Worms?

Worms? is a 1983 computer game written by David Maynard for Electronic Arts, released for the Atari 800 and Commodore 64. It was one of the original five games that launched the company. More a software toy than a game, Worms? is an interactive version of Paterson's Worms.

The game is abstract, like Conway's Game of Life, but the player's ostensible goal is to optimally program one or more "worms" (each a sort of cellular automaton) to grow and survive as long as possible. The game area is divided up into hexagonal cells, and the worms are essentially programmed to move in a particular direction for each combination of filled-in and empty frame segments in their immediate vicinity. Over the course of a game, the player needs to give his/her worm less and less input, and more and more moves by their worm result in the encountering of familiar situation for which the worm has already been 'trained'. As the worms move, they generate aleatoric music.

Reception

Orson Scott Card in Compute! in 1983 gave Worms? and two other EA games, M.U.L.E. and Archon: The Light and the Dark, complimentary reviews, writing that "they are original; they do what they set out to do very, very well; they allow the player to take part in the creativity; they do things that only computers can do".^[1] Compute!'s Gazette's reviewer called Worms? for the Commodore 64 "one of the most fascinating games I've played in a long time. It's so different from anything else that it quickly captivated me. Worms? tournaments become popular among the staff of Compute! ... [It] is as much fun to watch as it is to play". He added that part of its appeal was that "The game is hard to master. It's easy to play, but seems almost impossible to play well time after time".^[2] Compute! listed the game in May 1988 as one of "Our Favorite Games", writing that four years after its introduction "Worms? is still in a class by itself", requiring "a sense of strategy as well as proficiency at joystick maneuvers".^[3]

References

• TheLegacy article on Worms? including screenshot and cover.
• "Worm Paths", chapter 17 in: Martin Gardner, 1986, Knotted Doughnuts and Other Mathematical Entertainments, W. H. Freeman and Company.
• "Paterson's Worm", Michael Beeler, MIT AI Memo #290, June 1973.
• Games::Worms, a Perl implementation of a Worms?-like game, by Sean M. Burke.