Worms is a series of artillery tactical video games developed by British company Team17.

In these games, small platoons of anthropomorphic worms battle each other across a destructible landscape with the objective being to become the sole surviving team.

Each turn is time-limited to ensure that players do not hold up the game with excessive thinking or moving.

Other scheme settings allow options such as deployment of reinforcement crates, from which additional weapons can be obtained, and sudden death where the game is rushed to a conclusion after a time limit expires.

The Worms series has seen weapons such as the iconic Holy Hand Grenade, the Priceless Ming Vase and the Inflatable Scouser.

The MB Bomb, for example, which floats down from the sky and explodes on impact, is a cartoon caricature of Martyn Brown, Team17's studio director.

Other such weapons include the "Concrete Donkey", one of the most powerful weapons in the game, which is based on a garden ornament in Andy Davidson's home garden, and an airstrike known in the game as Mike's Carpet Bomb was actually inspired by a store near the Team17 headquarters called "Mike's Carpets".

Some weapons were inspired from popular films and TV programs, including the Holy Hand Grenade (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and Ninja Rope (named the Bat Rope in early demos of the original game).

[8] Davidson was working on a program called "Jack the Ripper" for the Amiga personal computer, which allowed him to trawl the residual contents of RAM after applications had been run and quit.

The original name of the game was Lemartillery, and it was created purely as a bit of fun for him and his school friends in 1993.

[15] The game would overhaul the series' visuals, dropping the darker tones of its predecessor and adopting a more cartoonish look.

[16] Armageddon marked the introduction of "WormNET", an online services which required registration and provided leagues and ranks.

[18] Worms: Open Warfare, a handheld game was released in March 2006, returned to the original 2D gameplay.

In addition to a sequel, a console port of Open Warfare would be first released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2007.

[19] While initial installments were generally praised, later games in the series have been criticized for the lack of meaningful additions.

[20] In 2001, Metacritic quoted Worms World Party reviews with comments such as "it's virtually nothing more than an expansion pack for Worms Armageddon" and, as ActionTrip's Dejan Grbavcic put it: "And I thought that only Eidos was impertinent enough to keep selling the same game with a slightly different name...".