The following piece appeared in The Independent of 21 October 1997. © Newspaper Publishing plc

Andy Davidson was bored by A-level art. So he started messing around with Worms.

A 'warped and damaged' perspective on the world can be a real asset for a games developer. Andy Oldfield meets the creator of a cult classic.

Worms are usually lauded as all-round ecological good guys. To computer-games players, however, they are synonymous with violence, war and hi-tech weapons. The fairly crude, pink, cartoonish versions of Lumbricus terrestris responsible for this were the stars of a multi-award winning game called Worms which, since its release in 1995, has attracted a massive cult following. The more stylish Worms 2, released for PC on CD-Rom on 7 November, will do nothing to redeem the bad press for these otherwise peaceful annelids.

The humble earthworm might have escaped with its positive image intact if the creator of the game, Andy Davidson, had not found A-level art so boring seven years ago in Bournemouth. "It's bad enough, sitting there painting," he says, "but when they start saying 'explain the hidden meaning of this' you think 'Oh God'... So basically I had to come up with something to keep me and my mates amused and keep us not doing A-level art. Worms grew from there."

The game shares some of the characteristics of conventional war games but, instead of revelling in the minutiae of historical or military detail, Worms focuses on oddball humour and cartoon violence as one platoon of ferociously armed worms takes on another in a computer-generated landscape. Each player takes it in turn to try to wipe out the other's troops, or move their own worms out of range of hostile Uzis, bazookas and exploding sheep.

The list of things that make a worm say "goodbye" in a curious falsetto voice before expiring is a long and inventive one. The list in Worms 2 is even longer and more bizarre - flying sheep and exploding old women rub shoulders with cluster bombs and there are rumours that a concrete donkey will be putting in an appearance.

A concrete donkey is something Davidson, 24, uses to explain his "warped and damaged" perspective on the world. He remembers his childhood home and a garden that contained an ornamental concrete donkey: "Quite attractive. Full works. Big ears. And I was convinced that my parents had poured concrete over a real, live donkey and so I used to get a little stone and chip away at it to see if I could get down to the fur underneath it. That's what scarred me, that's where all the ideas came from."

School careers advisers, predictably enough, did not see such a mindset as the basis for securing gainful employment. Having no truck with Hunter S Thompson's dictum that when the going gets weird the weird turn professional, they were about as helpful as A-level Art in helping Davidson to develop his game and enter the realm of urban myth as one of those teenage programmers ("self-taught," as he says, "messing about with rubber-keyed Spectrums, then a Commodore 64 and an Amiga") coming up in his bedroom with a game that would sell millions of copies.

"One of their comments was 'you're good, but you're not that good'. Uplifting stuff," he says. "My parents, like a lot of people, didn't see that there was a video games industry. They thought, 'let him go and get it out of his system. Then he'll go and do something more straightforward instead.' Games were the only thing I was really interested in. But the industry is so fast-moving that to go to university and spend three years doing something that isn't going to take you in the direction you want ... I thought I might as well go for what I wanted. If it didn't work, go and get a boring job somewhere."

He went to work in a computer shop so that he could test and refine his game on unsuspecting customers. Convinced that it would appeal to a wider audience, Davidson took his game to ECTS, Europe's premier interactive entertainment expo. He had a publisher in mind - Team 17, an outfit which had evolved from a public domain library into a leading professional games software development company. Team 17 liked his idea, helped to develop it and ported it from the Amiga to different platforms. In its first two years, the game won seven big awards and sold prodigiously. It is still selling. Repackaged as a cut-price classic it recently made No 1 in the UK budget charts.

Those career advisers from school ought to be kicking themselves for trying to dissuade Davidson from his left-of-centre entrepreneurial path. "It was a good feeling - being able to make your living out of something you genuinely enjoy," he said. "Some of the people I'd known for years changed overnight. Others weren't bothered by it. But it does cause some weirdness with people."

After Worms, Worms 2 was inevitable. Not merely to cash in, but because there was so much that needed adding. "It's an ongoing thing. There's a huge box full of ideas which never got put in the original. Mainly, Worms 2 was inevitable because there's so much more you could do with sheep. Now they can fly, but when you've got a sheep that can fly, what more do you want? So we're moving on to old women. At the moment they've just got a handbag, but we could upgrade them with little tartan shopping trolleys with spikes and when they explode they'll shed cans of Happy Shopper baked beans everywhere... or No Frills. They like the No Frills stuff.

"With Worms 2, there's been a change in style of graphics and a complete new engine to get it running at high-res with DirectX under Windows 95. The team came up with all that while I basically spent last year coming up with the big changes in the game. They left me to do that. Everyone contributes ideas, but they leave me the warped stuff.

"There's still a lot of things I want to do with the game; develop the one-player side and multi-player stuff. A lot of the most popular multi-player games are very simple and I like games you can play on lots of different levels.

"Even though things like Doom and Quake are phenomenally popular over networks, at the end of it you're mainly just seeing someone flip past the end of a corridor. There's a lot more you can do with multi-player stuff than that. Worms is a bit different, so it should be appreciated. You can either play a simple one or a tactical one. Being turn-based, Worms 2 is ideal for networks - with an infinite number of levels every game plays different. With chat built in you can send anonymous messages and wind people up. Over the Internet it is going to be huge. And there's humour. Humour in games is completely overlooked in general."

For aspiring games programmers today there are university courses which, although they may teach structured programming and flowcharts ("Not a single one of which was drawn in the making of Worms 2," says Davidson), are probably more important and relevant now than they used to be. "You can't nip down your local Dixons and walk out with a Silicon Graphics workstation, so [universities] do let people get their hands on stuff. It's difficult today because there's no equivalent to what the Amiga was - that let anybody get into it. The cost of a decent PC set-up is still quite high and also people's expectations of what they get from games has gone up, so the teams to produce them have got bigger."

Not that the highly individual touch is surplus to requirements. "The one thing that has happened because of all this is people are afraid to try anything different," he said. "People are producing clones of each other's games - nothing original. So if anyone had a really strong, different idea for a game, then if they can present that in some way - whether it's in the form of a demo or just on paper - it'll stand out. The industry is getting pretty boring. I want to keep Worms different."