9 ms·

The Making of Lemmings

262 points by errozero 11y ago

oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
Maybe I was just the perfect age - 12 - when the game came out, but I remember it as pretty much the most formative video game I've ever played. It truly blew my mind that you could have something that seemed so open, even to the extent of being able to modify the actual environment. Lemmings just seemed so different from everything else around, in a way that might be difficult to appreciate nowadays. I must've played Sim City & Populous prior, but something about the platformer genre and the level of indirection combined perfectly to make this game genuinely unique.
- adibchoudhury 11y ago
  Agreed-awesome game. I also felt there was nothing like it back when I played it, which made it all the more engaging.
- beeswax 11y ago
  Exactly - Lemmings is one of the games I still enjoy playing in DOSBox (along with e.g. Lost Vikings, Monkey Island 1+2, …). If it weren’t for those titles roughly between 1991 and 1994 I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have started to get deeper into DOS and pick up programming later on (remember messing with config.sys and HIMEM.SYS, EMM386 etc to fine-tune memory? using memmaker was so lame :) ). Last year I was fortunate enough to be working on Meerkatz Challenge, a heavily Lemmings inspired puzzle platformer: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meerkatz-challenge/id732854001?l=de&ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meerkatz-challenge/id7328540... I think some of the original Lemmings concepts and controls simply don’t translate to platforms with touch input and high resolution graphics. Too bad that the PC versions don't seem to be available on archive.org.
- ErikRogneby 11y ago
  Scorched earth was another one around that time that had an environment you could destroy. Our token ring network got a lot of use from just those two. The thing I remember about lemmings was the frantic feeling of them just pouring in and having to time things right.
- derefr 11y ago
  I only found out about Lemmings when I was past my formative years, and it had long existed. But as a game designer, I still think of it as a pretty seminal game. An RTS is just Lemmings with units that will go where you tell them, after all. However, the core conceit of Lemmings—the feeling of herding a bunch of autonomous agents around, that will do whatever they like (to your detriment) unless you restrict them—is still pretty unexplored. It never spawned its own direct subgenre, unlike its cousins Tower Defense and MOBA. There were a few attempts—I think from Nintendo there was Mario & Wario, and of all things Krusty's Fun House. But generally there's still a lot of unexplored "herding game" mechanics-space. I wonder why we don't see more of it on mobile? Herding things by tapping them seems obvious.
  - t0mbstone 11y ago
    Go on the Apple app store and search for "lemmings". I found quite a few games that were all based on this premise, the biggest one being "Flockers" by Team 17 (the same people who made "Worms"). Maybe it's more popular than you realized?
    - derefr 11y ago
      It may be! My belief stemmed from the fact that I've heard of no break-out success herding games besides Lemmings itself. Nobody has gotten rich by making a herding game. There is no herding game with merchandise. Etc.
  - tokenrove 11y ago
    There were a number of Lemmings clones at the time. Troddlers being a favorite. However, there was so much activity around the Lemmings property itself at the time, that I conjecture the real reason we didn't see more exploration of that space was that the market was burned out on it, and then it was forgotten. Definitely a lot of potential in those mechanics.
  - dogles 11y ago
    I agree, there is a lot more unexplored territory! Lemmings was definitely one of our inspirations for World Zombination. Specifically, the zombie drones that you mutate into special units with different abilities. http://worldzombination.com/ http://worldzombination.com/
bluedino 11y ago
Special editions, ports for almost every system that existed, it was really the closest thing to Angry Birds of the time.
thisjepisje 11y ago
Wow, never even realized you could save blockers (by digging the ground under their feet away). /me grabs PSP
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Useful trick to finish the more difficult levels with high requirements (in terms of number of lemmings to save)
  - caf 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure there were levels that you had to do this to complete them (maybe just in "Oh No, more Lemmings"?)
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      That is what I was hinting at :)
- aidos 11y ago
  No, neither did I - always assumed you had to detonate them. Equally mind expanding - didn't know that DMA went on to create GTA!
  - pidg 11y ago
    Indeed - they became Rockstar North. Their offices are still in Scotland (Edinburgh, though, rather than Dundee).
    - Rayearth 11y ago
      I wonder if Rockstar can sneak in a Lemmings mini game into GTA V without getting sued by Sony.
- Untit1ed 11y ago
  Me neither! I can still remember the layout of that level where you only have two lemmings and you have to save both of them but need to use at least one as a blocker. I could never figure it out and didn't have the internet to look it up at the time! Argh!
Kenji 11y ago
Great article. I enjoyed the Lemmings games a lot as a kid. ‘Lemmings 3 was a bit crap … more to end our commitment to Psygnosis than actually do a good game,’ admits Dailly. You gotta give him credit for his honesty. Lemmings was one of many titles that didn't survive the transition to 3D unscathedly. I think it was because a lot of time went into the engine instead of cute handdrawn 2D graphics and map design. Also the 3D camera movements were finicky, while in 2D you could just scroll.
- matt_smith1968 11y ago
  Lemmings was terrific. Would it work well on modern touch-based systems? (iPad et al)
  - pidg 11y ago
    Yes, it would work very well. There's a near-perfect homebrew port on the DS[1]. I'm not sure why they haven't licensed it yet. [1] http://www.mrdictionary.net/lemmings/ http://www.mrdictionary.net/lemmings/
  - oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
    It would be tricky because there was an amount of precision required that would be tricky to emulate on touch-based input. Plus you really wouldn't want your finger obscuring the screen at the vital moment! Maybe with a stylus, though.
- sambeau 11y ago
  Having worked closely with Mike Dailly, "honesty" doesn't do justice to his ability to speak hard truths :)
- pimlottc 11y ago
  I thought Lemmings Revolution (2000) struck a pretty good compromise - it had the requisite 3D graphics that the industry demanded but the playing field was still basically 2D - just wrapped around a cylinder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Sh72bZ5Dmg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Sh72bZ5Dmg
crispweed 11y ago
Two player lemmings was crazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAedz3nWn9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAedz3nWn9E There was a kind of pixel preciseness with the original lemmings that contributed a lot to this being great, but that somehow seems to have got lost in newer versions..
- bluedino 11y ago
  >> There was a kind of pixel preciseness with the original lemmings I always wondered what kind of challenges that imposed on the sprite-based consoles of the day like the NES and especially something like the Gameboy.
  - crispweed 11y ago
    How it worked was that each lemming was actually treated for collision purposes as if it was a single dot, and that was tested against some kind of bitmap for where there was solid ground. (I think! I remember, with a friend, implementing our own version of this, and that's definitely how our version worked.) So this is less realistic than other ways of implementing lemming behaviours, and easier to implement than some kind of more 'correct' collision approach, but gave the gameplay a very nice precise feel.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  > Two player lemmings was crazy Yeah it was great on the Amiga! Not sure if it worked well on other machines where you could not connect more than a mouse, though !
  - maggit 11y ago
    I remember it was possible to play Settlers 2 in two-player split screen with two mice in DOS, and it seems possible to recreate in Dosbox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfpx0siF5TU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfpx0siF5TU If I remember correctly, the trick here was to not start the mouse driver (mouse.com), but let Settlers' internal mouse driver have control :) I have no idea about two player Lemmings in DOS. I have never played it, at least.
learnstats2 11y ago
Any comment on lemmings being suicidal in popular culture is incomplete if it doesn't credit Disney for chasing a few of the "nasty little rodents" off a cliff. http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp
- aidos 11y ago
  I did like that note in the post "In the popular imagination, for some reason, we interpret this as consistent and collective suicide." Where "some reason" is because TV told us so. I wonder where the original myth came from. Obviously the population fluctuation gave rise to it - but someone decided they were committing mass suicide. I'd love to know how much of a "fact" it was before the Disney piece.
- kahirsch 11y ago
  1823 Travels Through Sweden, Norway ... https://books.google.com/books?id=qrNfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA152&dq=lemmings+suicide https://books.google.com/books?id=qrNfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA152&dq=l... 1836 The Mirror of Literature https://books.google.com/books?id=amBEAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA21&dq=lemmings https://books.google.com/books?id=amBEAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA21&d... 1841 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh https://books.google.com/books?id=tC4_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA449&dq=%22throw+themselves%22 https://books.google.com/books?id=tC4_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA449&dq=%... 1874 Popular Science https://books.google.com/books?id=_B8DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA347&dq=lemmings https://books.google.com/books?id=_B8DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA347&dq=l... 1877 Popular Science https://books.google.com/books?id=gisDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA404&dq=perishes+voluntarily https://books.google.com/books?id=gisDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA404&dq=p... 1947 Life Magazine https://books.google.com/books?id=bkgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA81&dq=%22death+march%22 https://books.google.com/books?id=bkgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA81&dq=%2... 1952 Boys Life https://books.google.com/books?id=QXO4WXYxnAwC&pg=PA50&dq=%22death+march%22 https://books.google.com/books?id=QXO4WXYxnAwC&pg=PA50&dq=%2... 1953 Natural Religion and Christian Theology https://books.google.com/books?id=j0yEUu8A5hEC&pg=PA116&dq=lemmings+suicide https://books.google.com/books?id=j0yEUu8A5hEC&pg=PA116&dq=l... 1953 Boys' Life https://books.google.com/books?id=z-p67xyiQpQC&pg=PA4&dq=%22How+About+Those+Lemmings%22 https://books.google.com/books?id=z-p67xyiQpQC&pg=PA4&dq=%22...
  - 11y ago
lmedinas 11y ago
I'm waiting for a Remaster for years, we had Pingus a while ago and it seems the development is back to the track again. I hope Sony change their mind and make Lemmings again. 1 - http://pingus.seul.org/welcome.html http://pingus.seul.org/welcome.html
- Mindless2112 11y ago
  You might be interested in Lix [1], it's like Lemmings but with networked multiplayer, and it's open source (CC0). [1] http://asdfasdf.ethz.ch/~simon/about.php http://asdfasdf.ethz.ch/~simon/about.php
- rjsw 11y ago
  There is a Lemmings clone in DHTML but it seems to have legal problems [1]. http://crisp.home.xs4all.nl/lemmings/lemmings.html http://crisp.home.xs4all.nl/lemmings/lemmings.html
  - Cthulhu_ 11y ago
    I was waiting for that one to pop up :p. That is actually a web game from way before web games, AJAX, or Javascript animations were a thing. That's probably just as important history as the Lemmings game itself is.
hnur 11y ago
Feeling nostalgic for the soundtrack? This guy did a medley -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0_ZHEDZ-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0_ZHEDZ-4
- ekianjo 11y ago
  The MODs are probably a better way to get the actual sound quality out of your speakers :)
benbristow 11y ago
Site seems to be down. Here's a mirror. https://archive.is/t96Pg https://archive.is/t96Pg
- ionwake 11y ago
  Thank you
paublyrne 11y ago
I played Lemmings 2 recently on an Amiga for the first time since about 1992. There was something magical about that game. They make great Halloween costumes also.
Symbiote 11y ago
"Composer Tim Wright pulled Lemmings out of the fire with style, bouncily reinterpreting standards like Offenbach’s Galop Infernal and Ten Green Bottles, and adding a touch of class with Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Little Swans." Since I was about five years old when my parents bought Lemmings, I remember pieces like "Dance of the Little Swans" as "Lemmings music". I think it's a better choice than 60s/70s music would have been. It doesn't date, and it's less annoying to hear on repeat for four hours straight... https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=QwXthGJfHLc#t=390 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Qw...
- Mindless2112 11y ago
  They actually released an Amiga demo disk with the "60's/70's action music" [1] hidden away on it. None of those tunes played when you played the demo, of course. If you're interested in hearing them, I reverse engineered [2] the music format a while back and converted them to ProTracker modules [3]. [1] https://tcrf.net/Proto:Lemmings_%28Amiga%29#Unused_Music https://tcrf.net/Proto:Lemmings_%28Amiga%29#Unused_Music [2] https://bitbucket.org/mindless/sjstomod/src https://bitbucket.org/mindless/sjstomod/src [3] http://www.camanis.net/lemmings/files/rips/music/lemmings_demo_mod.zip http://www.camanis.net/lemmings/files/rips/music/lemmings_de...
  - errozero 11y ago
    I'll definitely check this out later, thanks.
- glandium 11y ago
  Having played Lemmings back then on a PC, I'm more fond of the Adlib version of the soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvgncwgPA20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvgncwgPA20
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiWbcws-s4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiWbcws-s4o
amelius 11y ago
> Already a keen programmer, Jones used his £3000 redundancy cheque to invest in a top-of-the-range Amiga 1000 and begin taking software engineering classes, If you were already a keen programmer, what would software engineering classes in the 80s have given you? > to the chagrin of his parents, who saw a better future in his hardware expertise. Perhaps rightly so, he could have invented mobile telephony for instance :)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- fmsf 11y ago
  Q1: calculus, discreet math, planning, algorithms, datastructures... The list goes on...
  - codeulike 11y ago
    Ah, discreet math, when you had to work things out really quietly to avoid drawing any attention to oneself. Used to love that. I was also a fan of discrete math.
- ptaipale 11y ago
  > If you were already a keen programmer, what would software engineering classes in the 80s have given you? A lot of us keen programmers had just learned our way ourselves, and had very little exposure to existing research on things like data structures (a binary tree is nice!), algorithms (bubble sort is not!) or software engineering practices (yes, you really need a version control system and some automated testing!) So, software engineering classes could give a lot. I remember how clever I felt as a starting freshman, and how humble I had got in about three years' time when my professor took me through the Compilers class. A lot of education and classes is not really teaching you to know things, it's just to teach you to know how much there is to learn.
  - amelius 11y ago
    Yes, but software engineering was a completely different field back in those days. A lot of it was purely academic, and not of very much practical value for a solo programmer.
finnjohnsen2 11y ago
503 - Service unavailable :(
Symbiote 11y ago
"But if you ever visit Perth Road in the centre of Dundee, you can see DMA Design’s old office at the far west end. A few hundred yards away is a park called Seabraes and here, in front of the entrance to Dundee’s digital media park, you can find a pillar with three bronze lemmings clambering up and over it." News article with several pictures of the pillar: http://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/local/dundee/gallery-lemmings-sculptures-find-their-way-home-to-dundee-1.115473 http://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/local/dundee/gallery-lemmin...
- jplahn 11y ago
  Ah I wish I had known about this! I lived in Aberdeen for 7 years and, as a lover of Lemmings when I was younger, I would have loved to check this out during one of the many times I drove through Dundee. Very cool.
  - sambeau 11y ago
    They're a fairly recent addition. They were originally supposed to be on the side of the original (bright pink) DMA office (along with a blue plaque) but the current owner didn't want them :(
yagami_san 11y ago
Google cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8O3HvdUM7QgJ:readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-lemmings/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8O3Hvd...
martincerdeira 11y ago
503 - Service unavailable :(
caasih 11y ago
imgur backup: http://imgur.com/gallery/zeDuXtN/ http://imgur.com/gallery/zeDuXtN/
Mindless2112 11y ago
There's also "The Complete History of Lemmings" [1] for Mike Dailly's (the guy who inspired the game) take on the making of Lemmings. [1] http://www.javalemmings.com/DMA/Lem_1.htm http://www.javalemmings.com/DMA/Lem_1.htm
jcadam 11y ago
Ah, this brings back memories. My parents had acquired a second-hand Amiga 500, which we then hooked up to the green monochrome monitor from our Apple ][e (also acquired used several years previously) - we couldn't afford a 'real' monitor :) The Amiga came with a big box of floppies, one of which was labelled 'Lemmings.' I don't believe I've ever played Lemmings in color (I'm having trouble picturing it, actually), but it was still pretty amazing in monochrome. Though, my only basis for comparison at the time was the games I'd played on the Apple ][.
Rexxar 11y ago
... he also recalls it was partly funded by royalties (75p per £25 sale) from DMA’s first two games They had 3% royalties on their two first games. It seems retrospectively incredibly low compared to what people currently get from app stores.
- Drdrdrq 11y ago
  I agree it was low, but I wonder if their contribution was larger in marketing and distribution of the game? Those were different times...
  - jameshart 11y ago
    Physical duplication, packaging, inventory and distribution would have been significant costs borne by a publisher. Retailers would have taken, what, over 50% of the cover price I assume? Kids today with their digital downloads have no idea :) Still, 3% of gross seems low.
sambeau 11y ago
I once applied for a job working for DMA just before Lemmings came out and in the phone call Dave Jones described Lemmings to me. He sounded really excited about it. I thought it sounded totally mad and couldn't for a minute understand why they would leave behind their totally successful series of side-shooters for a bonkers game about suicidal rodents. More fool me.
simonebrunozzi 11y ago
Cache from Google (site unreachable at the moment): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8O3HvdUM7QgJ:readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-lemmings/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8O3HvdU...
M8 11y ago
There was a good cloned game about pigs on mobile recently...
lisper 11y ago
ObLemming: http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/ http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/
edem 11y ago
I still remember Lemmings 2: The Tribes when I played it for the first time. I still listen to its music sometimes. It was a masterpiece!
digi_owl 11y ago
Looking over the history of DMA Design, i am struck by how prolific they were. Yet it never dawned on me that they were Scotland based.

262 points by errozero 11y ago

Maybe I was just the perfect age - 12 - when the game came out, but I remember it as pretty much the most formative video game I've ever played. It truly blew my mind that you could have something that seemed so open, even to the extent of being able to modify the actual environment. Lemmings just seemed so different from everything else around, in a way that might be difficult to appreciate nowadays. I must've played Sim City & Populous prior, but something about the platformer genre and the level of indirection combined perfectly to make this game genuinely unique.

adibchoudhury 11y ago
Agreed-awesome game. I also felt there was nothing like it back when I played it, which made it all the more engaging.
beeswax 11y ago
Exactly - Lemmings is one of the games I still enjoy playing in DOSBox (along with e.g. Lost Vikings, Monkey Island 1+2, …). If it weren’t for those titles roughly between 1991 and 1994 I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have started to get deeper into DOS and pick up programming later on (remember messing with config.sys and HIMEM.SYS, EMM386 etc to fine-tune memory? using memmaker was so lame :) ). Last year I was fortunate enough to be working on Meerkatz Challenge, a heavily Lemmings inspired puzzle platformer: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meerkatz-challenge/id732854001?l=de&ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meerkatz-challenge/id7328540... I think some of the original Lemmings concepts and controls simply don’t translate to platforms with touch input and high resolution graphics. Too bad that the PC versions don't seem to be available on archive.org.
ErikRogneby 11y ago
Scorched earth was another one around that time that had an environment you could destroy. Our token ring network got a lot of use from just those two. The thing I remember about lemmings was the frantic feeling of them just pouring in and having to time things right.
derefr 11y ago
I only found out about Lemmings when I was past my formative years, and it had long existed. But as a game designer, I still think of it as a pretty seminal game. An RTS is just Lemmings with units that will go where you tell them, after all. However, the core conceit of Lemmings—the feeling of herding a bunch of autonomous agents around, that will do whatever they like (to your detriment) unless you restrict them—is still pretty unexplored. It never spawned its own direct subgenre, unlike its cousins Tower Defense and MOBA. There were a few attempts—I think from Nintendo there was Mario & Wario, and of all things Krusty's Fun House. But generally there's still a lot of unexplored "herding game" mechanics-space. I wonder why we don't see more of it on mobile? Herding things by tapping them seems obvious.
- t0mbstone 11y ago
  Go on the Apple app store and search for "lemmings". I found quite a few games that were all based on this premise, the biggest one being "Flockers" by Team 17 (the same people who made "Worms"). Maybe it's more popular than you realized?
  - derefr 11y ago
    It may be! My belief stemmed from the fact that I've heard of no break-out success herding games besides Lemmings itself. Nobody has gotten rich by making a herding game. There is no herding game with merchandise. Etc.
- tokenrove 11y ago
  There were a number of Lemmings clones at the time. Troddlers being a favorite. However, there was so much activity around the Lemmings property itself at the time, that I conjecture the real reason we didn't see more exploration of that space was that the market was burned out on it, and then it was forgotten. Definitely a lot of potential in those mechanics.
- dogles 11y ago
  I agree, there is a lot more unexplored territory! Lemmings was definitely one of our inspirations for World Zombination. Specifically, the zombie drones that you mutate into special units with different abilities. http://worldzombination.com/ http://worldzombination.com/

bluedino 11y ago

Special editions, ports for almost every system that existed, it was really the closest thing to Angry Birds of the time.

thisjepisje 11y ago

Wow, never even realized you could save blockers (by digging the ground under their feet away). /me grabs PSP

ekianjo 11y ago
Useful trick to finish the more difficult levels with high requirements (in terms of number of lemmings to save)
- caf 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure there were levels that you had to do this to complete them (maybe just in "Oh No, more Lemmings"?)
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    That is what I was hinting at :)
aidos 11y ago
No, neither did I - always assumed you had to detonate them. Equally mind expanding - didn't know that DMA went on to create GTA!
- pidg 11y ago
  Indeed - they became Rockstar North. Their offices are still in Scotland (Edinburgh, though, rather than Dundee).
  - Rayearth 11y ago
    I wonder if Rockstar can sneak in a Lemmings mini game into GTA V without getting sued by Sony.
Untit1ed 11y ago
Me neither! I can still remember the layout of that level where you only have two lemmings and you have to save both of them but need to use at least one as a blocker. I could never figure it out and didn't have the internet to look it up at the time! Argh!

Kenji 11y ago

Great article. I enjoyed the Lemmings games a lot as a kid. ‘Lemmings 3 was a bit crap … more to end our commitment to Psygnosis than actually do a good game,’ admits Dailly. You gotta give him credit for his honesty. Lemmings was one of many titles that didn't survive the transition to 3D unscathedly. I think it was because a lot of time went into the engine instead of cute handdrawn 2D graphics and map design. Also the 3D camera movements were finicky, while in 2D you could just scroll.

matt_smith1968 11y ago
Lemmings was terrific. Would it work well on modern touch-based systems? (iPad et al)
- pidg 11y ago
  Yes, it would work very well. There's a near-perfect homebrew port on the DS[1]. I'm not sure why they haven't licensed it yet. [1] http://www.mrdictionary.net/lemmings/ http://www.mrdictionary.net/lemmings/
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  It would be tricky because there was an amount of precision required that would be tricky to emulate on touch-based input. Plus you really wouldn't want your finger obscuring the screen at the vital moment! Maybe with a stylus, though.
sambeau 11y ago
Having worked closely with Mike Dailly, "honesty" doesn't do justice to his ability to speak hard truths :)
pimlottc 11y ago
I thought Lemmings Revolution (2000) struck a pretty good compromise - it had the requisite 3D graphics that the industry demanded but the playing field was still basically 2D - just wrapped around a cylinder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Sh72bZ5Dmg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Sh72bZ5Dmg

crispweed 11y ago

Two player lemmings was crazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAedz3nWn9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAedz3nWn9E There was a kind of pixel preciseness with the original lemmings that contributed a lot to this being great, but that somehow seems to have got lost in newer versions..

bluedino 11y ago
>> There was a kind of pixel preciseness with the original lemmings I always wondered what kind of challenges that imposed on the sprite-based consoles of the day like the NES and especially something like the Gameboy.
- crispweed 11y ago
  How it worked was that each lemming was actually treated for collision purposes as if it was a single dot, and that was tested against some kind of bitmap for where there was solid ground. (I think! I remember, with a friend, implementing our own version of this, and that's definitely how our version worked.) So this is less realistic than other ways of implementing lemming behaviours, and easier to implement than some kind of more 'correct' collision approach, but gave the gameplay a very nice precise feel.
ekianjo 11y ago
> Two player lemmings was crazy Yeah it was great on the Amiga! Not sure if it worked well on other machines where you could not connect more than a mouse, though !
- maggit 11y ago
  I remember it was possible to play Settlers 2 in two-player split screen with two mice in DOS, and it seems possible to recreate in Dosbox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfpx0siF5TU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfpx0siF5TU If I remember correctly, the trick here was to not start the mouse driver (mouse.com), but let Settlers' internal mouse driver have control :) I have no idea about two player Lemmings in DOS. I have never played it, at least.

learnstats2 11y ago

Any comment on lemmings being suicidal in popular culture is incomplete if it doesn't credit Disney for chasing a few of the "nasty little rodents" off a cliff. http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp

aidos 11y ago
I did like that note in the post "In the popular imagination, for some reason, we interpret this as consistent and collective suicide." Where "some reason" is because TV told us so. I wonder where the original myth came from. Obviously the population fluctuation gave rise to it - but someone decided they were committing mass suicide. I'd love to know how much of a "fact" it was before the Disney piece.
kahirsch 11y ago
1823 Travels Through Sweden, Norway ... https://books.google.com/books?id=qrNfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA152&dq=lemmings+suicide https://books.google.com/books?id=qrNfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA152&dq=l... 1836 The Mirror of Literature https://books.google.com/books?id=amBEAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA21&dq=lemmings https://books.google.com/books?id=amBEAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA21&d... 1841 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh https://books.google.com/books?id=tC4_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA449&dq=%22throw+themselves%22 https://books.google.com/books?id=tC4_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA449&dq=%... 1874 Popular Science https://books.google.com/books?id=_B8DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA347&dq=lemmings https://books.google.com/books?id=_B8DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA347&dq=l... 1877 Popular Science https://books.google.com/books?id=gisDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA404&dq=perishes+voluntarily https://books.google.com/books?id=gisDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA404&dq=p... 1947 Life Magazine https://books.google.com/books?id=bkgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA81&dq=%22death+march%22 https://books.google.com/books?id=bkgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA81&dq=%2... 1952 Boys Life https://books.google.com/books?id=QXO4WXYxnAwC&pg=PA50&dq=%22death+march%22 https://books.google.com/books?id=QXO4WXYxnAwC&pg=PA50&dq=%2... 1953 Natural Religion and Christian Theology https://books.google.com/books?id=j0yEUu8A5hEC&pg=PA116&dq=lemmings+suicide https://books.google.com/books?id=j0yEUu8A5hEC&pg=PA116&dq=l... 1953 Boys' Life https://books.google.com/books?id=z-p67xyiQpQC&pg=PA4&dq=%22How+About+Those+Lemmings%22 https://books.google.com/books?id=z-p67xyiQpQC&pg=PA4&dq=%22...
- 11y ago

lmedinas 11y ago

I'm waiting for a Remaster for years, we had Pingus a while ago and it seems the development is back to the track again. I hope Sony change their mind and make Lemmings again. 1 - http://pingus.seul.org/welcome.html http://pingus.seul.org/welcome.html

Mindless2112 11y ago
You might be interested in Lix [1], it's like Lemmings but with networked multiplayer, and it's open source (CC0). [1] http://asdfasdf.ethz.ch/~simon/about.php http://asdfasdf.ethz.ch/~simon/about.php
rjsw 11y ago
There is a Lemmings clone in DHTML but it seems to have legal problems [1]. http://crisp.home.xs4all.nl/lemmings/lemmings.html http://crisp.home.xs4all.nl/lemmings/lemmings.html
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  I was waiting for that one to pop up :p. That is actually a web game from way before web games, AJAX, or Javascript animations were a thing. That's probably just as important history as the Lemmings game itself is.

hnur 11y ago

Feeling nostalgic for the soundtrack? This guy did a medley -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0_ZHEDZ-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0_ZHEDZ-4

ekianjo 11y ago
The MODs are probably a better way to get the actual sound quality out of your speakers :)

benbristow 11y ago

Site seems to be down. Here's a mirror. https://archive.is/t96Pg https://archive.is/t96Pg

ionwake 11y ago
Thank you

paublyrne 11y ago

I played Lemmings 2 recently on an Amiga for the first time since about 1992. There was something magical about that game. They make great Halloween costumes also.

Symbiote 11y ago

"Composer Tim Wright pulled Lemmings out of the fire with style, bouncily reinterpreting standards like Offenbach’s Galop Infernal and Ten Green Bottles, and adding a touch of class with Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Little Swans." Since I was about five years old when my parents bought Lemmings, I remember pieces like "Dance of the Little Swans" as "Lemmings music". I think it's a better choice than 60s/70s music would have been. It doesn't date, and it's less annoying to hear on repeat for four hours straight... https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=QwXthGJfHLc#t=390 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Qw...

Mindless2112 11y ago
They actually released an Amiga demo disk with the "60's/70's action music" [1] hidden away on it. None of those tunes played when you played the demo, of course. If you're interested in hearing them, I reverse engineered [2] the music format a while back and converted them to ProTracker modules [3]. [1] https://tcrf.net/Proto:Lemmings_%28Amiga%29#Unused_Music https://tcrf.net/Proto:Lemmings_%28Amiga%29#Unused_Music [2] https://bitbucket.org/mindless/sjstomod/src https://bitbucket.org/mindless/sjstomod/src [3] http://www.camanis.net/lemmings/files/rips/music/lemmings_demo_mod.zip http://www.camanis.net/lemmings/files/rips/music/lemmings_de...
- errozero 11y ago
  I'll definitely check this out later, thanks.
glandium 11y ago
Having played Lemmings back then on a PC, I'm more fond of the Adlib version of the soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvgncwgPA20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvgncwgPA20
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiWbcws-s4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiWbcws-s4o

amelius 11y ago

> Already a keen programmer, Jones used his £3000 redundancy cheque to invest in a top-of-the-range Amiga 1000 and begin taking software engineering classes, If you were already a keen programmer, what would software engineering classes in the 80s have given you? > to the chagrin of his parents, who saw a better future in his hardware expertise. Perhaps rightly so, he could have invented mobile telephony for instance :)

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
fmsf 11y ago
Q1: calculus, discreet math, planning, algorithms, datastructures... The list goes on...
- codeulike 11y ago
  Ah, discreet math, when you had to work things out really quietly to avoid drawing any attention to oneself. Used to love that. I was also a fan of discrete math.
ptaipale 11y ago
> If you were already a keen programmer, what would software engineering classes in the 80s have given you? A lot of us keen programmers had just learned our way ourselves, and had very little exposure to existing research on things like data structures (a binary tree is nice!), algorithms (bubble sort is not!) or software engineering practices (yes, you really need a version control system and some automated testing!) So, software engineering classes could give a lot. I remember how clever I felt as a starting freshman, and how humble I had got in about three years' time when my professor took me through the Compilers class. A lot of education and classes is not really teaching you to know things, it's just to teach you to know how much there is to learn.
- amelius 11y ago
  Yes, but software engineering was a completely different field back in those days. A lot of it was purely academic, and not of very much practical value for a solo programmer.

finnjohnsen2 11y ago

503 - Service unavailable :(

Symbiote 11y ago

"But if you ever visit Perth Road in the centre of Dundee, you can see DMA Design’s old office at the far west end. A few hundred yards away is a park called Seabraes and here, in front of the entrance to Dundee’s digital media park, you can find a pillar with three bronze lemmings clambering up and over it." News article with several pictures of the pillar: http://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/local/dundee/gallery-lemmings-sculptures-find-their-way-home-to-dundee-1.115473 http://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/local/dundee/gallery-lemmin...

jplahn 11y ago
Ah I wish I had known about this! I lived in Aberdeen for 7 years and, as a lover of Lemmings when I was younger, I would have loved to check this out during one of the many times I drove through Dundee. Very cool.
- sambeau 11y ago
  They're a fairly recent addition. They were originally supposed to be on the side of the original (bright pink) DMA office (along with a blue plaque) but the current owner didn't want them :(

yagami_san 11y ago

Google cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8O3HvdUM7QgJ:readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-lemmings/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8O3Hvd...

martincerdeira 11y ago

503 - Service unavailable :(

caasih 11y ago

imgur backup: http://imgur.com/gallery/zeDuXtN/ http://imgur.com/gallery/zeDuXtN/

Mindless2112 11y ago

There's also "The Complete History of Lemmings" [1] for Mike Dailly's (the guy who inspired the game) take on the making of Lemmings. [1] http://www.javalemmings.com/DMA/Lem_1.htm http://www.javalemmings.com/DMA/Lem_1.htm

jcadam 11y ago

Ah, this brings back memories. My parents had acquired a second-hand Amiga 500, which we then hooked up to the green monochrome monitor from our Apple ][e (also acquired used several years previously) - we couldn't afford a 'real' monitor :) The Amiga came with a big box of floppies, one of which was labelled 'Lemmings.' I don't believe I've ever played Lemmings in color (I'm having trouble picturing it, actually), but it was still pretty amazing in monochrome. Though, my only basis for comparison at the time was the games I'd played on the Apple ][.

Rexxar 11y ago

... he also recalls it was partly funded by royalties (75p per £25 sale) from DMA’s first two games They had 3% royalties on their two first games. It seems retrospectively incredibly low compared to what people currently get from app stores.

Drdrdrq 11y ago
I agree it was low, but I wonder if their contribution was larger in marketing and distribution of the game? Those were different times...
- jameshart 11y ago
  Physical duplication, packaging, inventory and distribution would have been significant costs borne by a publisher. Retailers would have taken, what, over 50% of the cover price I assume? Kids today with their digital downloads have no idea :) Still, 3% of gross seems low.

sambeau 11y ago

I once applied for a job working for DMA just before Lemmings came out and in the phone call Dave Jones described Lemmings to me. He sounded really excited about it. I thought it sounded totally mad and couldn't for a minute understand why they would leave behind their totally successful series of side-shooters for a bonkers game about suicidal rodents. More fool me.

simonebrunozzi 11y ago

Cache from Google (site unreachable at the moment): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8O3HvdUM7QgJ:readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-lemmings/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8O3HvdU...

M8 11y ago

There was a good cloned game about pigs on mobile recently...

lisper 11y ago

ObLemming: http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/ http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

edem 11y ago

I still remember Lemmings 2: The Tribes when I played it for the first time. I still listen to its music sometimes. It was a masterpiece!

digi_owl 11y ago

Looking over the history of DMA Design, i am struck by how prolific they were. Yet it never dawned on me that they were Scotland based.