Worms
Team17's 1995 artillery game: teams of cartoon worms with bazookas, exploding sheep and the Banana Bomb, lobbing shots across a crumbling landscape while you wait on the wind. Invented by a computer-shop employee on a graphing calculator, it sold around five million copies across every platform of the decade.
Andy Davidson was an Amiga fan working in a computer shop when he started Artillery in 1990 as a program on a Casio graphing calculator. He moved it to the Amiga in August 1993 and, wanting the animation and humour of Lemmings, tried characters until worms stuck. Renamed Total Wormage, with 55,000 randomly generated levels, it went into an Amiga Format programming competition and didn't place. Publishers passed. Then Davidson showed it at the ECTS trade show in September 1994, where Team17 co-founder Martyn Brown made an offer on the spot.
The game is turn-based: each player controls a team of worms and, one worm per turn against a clock, picks a weapon, aims, judges the wind and fires, with every explosion carving a crater out of the terrain. Worms walk, jump, bungee and swing on the Ninja Rope; dead worms leave gravestones, and the water at the bottom of the map claims the careless. The arsenal of twenty-odd weapons ran from grenades and homing missiles to exploding sheep and the Banana Bomb, both of which have been in every Worms game since. The series' arsenal also includes the Holy Hand Grenade, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the Concrete Donkey, modeled on a garden ornament at Davidson's house.
Ocean Software published it in late 1995, the Amiga version arriving in Europe on November 17, and it spread across PlayStation, Saturn, DOS, Mac, Game Boy, Mega Drive and SNES (Sony, which had a policy against 2D games, took some persuading). Critics split hard. Sega Saturn Magazine called it "quite simply the most playable game to hit the Saturn so far," and GameSpot compared it to Othello: "only a few minutes to learn, but may take a lifetime to master." Players didn't split. Nearly 250,000 copies sold by March 1996, and around five million across every port by 2006.
Worms 2 arrived in 1997 and the series has run to more than twenty entries, still Team17's primary development output from Wakefield, England. The original made the 2010 book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. It was the multiplayer game for a room with one keyboard: pass it along, hold your breath on the wind, and watch a friend's last worm sail into the sea.
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