Deluxe Paint levels), and the news page on its competition origin.
- Amiga Power issue 59, March 1996: the “TOTAL WORMAGE” sheep-mode cheat.
- Amiga Format issue 104, December 1997: Davidson developed Worms with the Blitz Basic cover disk from issue 52.
- Edge issue 53, Christmas 1997: Davidson on Worms 2; MicroProse as its publisher.
- PC Zone issue 73, February 1999: “Worms” case study (the A-levels, ECTS ’94, Martyn Brown, Bjørn Lynne, Davidson’s voice).
- Retro Gamer issue 21, 2005: Team17 company profile with Marcus Dyson (the rights to Total Wormage, Sony’s policy, The Director’s Cut and its sales).
- Retro Gamer issue 23, 2005, pp. 26–29: “The Making of Worms”, interview with Andy Davidson by Ashley Day (Artillery, the calculator, the ban, ECTS, the budget plan, the sheep, the Concrete Donkey, custom levels, leaving Team17, sales).
- Wikipedia, “Worms (1995 video game)” and “Worms (series)” (web, secondary): release dates and platforms, Worms Reinforcements and Worms United, the later games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worms_(1995_video_game)
- Mike Rose, “Worms creator Andy Davidson returns to Team17”, Game Developer, 2 April 2012 (web, secondary).
- Daryl Baxter, “Andy Davidson on Worms: The Director’s Cut Expansion Pack”, 7 August 2026 (web, secondary). https://darylbaxter.com/posts/worms-directors-cut-andy-davidson-interview/