How Worms Went From a School Calculator to a 70 Million-Selling Classic

Andy Davidson was 22 when the game he programmed, partly during his final years at Bournemouth School, first reached store shelves. More than three decades later, the Worms series has sold enough copies that, by his own estimate, everyone in the UK could own one. "Across all formats and all versions of the game it's up to 70 million now," Davidson said. "I just can't get my head around it." ^¹

That figure is Davidson's own accounting rather than an audited sales tally, so it is best read as the creator's rough measure of the franchise's reach. What is not in dispute is the origin story, which Davidson has told repeatedly: the game began not in a studio but in a mathematics classroom.

Worms is a turn-based artillery game in which players command a team of invertebrates and destroy their opponents with an arsenal that includes dynamite, homing missiles and exploding sheep. The genre itself predates Worms by years: an early artillery-style demo program ran on the Apple II in the 1970s, pitting two pixelated tanks against each other with visible projectile trajectories. Davidson's contribution was to build his own version of that idea on hardware nobody expected to run a game at all.

Bored during his A-levels, he started programming an early incarnation of the game into his scientific calculator. "I found A-levels really hard, especially maths," he said. "So I challenged my friend to make a game on a calculator. It was a little Casio graph-plotting calculator. And if you really pushed it hard you could get it to make a game. And so I made this little tank game. It snowballed from there."

The snowball rolled through an Amiga, where Davidson's art teacher, John Pakeman, took an interest in what the machine could do for art. In a 2025 episode of The Retro Hour podcast, Davidson recounted how a quirky artillery game made on a school Amiga evolved into something much larger ^². The podcast episode's own title quotes a teacher telling him he "wasn't that good" — a detail that sits oddly against the franchise's eventual scale, though the sources do not establish which teacher said it or in what context.

What the sources do establish is the design logic behind the worms themselves. Davidson chose invertebrates because they had not appeared in a game before, and because their simple forms made it easy to pack character into the animations. That decision gave the series a visual identity that survived every hardware generation.

By 2012, Team17 was preparing Worms Revolution, and a Destructoid preview from that June described the pitch: the same strategic 2D gameplay the series was known for, wrapped in a new 3D engine, a more polished look and water physics that added both strategy and humour ^³. Davidson was back on the team for that entry. The preview listed the platforms as PC, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, with a PC release pencilled in for the end of September and the console dates still to be determined at the time of writing.

The Revolution preview is useful precisely because it shows what the series refused to abandon. The shift to a 3D engine did not mean abandoning the 2D plane where trajectories, wind and terrain have always done the work. Water, in that entry, was not scenery but a tactical hazard. That is the same instinct that produced a tank game on a graphing calculator: constrain the simulation, then let physics and a small set of tools create the drama.

For readers who mostly meet older games through modern hardware, the Worms back catalogue is a useful test case. These are lightweight, turn-based titles that run on almost anything, which is why they show up so often in discussions of older backlog games on handhelds. Emulation overhead matters far less for a 2D artillery game than for a 3D action title, though the sources here do not benchmark any Worms entry on current handhelds, so any performance expectation should be treated as untested.

What remains genuinely unconfirmed is the commercial trajectory between the early 1990s and today. The sources give a lifetime figure of up to 70 million and a 2012 snapshot of one release's platforms and rough window, but they do not break sales down by title, platform or year, and they do not say how much of that total came from re-releases, bundles or mobile ports. Nor do they establish the exact release date of the original game beyond Davidson's age at the time and the fact that it was programmed partly during his school years.

Those gaps matter less than the shape of the story, which is unusually clean for a games franchise. A student bored in maths class builds a tank game on a calculator, challenges a friend to do the same, gets noticed by a teacher, and ends up with a series that outlasts most of the hardware it launched on. The 70 million figure may be Davidson's own rough count, but the path from a Casio graph-plotting calculator to a global franchise is documented in his own words, and it is the kind of origin story the industry keeps retelling because so few of them are true.

Sources

1. ¹ How computer game Worms went from classroom to classic tech.yahoo.com
2. ² 492: “My Teacher Said I Wasn’t That Good” – The Story of Worms with Andy Davidson - The Retro Hour EP492 The Retro Hour (Retro Gaming Podcast) | iHeart - Presets www.iheart.com
3. ³ Preview: Worms Revolution brings a deluge from the past - Recommended Videos www.destructoid.com