Today in game history: the first (Amiga) version of Lemmings, by DMA Design, was released thirty years ago!

I feel a trivia thread coming on. (adopts squeaky voice) Let’s go!

#Lemmings30th

The genesis of Lemmings, according to Mike Dailly, was in trying to prove a point to the team. He demonstrated that he could do a walk cycle with an 8-pixel-tall sprite. Gary Timmons made Dailly’s animations more fluid, and everyone was enamoured by the little guys.

The signature green hair and blue outfit were similarly born of constraints: the PC’s 16-colour EGA palette. The team overwhelmingly preferred the green hair to blue, the other option on the table.

The soundtrack featured many remixes of old folk songs and other music in the public domain. Most of it was written at short notice to replace a far more copyright-infringing soundtrack of classic TV themes, including Mission Impossible, The A-Team, and Batman.

The ‘666’ level (where you had to save 66% of 66 Lemmings in 6 minutes) was removed from several of the console versions of the game, because integers are a corrupting influence on impressionable youth.

DMA had a level editor in the works, which would doubtless have led to a huge number of user-created levels we could still play today. But they decided against releasing it on the grounds that people trading impossible levels would frustrate players.

Lemmings is one of the most-ported games ever… 25 different systems, including the NES, C64, Game Boy, Spectrum and Sharp X68000. Most play a little different, as levels have been added or removed to suit hardware, and some ports can handle more lemmings than others.

And that ports list doesn’t even include MrD’s Nintendo DS homebrew version, with every level from Lemmings, Oh-No! More Lemmings, and the four Xmas releases. Oh, and a level editor. The touchscreen controls make this unofficial release genuinely one of the strongest versions.

An arcade version (with trackball) was field-tested by Data East, but never came out, apparently because testers considered the gameplay too slow and deliberate for a coin-op. It’s playable in MAME, though unfinished and not completable.

Terry Pratchett was a fan. There’s a reference to the game in the Discworld novel Interesting Times, and when asked about it on Usenet, Pratchett replied: “Not only did I wipe Lemmings from my hard disc, I overwrote it so’s I couldn’t get it back.”

Thanks to its purchase (and shutdown) of Psygnosis, Sony now owns the rights to Lemmings, but in recent years all they’ve done with the license is publish a horrendously overmonetised mobile game.

After several acquisitions, DMA Design became a subsidiary of Take-Two in 1998 and was renamed Rockstar North. Their most recent game is some sort of horse-pestering simulator? I dunno, haven’t heard of it before.

Further reading:

@mdf200’s History of Lemmings: http://www.javalemmings.com/DMA/Lem_1.htm 

The Making of Lemmings by Rich Stanton:
https://readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-lemmings/

The Lemmings Effect by @DigiAntiquarian:
https://www.filfre.net/2017/10/games-on-the-mersey-part-5-the-lemmings-effect/

GamesTM issue 29
Retro Gamer issues 39 and 140