Happy Birthday Lemmings

Lemmings is such a fun game! I played many hours of it trying to perfectly solve its many puzzles.<p>Lemmings inspired Ron Millar, a designer at Silicon &amp; Synapse (later Blizzard Entertainment), to invent The Lost Vikings, our first original game: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Lost_Vikings" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Lost_Vikings</a><p>The original design for Vikings was very similar to Lemmings but saw massive changes during the course of development, going from many Vikings to five to eventually just three.<p>We owe a debt of gratitude to the Lemmings devs for inspiring our efforts.

In 1991 I was writing games and in those days you had to think a lot about how many moving objects there were on the screen and how many you could fit within the frame rate etc. So that gave games that &#x27;arcade&#x27; feel where the player controls one spaceship (say) and it can have 8 bullets on the screen at one time and enemies attack in waves of six etc. I suppose at that point processors were moving beyond those limitations but games were still conceived in those sorts of terms.<p>When I first saw Lemmings I was just amazed as to how it ignored all of that. The player controls up to 100 characters. The gameplay was freeform, you could dig through whatever, build a ladder wherever. It was a real paradigm shift. You can set ten lemmings to explode. When they do, the framerate will drop to a very slow lag. But that doesn&#x27;t matter, because its fun.

DHTML Lemmings is still playable in a modern browser: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elizium.nu&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;lemmings&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elizium.nu&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;lemmings&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s dated 2004, but I&#x27;m convinced I remember playing it earlier.

Whenever I pass this building in Sheffield, I immediately think “you need bashers this time”.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sheffield.ac.uk&#x2F;acse&#x2F;department&#x2F;facilities&#x2F;diamond" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sheffield.ac.uk&#x2F;acse&#x2F;department&#x2F;facilities&#x2F;diamo...</a>

I wonder why the open source ports never caught on like they did for other games. In any thread about Transport Tycoon, it&#x27;s five minutes until people start talking about OpenTTD, yet NeoLemmix and Lix are barely known, despite all the innovation and custom level design taking place there.

My dad got my family our first PC for Christmas in 1990. Back then I didn’t know anything about PC gaming, and when my dad took me and my brother out to pick out games, our decisions were driven mostly by the box art.<p>The first game I ever bought was Sim City, which I thought had some really intriguing box art. And my brother bought King’s Quest V. Such a great introduction to PC gaming for a couple young kids.<p>And I remember when Lemmings came out, it had really distinctive box art. I had no idea what it was about, but I remember it caught my eye and I wanted it from the first time I saw the box. It turned out to be completely different than I was expecting, but also incredibly fun and satisfying.<p>Never judge a book by its cover, but choosing PC games by their box art worked surprisingly well!

I loved Lemmings (the game) as a kid! But as an adult, I found out everything I thought I knew about lemmings (the animal) was a lie: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snopes.com&#x2F;fact-check&#x2F;white-wilderness-lemming-suicide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snopes.com&#x2F;fact-check&#x2F;white-wilderness-lemming-s...</a>

It always blew my mind how well animated the 12 pixel high lemmings were. The dynamics were incredible.

There was one level that stumped me for a long time, it was the level that introduced the one dig direction game mechanic. I was young and there was no internet to look up a solution.<p>One night I dreamed the solution, how obvious it was! Even now I still remember this experience when confronted with an intractable problem.

The UK has some of the most interesting video game studios in the world. I didn&#x27;t know that &quot;Lemmings&quot; had been created by Rockstar! Rare is also from the UK.

I loved lemmings as a kid, and bits of the soundtrack get stuck in my head to this day (I know a lot of it is just chippy arrangements of otherwise famous public domain music, but the arrangements were great). Even at the time it was a really original concept in a way that people seldom manage, like something that could have (but as far as I can tell didn&#x27;t) become its own &quot;genre&quot; of game

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;lemmings_2_the_tribes_1992" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;lemmings_2_the_tribes_1992</a>

The video linked in the article jogs some old memories, wow. The soundtrack to Shadow of the Beast was something else...<p>Lemmings was such an amazing game. I didn&#x27;t speak English at the time, and I never understood why the pause button had little critter feet on it. Only years later it came: &quot;paws&quot;

Annnnnnd now I&#x27;m playing Lemmings.

We need some modern games like Lemmings or the &quot;classic&quot; 2D Worms.<p>HOW did they do that pixel-perfect terrain destruction anyway?

I still remember the day I walked into my local games store and bought it off the shelf. It was flying off the shelves. I think there was a cover disc demo the previous month which had started the hype machine.

LOL I just played through Lemmings in one of those DosBox emulators a few days ago ... so much fun!! The music alone brought back some good memories.

I remember seeing this game for the first time in a computer shop - back when they still had a demo machine for you try to out new games. I came in totally blind, never heard of the company or the game before. It was like no other game I had ever seen. 15 minutes later, I took a copy home. I was hooked.<p>Truly one of the greatest puzzle games of all time.

I first played Lemmings on a Mac IIsi, and later on an Amiga 1200. I remember the pixel-perfect timing being brutally difficult with the low-quality Amiga ball mouse, but I played it enough that I can still hum all the tunes.

I played Lemmings on my Amiga 1000. Later when I bought a 386DX PC Clone I bought Lemmings for DOS and VGA.<p>Open Source version is Pingus: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pingus.seul.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pingus.seul.org&#x2F;</a>

First time I ever stayed up all night playing a game it was Lemmings. Second time was Angry Birds lol. I don&#x27;t game much.

So many memories

vgalemmi<p>tgalemmi<p>Don&#x27;t know why I still remember those.

Also see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lemmingsforums.net&#x2F;index.php?topic=5306.0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lemmingsforums.net&#x2F;index.php?topic=5306.0</a> for info on where to find and play Lemmings!

First video game I remember playing. Dad worked at a warehouse for the local school district and when I’d go to work with him, he’d set me up on their IBM PC and let me play lemmings the entire day. Truly loved that game

Lemmings was a game that I thoroughly enjoyed at the time. Happy birthday!

I played this on the Amiga when the game first came out. Loved it.

Let&#x27;s go!

I was totally addicted to the SNES version. I’ve been wanting to play this game again forever. What is the best way to? (Computer version is fine too, never played it)

I remember Lemmings! I remember getting into programming by trying to make games because of games like Lemmings!<p>So where is the outlet?<p>(I just did a search for Ludum Dare, and it seems ... dead?)

If the Lemmings games were remastered and slated for release I&#x27;d pay full price in a heartbeat.<p>I&#x27;m sure a Kickstarter for this purpose would be very well received.

Oh I enjoyed Lemmings. Nice flashback.

My first contact to computer games. Now thinking of introducing computers with this to my 5 yo

Why has a modern-graphics remake of Lemmings not happened? Surely it&#x27;d be a hit?

Tim Wright&#x27;s Lemmings music is low-key brilliant. It has a deliberately rough and dorky instrumentation with very &quot;synthetic&quot; trumpets and accordion (You can make much &quot;better&quot; instrumented music on the Amiga, and we know Tim could do that too!). It is somehow as cute and vexing as the little critters themselves. And yet there&#x27;s that subtle element of old English-Scottish folk that makes it magical.

I was a poor child when Lemmings came out, so I didn&#x27;t have a PC.

love that game

a classic.