Worms

Worms for Super Nintendo Entertainment System brings Team17’s turn-based artillery game to Nintendo’s 16-bit console. Developed for SNES by East Point Software and published by Ocean, it arrived in 1996 as a console version of the game that had launched the Worms series. Its simple premise is a comic battlefield contest: command a small team of armed worms, eliminate every rival team, and try to leave at least one of your own fighters alive when the fighting ends.

A match takes place on a side-view landscape made from destructible ground. Teams take turns, with the active player choosing one worm and making the best use of a limited turn timer. A worm can walk, jump, aim and fire, but poor positioning is costly. Falling from height causes damage, while tumbling into the water at the bottom of the stage or being knocked off the edge removes a worm outright. The goal is not merely to hit an opponent; a carefully timed blast can also send them into a fatal drop.

The weapons supply gives each turn its tactical character. Standard explosive options such as bazookas and grenades demand attention to trajectory, gravity and the changing wind, while other attacks and tools open different ways to damage enemies or reach difficult terrain. Players can also use practical equipment including ropes and girders, turning a dangerous hill, crater or enclosed passage into a route or a defensive position. After an attack, explosions reshape the ground, so a safe ledge can disappear and a new tunnel or pit can change the next player’s options.

Worms turns that terrain damage into an important part of its strategy. Rather than fighting on a fixed arena, teams continually alter the field beneath one another. A shot may take direct health from a target, destroy the ground supporting it, or create an opening that changes how the rest of the battle is approached. Randomly generated landscapes and varied scenery keep the contours of matches from feeling identical, while the exaggerated animation and mischievous worm soldiers give the conflict a deliberately playful tone.

The SNES release supports solo play against computer-controlled opponents as well as local multiplayer competition for up to four players. That makes its core attraction a shared-screen contest of judgement: decide whether to pursue a difficult long-range shot, take a safer strike, or spend a turn moving a vulnerable worm away from danger. Because only one worm acts at a time, every miss, fall and terrain collapse can alter the balance of a match before the next team receives control.

Although this is a port rather than a new entry, Worms on SNES remains a key early chapter in the franchise. Andy Davidson’s original concept began as an artillery-game idea before Team17 developed it into the character-driven game released in 1995; East Point Software then handled the SNES conversion. The Super Nintendo version preserves the defining ingredients that established the series: multiple worm teams, unpredictable destructible arenas, weapons with physical consequences, and a mixture of planning, aiming and comic disaster.