It is almost too much to believe, friends. Screenshots have surfaced from an unlikely Team 17-related project from probably a quarter century ago. The venerable software developers, known for Full Contact, Alien Breed, and Superfrog, launched their flagship series Worms in 1995. (The Sega Mega CD quoted in the above screen was in production until 1996, so that timeframe looks reasonable.)
Something else that was a going concern in 1995 was teletext on British televisions! We know that simple games were present on the commercial teletext services such as 4-Tel, Oracle and Ceefax -- mostly Choose-Your-Own-Adventures controlled via four coloured buttons ("press red to play") on a teletext remote control. But as gamebook authors have established, you could use a highly constrained medium to communicate not only simple parlour games like tic-tac-toe, checkers and cards but such play experiences as aerial dogfights. So why not artillery duels, where the available options really are few?
Here, no doubt extracted and reconstructed from a frame immortalized on some unrelated period TV programming on videotape, is a before and after sequence. Bamber is at the mercy of Turner (named after the teletext comics hero Turner the Worm)...
... but Turner has no mercy, leaving Bamber a broken worm in a crater hole. What is unclear from these screens is whether the project was an official Team 17 tie-in (if so, it was a bizarre gambit without precedent or successor, suggesting that it was a failure), or some kind of unlicensed (but there at the top of this post is the company logo!) clone or fan port. Questions are also raised regarding what the development environment for such a project might have looked like -- I figure that odds are good the game nodes could have been illustrated and programmed on BBC Micro computers, which shared teletext's Mode 7 graphics capability and were often used as input terminals. I would think that by '95 the Beeb computers would be getting a little long in the tooth for work of this sort, but I also know that professional video studios were still using Amiga Video Toasters to composite graphics effects at the turn of the century, recording their pre-made visual segments on Sony Betamax kit, so anything is possible -- one forgets that the future wasn't always hurtling at us at quite so feverish a pace as it does today.
This screenshot beggars the imagination: special attacks in a four-player melee through your TV set? (Really four players? I see four worms but only two health bars. Are there two computer AIs not counted?)
No offence to Team 17, who I'm sure would have been capable of this feat -- but may not have backed it up with the quixotic development dollars needed. Maybe these screens are actually from an undocumented fan port (you know, the kind you'd pick up on a home-dubbed, hand-labelled cassette at a boot sale, but wasn't that more of an '80s scene?) for the BBC, which I know featured early networked deathmatches in eg. the tank game Bolo. Anything is possible, and truth is stranger than fiction. If I find out more about this release, I will be sure to announce it here! The screens have appeared recently without much supporting context, so all the alpha nerds (adjusts pocket protector) are scrambling to interpret what they're seeing with their lying eyes and make sense of it all. In the meantime, the screens are a feast for the eyes and fuel the imagination!
Update: the company speaks!
Updated update: er, eh, uhm... April Fool's! These are all 2019 Horsenburger teletext screens drawn up on the invitation of a current Team17 employee as a prank on his colleagues. But fun to think about regardless!
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