From QBasic to Worms: thirty years of the artillery genre
How a genre that began with a few lines of BASIC became a family of games — Scorched Earth, Worms and their descendants — and why the formula still holds.
Artillery games are older than most people think, but the version everyone recognises settled into place around 1991, and GORILLA.BAS was one of the games that fixed it there: you aim, you account for wind and gravity, and you take turns.
The same year, a bigger gun
1991 was also the year of Scorched Earth, which took the same turn-based artillery idea and pushed it much further: many tanks, a shop between rounds, dozens of weapons and wildly destructive terrain. If GORILLA.BAS was the free taster in the operating system, Scorched Earth was the full afternoon.
Worms and the move to characters
In 1995, Team17 released Worms, which kept the aiming and the wind but put a squad of cartoon characters and a sense of humour on top of it. The genre stopped being about numbers on a battlefield and became something you could laugh at with friends. It also showed that the core loop — aim, miss, adjust, hit — scales to almost any skin.
What never changed
Across all of them, the tension is the same and it comes from one design choice: the shot is committed before you see it land. There is no undo, no retry mid-flight. You weigh the wind, you accept the risk, and you live with where it goes. That single beat is why the genre outlasted the hardware it started on.
Why it still works in a browser
The genre never needed power. It needed a target, a variable, and the honesty of a shot you cannot take back. Thirty years on, two gorillas on a skyline still deliver it in a way a modern browser can run in a single page — and a phone can hold in two hands.