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Squirminator2k

Real Name: Ben Paddon
Age: 37
Location: Los Angeles, California
Favorite Team17 Game: Worms: The Director's Cut

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No longer a Dream17 Staff Member.

Ben was born in 1986 in the Snap-To-Grid city known as Milton Keynes, England. He moved to Luton when he was three and, when he was 21 and thus old enough to see Luton for the cesspit it is, packed his bags and flew all the way to Los Angeles, USA.

Ben made a name for himself in the Worms community by setting up the web's first truly dedicated Worms - The Directors Cut fansite. 4 years on, following a brief excursion as a member of staff at Wormtopia, Ben's WormsDC site evolved into The WorMatriX, a surprisingly popular Worms fansite with information on every single Worms game out there. WMX has since been incorporated into Dream17. As well as all of this, Ben was also a member of staff at the now defunct Wormiverse, created the unpopular webcomic Fried, and a regular visitor and poster at the Official Team17 Forum. As well as this, he was a featured writer at GamePartisan until mid-2007, is both co-founder and columnist for RealVG, and is a listed Staff Writer for Snackbar Games.

In 2006 he wrote the "pilot script" for a Scifi-Comedy entitled "Jump Leads", and on July 2007 that script began being published online as a webcomic, with a new page being made available each week. With artwork provided by JjAR, the webcomic has received almost universally positive praise and is due to appear to no less than two comic conventions in 2008.

Ben has been using Amigas from the ripe old age of 3, initially just for gaming but more and more these days he finds himself using them for creative purposes. He didn't play any Team 17 games until 1993 when he first played Body Blows Galactic on a semi-functional Amiga 2000 hooked up to what was possibly the dodgiest video editing monitor known to man. Ben didn't realise that almost all of his favourite games were made by Team17 until 1995, when Ben got his first taste of Team 17's most successful title to date - Worms.

As well as the Team17 games and his Amiga history, Ben is a keen gamer and owns a generous selection of consoles old and new. He refuses to buy an XBox not on the basis that the console itself is rubbish - which it isn't, it's very powerful - but on the basis that there are only 4 good games for the system, and 3 of them are available on the PC.

Aside from games, Ben is a keen writer and, when the mood tastes him, a bit of an artist. He's a chocoholic (there are no support groups) and, despite his aversion to mornings, is an expert in the field of Breakfastology. He loves reading, particularly novels by Terry Pratchett, and has a fondness for Red Dwarf, the best British Sitcom in the Universe. As well as videogames, Ben's other passions include writing and music, one of his musical obsessions being Overclocked Remix. He's a keen writer, and is currently working on a couple of projects in the hopes that they will be picked up by the BBC.

He also likes writing ridiculously long biographies about himself in the third person.