The North American release of the PlayStation version was the subject of considerable negotiation, as Sony Computer Entertainment of America had a policy against 2D games being published for the console. Commercial ports of the game were released for Amiga CD32, Atari Jaguar, Game Boy, Macintosh, MS-DOS, PlayStation, Sega Mega Drive, Sega Saturn and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Worms was first launched in Europe for the Amiga on Novemby Ocean Software.
The object and landscape sets used to generate the field are arranged into thematics including forests, martian terrains, beaches and hell. Level designs are randomly generated by the use of an alpha-numeric string as their seeds. Team17 made an offer on-the-spot to develop and publish it. Davidson then pitched his project to multiple publishers with no success, before showcasing his game during ECTS in September 1994, where he met Team17 co-founder Martyn Brown. However, Davidson's entry did not win the competition nor did reached any place for classification. With the addition of worms into his ideas and inspired by a Blitz BASIC programming competition held by Amiga Format magazine, Davidson renamed his project from Artillery to Total Wormage (possibly in reference to Midway's Total Carnage), featuring 55,000 levels and publications compared it with both Lemmings and Cannon Fodder due to its visual style and thematic, which Team17 project manager Marcus Dyson claimed said "cross" was planned from start. Davidson wanted to achieve the same animation quality and humour seen in Lemmings, which led him on employing worms as characters for his project after delving on various experiments through Deluxe Paint. Davidson later moved development of Artillery to the Amiga in August 1993, which allowed to expand his idea further, leading him on introducing new elements and a graphical style to distinguish his project from its spiritual predecessors. Worms was the brainchild of Andy Davidson, a then-unknown computer shop employee and fan of Amiga microcomputers since 1987, who began work on the project in 1990 under the name Artillery based on previous tank games from the 8-bit era using a Casio graphing calculator as an experiment for his own amusement. Worms originally began as an amusement experiment by Andy Davidson on a graphing calculator by Casio before moving development on the Amiga. Worms can also die by being thrown off the side of the map or by falling into the water at the map's base. A worm who is out of health will die by blowing themselves up and leaving a grave marker. If a worm is hit with a weapon, they will lose health. When most weapons are used, they cause explosions that deform the terrain, creating circular cavities. Some settings provide for the inclusion of objects such as land mines and explosive barrels. 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. Over fifty weapons and tools may be available each time a game is played, and differing selections of weapons and tools can be saved into a "scheme" for easy selection in future games. The time limit can be modified in some of the games in the Worms series. Each turn is time-limited to ensure that players do not hold up the game with excessive thinking or moving.
Worms may move around the terrain in a variety of ways, normally by walking and jumping but also by using particular tools such as the "Bungee" and "Ninja Rope", to move to otherwise inaccessible areas. They then use whatever tools and weapons are available to attack and kill the opponents' worms, thereby winning the game. During the course of the game, players take turns selecting one of their worms. Each player controls a team of several worms. Worms is a turn-based artillery game, similar to other early games in the genre such as Scorched Earth. From the Amiga version: A scrapyard themed level, with the player using the blowtorch tool.