The long answer?
It was a dark and stormy night in the winter of 1995 when Jason opened the latest GamePro magazine and found a demo disc (YES a demo DISC) inside that contained the demo for a new game called Worms. It had two levels – an ice stage and fiery one – but the seeds of obsession began. Just ask our wives!
In the early days of Worms, there really wasn’t any creative outlet available to us, but the game itself really kept us coming back. We seem to remember one particularly awkward afternoon ninja-roping with our toes – yeah… our toes. By the time Worms 2 came around, we were old veterans and when we found out we could hand draw our own levels in the new editor, we were happy to take a shot at it. Actually, it was Jeremy, the Potatoes of this party, who one day showed me a decent rendition of what he called “Alcatraz”. It was set to a standard scheme and sank during Sudden Death. We played the crap out of it.
We can’t remember how long after the birth of Alcatraz it was before Jeremy produced the original version of Titanic. It consisted of a few square rooms and a couple smoke stacks. We loved the way the rooms slowly sank into the sea and the feel of the level actually started to take shape.
By the time Worms Armageddon came out, we were introduced to the concept of importing our own hand-drawn bitmaps. Once again, it was Jeremy who surprised me with a hand-drawn, full color rendering of Airforce One. In a state of shock, I found myself wondering when I was going to pull my weight in this partnership. Within a few weeks, I had produced Titanic B. Over the next few years, we produced a few more fan favorites, including Titanic D, the Ewok Village, and Jabba’s Palace. And then our interest in the game slowly faded.
In 2008, we happened across the Team17 forum and noticed that Worms Armageddon had been updated by a couple of great programmers, Deadcode and Cybershadow. The updates were not supported by Team17 officially and were considered betas. But the larger map scale that was now allowed in Worms Armageddon suddenly opened a new interest in Worms map-making and getting back in to playing the game again. It was once again good ole Jer who said one day: “You know what would be awesome? Remaking our full color levels with less constraints on the map size.” And like patient zero in a pandemic, he infected the rest of the team with what became our duty to the community – to redesign, reproduce, and re-release the Meat & Potatoes maps for all the current fans.
So from 2008 to the present, we’ve not only done that, re-releasing Titanic B, Titanic D, and Airforce One, but we’ve created some new originals and put them into the category of our Next Gen Worms maps. Global Warming, which is incidentally where the third member of our team joined up, as well as Last Resort and the Pit of Carkoon, became immediate favorites in the Worms gaming and mapping community. There are still others under construction, and still others on the drawing board for future release, but it’s clear that MnP has been revived.
We want to thank Deadcode, Cybershadow, bonz, franpa, Vader, and all of our buds on the Team17 forums for supporting us and giving us feedback.
UPDATE 1: In August 2010, Meat & Potatoes Productions were honored by the inclusion of 4 of our custom maps in the new PC video game Worms Reloaded! Read all about it.
UPDATE 2: In December 2010, Tycoon was added to the list of MNP maps currently included in Worms Reloaded as a result of winning a community map design competition hosted by Team17.
