8 ms·

‘Worms’ or bust: Britain’s most tenacious indie games company

129 points by doppp 10y ago

aab0 10y ago
The ending is a little eyebrow-raising. Both founders are ousted, refuse to talk about it, and we get some pablum about how they are now a 'team' (rather implying that they epically weren't before). What was going on there in the 2000s?
- cmaggard 10y ago
  Not sure about the team bits, but Worms in the 2000s was basically ultra-DLC before DLC even existed. Every 'new' game for a long time kept the vast majority of the old bits from the previous games, added a few new items, and charged full retail for the privilege.
  - abritinthebay 10y ago
    You just described how sequels work...
    - cmaggard 10y ago
      A sequel implies some sort of continued story or major overhaul, not what would be 1.99 DLC in this day and age.
      - abritinthebay 10y ago
        I refer you to almost the entire output of the 80s & 90s game scene. Especially platformers.
      - 1123581321 10y ago
        cmaggard is being downvoted, but he's quite right. Playing Worms means repeated multiplayer matches on a handful of maps, with a couple dozen weapons that don't change. Sequels repeated most of the maps and weapons and added a few more, and these would indeed be small IAP or perhaps $5-10 DLC on Steam if made today. I think it's fair to say that the sequels were more derivative than the sequels of most other franchises since at least those franchises could add new campaigns (Worms added a campaign-esque experience at some point that was mainly a chain of single-player matches) or do significant graphics updates (which Worms could not meaningfully do since its cartoon graphics and physics were good enough early on in the series.)
      - intoverflow2 10y ago
        > not what would be 1.99 DLC in this day and age. To make your point valid we have to completely ignore the lack of easy payment/DRM platforms like Steam to sell these "1.99 DLCs" we also have to ignore that 2d gaming in particular has been massively devalued since the 90s/00s because of the mobile game race to the bottom and steam sales.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
No mention of 17 Bit / Team 17 is complete without mentioning they got their start by publishing a hugely successful disk magazine. Initially quite amateur but became a fairly slick presentation, and very popular. If memory serves a few of the magazines gave away their disks a time or two. Pretty much every UK Amiga owner knew of them from this. Worms was also notable in that it was one of a very few decent games produced in BASIC - Blitz Basic. Not sure if other 17 Bit output was also Basic.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- richardjdare 10y ago
  Didn't 17bit run a PD library as well as a disk magazine? Back in the day, if you wanted free software or shareware you ordered it by post from a Public Domain library. They used to advertise in the Amiga magazines. I was a Blitz Basic programmer myself (still do a bit now and again). The other big Blitz Basic game was Skidmarks, a really cool isometric racing game from Acid Software. I used to carry my Amiga and TV set a few hundred yards to my friends house for multiplayer games over a null modem cable! I was a huge fan of Alien Breed, Team17's first self-published release. It was a gauntlet style top-down shooter with an "Aliens" theme. Rico Holmes's pixel art was fantastic and it had great sound. I had to buy an extra 512k for my A500 for £25 in order to play it. I think it was also one of the earliest games to have a pre-rendered animation sequence in the intro. It was made by Tobias Richter, who was well known on the Amiga scene for his 3d renders.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    They did. The mag was probably started to promote the PD library - it'd include a few PD things each time. Seem to remember they'd put a scene demo, a game and an app or utility on every disk. They seemed to curate their PD collection and give good descriptions, rather than havng to buy on blind faith and a disk title. The main PD competition, the Fred Fish disks were so very variable by comparison.
  - busterarm 10y ago
digi_owl 10y ago
This may be the best part about Ars expanding to UK, getting some proper coverage of what was going on Europe.
jsheard 10y ago
I want to like the newer Worms games, but IMO the series peaked with Worms Armageddon in 1999. The physics in that game were perfect and all their attempts since then feel floaty and weird. Thankfully T17 turned over the source code to some fans who renovated it to work on modern versions of Windows, and they're still running the master server for multiplayer 17 years after release!
- irox859 10y ago
  WA saved a woefully boring junior year in college as me and my mates had epic worm offs. Love this game. Still play it.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    The theme song from Armageddon is also perfect and brings back memories for me.
- misnome 10y ago
  I remember and like armageddon - and remember world party being good too. I've wanted to try getting into a modern-er worms again, but for several years now, there have been so many different versions being sold simultaneously with so many different names, it's impossible to tell which is the "latest" or even most advanced (several being cut down for consoles and subsequently ported). See e.g. the post world-party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worms_(series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worms_(series) with often several new, similarly named titles per year. It's impossible to know what to get, and the fact that several are usually being sold/on sale simultaneously just leads to confusion.
  - NTripleOne 10y ago
    The latest worms game worth playing is probably Reloaded on PC. It's a little stripped down compared to Armageddon/World Party but it's the last worms game where the physics are spot on. After Revolution came out they've all been floaty and janky, grenades that would rather roll than bounce, ninja ropes that actually act like rope (and are therefore completely useless) and just general visual 'bleh' from the 2.5d.
golergka 10y ago
No mention of Scorched Earth in an article about Worms creators? Sounds like someone didn't do their research.
- nullc 10y ago
  I never played worms, but I saw other people play it at the height of its popularity. After seeing it mentioned on HN today I was telling my SO about it, and compared it to scorched earth. Nice to see someone else making the comparison.
  - ido 10y ago
    This was a well known comparison/argument at the time :)
- durzagott 10y ago
  I'm glad someone else mentioned Scorched Earth. My friends and I played this to death when we were young. I never got on the Worms bandwagon though as it just felt like an over-animated very of Scorched Earth.
  - ido 10y ago
    Worms is obviously in the same genre but it does change quite a bit - most obviously the focus on moving your team members (SE is mostly about weapon selection and aiming, in worms each turn also includes a movement phase which is just as important as the other 2 elements). This changes the gameplay quite a bit, especially in multiplayer (it become a lot less "chess-like" and more action-y, despite being a turn based game).
- ry_ry 10y ago
  I rather liked the banana throwing gorillas game that came packaged with QBASIC
- vintermann 10y ago
  I don't think Scorched Earth was the first tank game, pretty sure I can recall playing simpler version (without choice of weapons) on early IBM compatibles. If worms owes something to Scorched Earth, it owes as much or more to Lemmings.
JonnieCache 10y ago
Did anyone ever try playing the original worms CDROM as an audio CD back in the day? The saga of Boggy B and Spadge, along with the full vocal version of the worms theme tune still brings a tear to my eye. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVzBItajyEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVzBItajyEo Back when the code was a couple of mb, and the "prerendered FMVs" (shoutouts to intel indeo) only took up a couple of hundred so you had to come up with something else to fill the disc.
- andrepd 10y ago
  Whoa! I had no idea there was a vocal version of the theme song. I heard that theme song probably thousands of times before, but never realised it had lyrics. Neat!
- david-given 10y ago
  Hey, Bjorn Lynne! One of the classic demoscene musicians --- known as Dr. Awesome. I have a tonne of his CDs. ...also, I see that someone has deleted his Wikipedia page. Sigh.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    There is always his website: http://www.lynnemusic.com/ http://www.lynnemusic.com/
- jads 10y ago
  I remember this - I'd often try this with most CD-based games, PlayStation ones in particular used CD audio for game soundtracks.
  - s_kilk 10y ago
    Same trick with Quake. The soundtrack was done by Trent Reznor, so I consider it to be a 'secret' NIN album.
- camtarn 10y ago
  I similarly had no idea that there was a vocal version! Trying to find the theme from the version I owned (Worms United - basically Worms + the Reinforcements expansion) led me to this: not only the theme, but the oh-so-very-old CG cutscenes from the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ckbNvrM83A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ckbNvrM83A The theme is still brilliant, but those cutscenes... oh deary me.
jamespo 10y ago
Sad to see Martyn Brown kicked out, I still remember writing to him at 17-Bit Software as it was then to get maps for the game "Dungeon Master".
elliotpage 10y ago
I'm glad the article mentions the lawsuit Team17 brought against Amiga Power, but could really gave gone into this in greater depth- this is a fascinating point in gaming history. It had a much bigger impact than effecting just one (admittedly large) Magazine.
piotrkubisa 10y ago
Hopefully, there is very mature open-source alternative called Hedgewars [1][2]. I found this game as very nice remake of Worms Armageddon / World Party with a multiplayer and better graphics and sounds effects. [1] https://github.com/hedgewars/hw https://github.com/hedgewars/hw [2] https://www.hedgewars.org/ https://www.hedgewars.org/
anotheryou 10y ago
How the heck did they survive 3D? They should have sticked to 2D. There was even some 2D version made in 3D graphics, no?

129 points by doppp 10y ago

aab0 10y ago

The ending is a little eyebrow-raising. Both founders are ousted, refuse to talk about it, and we get some pablum about how they are now a 'team' (rather implying that they epically weren't before). What was going on there in the 2000s?

cmaggard 10y ago
Not sure about the team bits, but Worms in the 2000s was basically ultra-DLC before DLC even existed. Every 'new' game for a long time kept the vast majority of the old bits from the previous games, added a few new items, and charged full retail for the privilege.
- abritinthebay 10y ago
  You just described how sequels work...
  - cmaggard 10y ago
    A sequel implies some sort of continued story or major overhaul, not what would be 1.99 DLC in this day and age.
    - abritinthebay 10y ago
      I refer you to almost the entire output of the 80s & 90s game scene. Especially platformers.
    - 1123581321 10y ago
      cmaggard is being downvoted, but he's quite right. Playing Worms means repeated multiplayer matches on a handful of maps, with a couple dozen weapons that don't change. Sequels repeated most of the maps and weapons and added a few more, and these would indeed be small IAP or perhaps $5-10 DLC on Steam if made today. I think it's fair to say that the sequels were more derivative than the sequels of most other franchises since at least those franchises could add new campaigns (Worms added a campaign-esque experience at some point that was mainly a chain of single-player matches) or do significant graphics updates (which Worms could not meaningfully do since its cartoon graphics and physics were good enough early on in the series.)
    - intoverflow2 10y ago
      > not what would be 1.99 DLC in this day and age. To make your point valid we have to completely ignore the lack of easy payment/DRM platforms like Steam to sell these "1.99 DLCs" we also have to ignore that 2d gaming in particular has been massively devalued since the 90s/00s because of the mobile game race to the bottom and steam sales.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

No mention of 17 Bit / Team 17 is complete without mentioning they got their start by publishing a hugely successful disk magazine. Initially quite amateur but became a fairly slick presentation, and very popular. If memory serves a few of the magazines gave away their disks a time or two. Pretty much every UK Amiga owner knew of them from this. Worms was also notable in that it was one of a very few decent games produced in BASIC - Blitz Basic. Not sure if other 17 Bit output was also Basic.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
richardjdare 10y ago
Didn't 17bit run a PD library as well as a disk magazine? Back in the day, if you wanted free software or shareware you ordered it by post from a Public Domain library. They used to advertise in the Amiga magazines. I was a Blitz Basic programmer myself (still do a bit now and again). The other big Blitz Basic game was Skidmarks, a really cool isometric racing game from Acid Software. I used to carry my Amiga and TV set a few hundred yards to my friends house for multiplayer games over a null modem cable! I was a huge fan of Alien Breed, Team17's first self-published release. It was a gauntlet style top-down shooter with an "Aliens" theme. Rico Holmes's pixel art was fantastic and it had great sound. I had to buy an extra 512k for my A500 for £25 in order to play it. I think it was also one of the earliest games to have a pre-rendered animation sequence in the intro. It was made by Tobias Richter, who was well known on the Amiga scene for his 3d renders.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  They did. The mag was probably started to promote the PD library - it'd include a few PD things each time. Seem to remember they'd put a scene demo, a game and an app or utility on every disk. They seemed to curate their PD collection and give good descriptions, rather than havng to buy on blind faith and a disk title. The main PD competition, the Fred Fish disks were so very variable by comparison.
- busterarm 10y ago

digi_owl 10y ago

This may be the best part about Ars expanding to UK, getting some proper coverage of what was going on Europe.

jsheard 10y ago

I want to like the newer Worms games, but IMO the series peaked with Worms Armageddon in 1999. The physics in that game were perfect and all their attempts since then feel floaty and weird. Thankfully T17 turned over the source code to some fans who renovated it to work on modern versions of Windows, and they're still running the master server for multiplayer 17 years after release!

irox859 10y ago
WA saved a woefully boring junior year in college as me and my mates had epic worm offs. Love this game. Still play it.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  The theme song from Armageddon is also perfect and brings back memories for me.
misnome 10y ago
I remember and like armageddon - and remember world party being good too. I've wanted to try getting into a modern-er worms again, but for several years now, there have been so many different versions being sold simultaneously with so many different names, it's impossible to tell which is the "latest" or even most advanced (several being cut down for consoles and subsequently ported). See e.g. the post world-party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worms_(series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worms_(series) with often several new, similarly named titles per year. It's impossible to know what to get, and the fact that several are usually being sold/on sale simultaneously just leads to confusion.
- NTripleOne 10y ago
  The latest worms game worth playing is probably Reloaded on PC. It's a little stripped down compared to Armageddon/World Party but it's the last worms game where the physics are spot on. After Revolution came out they've all been floaty and janky, grenades that would rather roll than bounce, ninja ropes that actually act like rope (and are therefore completely useless) and just general visual 'bleh' from the 2.5d.

golergka 10y ago

No mention of Scorched Earth in an article about Worms creators? Sounds like someone didn't do their research.

nullc 10y ago
I never played worms, but I saw other people play it at the height of its popularity. After seeing it mentioned on HN today I was telling my SO about it, and compared it to scorched earth. Nice to see someone else making the comparison.
- ido 10y ago
  This was a well known comparison/argument at the time :)
durzagott 10y ago
I'm glad someone else mentioned Scorched Earth. My friends and I played this to death when we were young. I never got on the Worms bandwagon though as it just felt like an over-animated very of Scorched Earth.
- ido 10y ago
  Worms is obviously in the same genre but it does change quite a bit - most obviously the focus on moving your team members (SE is mostly about weapon selection and aiming, in worms each turn also includes a movement phase which is just as important as the other 2 elements). This changes the gameplay quite a bit, especially in multiplayer (it become a lot less "chess-like" and more action-y, despite being a turn based game).
ry_ry 10y ago
I rather liked the banana throwing gorillas game that came packaged with QBASIC
vintermann 10y ago
I don't think Scorched Earth was the first tank game, pretty sure I can recall playing simpler version (without choice of weapons) on early IBM compatibles. If worms owes something to Scorched Earth, it owes as much or more to Lemmings.

JonnieCache 10y ago

Did anyone ever try playing the original worms CDROM as an audio CD back in the day? The saga of Boggy B and Spadge, along with the full vocal version of the worms theme tune still brings a tear to my eye. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVzBItajyEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVzBItajyEo Back when the code was a couple of mb, and the "prerendered FMVs" (shoutouts to intel indeo) only took up a couple of hundred so you had to come up with something else to fill the disc.

andrepd 10y ago
Whoa! I had no idea there was a vocal version of the theme song. I heard that theme song probably thousands of times before, but never realised it had lyrics. Neat!
david-given 10y ago
Hey, Bjorn Lynne! One of the classic demoscene musicians --- known as Dr. Awesome. I have a tonne of his CDs. ...also, I see that someone has deleted his Wikipedia page. Sigh.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  There is always his website: http://www.lynnemusic.com/ http://www.lynnemusic.com/
jads 10y ago
I remember this - I'd often try this with most CD-based games, PlayStation ones in particular used CD audio for game soundtracks.
- s_kilk 10y ago
  Same trick with Quake. The soundtrack was done by Trent Reznor, so I consider it to be a 'secret' NIN album.
camtarn 10y ago
I similarly had no idea that there was a vocal version! Trying to find the theme from the version I owned (Worms United - basically Worms + the Reinforcements expansion) led me to this: not only the theme, but the oh-so-very-old CG cutscenes from the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ckbNvrM83A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ckbNvrM83A The theme is still brilliant, but those cutscenes... oh deary me.

jamespo 10y ago

Sad to see Martyn Brown kicked out, I still remember writing to him at 17-Bit Software as it was then to get maps for the game "Dungeon Master".

elliotpage 10y ago

I'm glad the article mentions the lawsuit Team17 brought against Amiga Power, but could really gave gone into this in greater depth- this is a fascinating point in gaming history. It had a much bigger impact than effecting just one (admittedly large) Magazine.

piotrkubisa 10y ago

Hopefully, there is very mature open-source alternative called Hedgewars [1][2]. I found this game as very nice remake of Worms Armageddon / World Party with a multiplayer and better graphics and sounds effects. [1] https://github.com/hedgewars/hw https://github.com/hedgewars/hw [2] https://www.hedgewars.org/ https://www.hedgewars.org/

anotheryou 10y ago

How the heck did they survive 3D? They should have sticked to 2D. There was even some 2D version made in 3D graphics, no?