In addition to standard weapons such as bazookas, guns, bombs, grenades and missiles Worms offered some out-of-the-ordinary weapons to players that hinted at some of the more colorful choices that would come in later titles. When a player's worms were all dead, they lost the game. An enemy worm was defeated when its health was depleted, it fell in the water or it was knocked off the side of the screen. On each player's turn they would move if necessary and fire at their opponents in an effort to defeat them. Each player was given a team of worms with a variety of weapons and a typical gameboard would feature terrain in either an island or cave configuration with water somewhere in the mix. Gamers were instantly enamored by the simple yet engrossing turn-based gameplay. It was given its third and final moniker, Worms, and was released for Amiga, PC and PlayStation in November, 1995. One major publisher actually left their computers running over the weekend because Team17 had taken the game disks with them and the writers wanted to play the game again the following Monday. An early indicator of the game's promising future occurred during the development when Team17 took the Amiga build around to gaming magazines to build awareness prior to release. Since the Amiga version was all but complete, the Team17 crew worked at porting the game to other formats for release. There he met Team17 producer Martyn Brown who signed him on the spot, agreeing to help produce and publish the game. After unsuccessfully shopping Total Wormage to other publishers, Davidson decided to make one final push and show his almost-completed game in person to developers at the 1994 European Computer Trade Show. Re-dubbing his game Total Wormage, Davidson submitted it to a contest for Amiga Format magazine but did not win. Emboldened by the positive reaction he got from those who had seen it Davidson went on to develop it further, transforming the military units into worms and adding on some of the quirky weapons and gameplay that the series would eventually become famous for. He noticed that the capability of movement added a whole new dimension to artillery games, which had become repetitive for him prior to that discovery. With the added capabilities of the Amiga he was able to further flesh out his vision, enabling the units to move during their turn and adding water that caused instant death. That same year Davidson would remake his creation, which he had appropriately dubbed Artillery, on an Amiga computer in the school's art room. His application would randomly generate a landscape and featured tanks and the ability to set angle and velocity. In 1990, 17 year-old Andy Davidson designed a basic artillery game on his Casio partially out of boredom and partially to one-up his friends as they attempted to see who could get the most interesting function out of a calculator. The (First) 2D Era As incredible as it sounds, the story of the Worms franchise begins with a Casio graphics calculator.
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