Lemmings (video game)
Lemmings is a 1991 puzzle strategy video game developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis for the Amiga. It was later ported to numerous other platforms. The game was programmed by Russell Kay, Mike Dailly and David Jones, and was inspired by a simple animation that Dailly created while experimenting with Deluxe Paint.
The objective of the game is to guide a group of anthropomorphised lemmings through a number of obstacles to a designated exit. In any given level, the player must save a specified number or percentage of the lemmings in order to advance. To this end, the player must decide how to assign limited quantities of eight different skills to individual lemmings, allowing them to alter the landscape and/or their own behaviour so that enough of the lemmings can reach the exit safely.
Lemmings was one of the best-received video games of the early 1990s. It was the second-highest-rated game in the history of Amstrad Action, and was considered the eighth-greatest game of all time by Next Generation in 1996. Lemmings is also one of the most widely ported video games, and is estimated to have sold around 20 million copies between its various ports. The popularity of the game also led to the creation of several other Lemmings games, remakes and spin-offs, and has also inspired similar games. Despite its success, Lemmings lost considerable popularity by the late 1990s, which was attributed in part to its slow pace of gameplay compared to games of later generations.
Gameplay
Lemmings is divided into a number of levels, grouped into four difficulty categories. Each level begins with one or more trap doors opening from above, releasing a steady line of lemmings who all follow each other. Levels include a variety of obstacles that prevent lemmings from reaching the exit, such as large drops, booby traps and pools of lava.The goal of each level is to guide at least a portion of the green-haired, blue-robed lemmings from the entrance to the exit by clearing or creating a safe passage through the landscape for the lemmings to use. Unless assigned a special task, a lemming will walk in one direction ignoring any other lemming in its way, falling off any edges and turning around if it hits an obstacle it cannot pass. A lemming can die in a number of ways: falling from too great a height, drowning or falling into lava, falling off the bottom edge of the screen, being caught in a trap or fire, or being assigned the Bomber skill for five seconds. Every level has a time limit; if the timer expires, all the lemmings explode, the level ends, and the player is evaluated on the number of lemmings rescued.
To successfully complete the level, the player must assign specific skills to certain lemmings. Which skills and how many uses of each are available to the player varies from level to level, and the player must assign the skills carefully to successfully guide the lemmings. There are eight skills that can be assigned: Climbers climb vertically though fall down if they hit an overhang. Floaters use a parachute to fall safely from heights. Bombers explode after a five-second timer, destroying themselves and any destructible landscape in close proximity, though not damaging other lemmings or traps. Blockers stand still and prevent other lemmings from passing; lemmings that hit a Blocker simply reverse direction. Builders build a stairway of 12 steps, but will stop building when either it hits its head, runs out of bricks, or when the stairway hits a solid object. Bashers, Miners and Diggers tunnel horizontally, diagonally downwards or directly downwards respectively, but cannot break through steel barriers.
While the player is able to pause the game to inspect the level and status of the lemmings, skills can only be assigned in real-time. Lemmings are initially released at a rate predetermined by the level. The player can increase the rate as desired to a maximum of 99, and later decrease it down to, but not lower than, the initial rate. The player also has the option to "nuke" all the remaining lemmings on the screen, converting them to Bombers. This option can be used to abort a level when in a no-win situation, remove any Blockers that remain after the remaining lemmings have been rescued, or end a level quickly once the required percentage of saved lemmings has been reached.
The four difficulty groups – "Fun", "Tricky", "Taxing" and "Mayhem" – are used to organise the levels to reflect their overall difficulty. This rating reflects several factors, including the number of obstacles the player has to surpass, the limitation on the number of types of skills available to assign, the time limit, the minimum rate of lemming release, and the percentage of lemmings that must be saved. Some versions have additional difficulty ratings with more levels in each.
Two-player mode
The original Lemmings also has 20 two-player levels. This took advantage of the Amiga's ability to support two mice simultaneously, and the Atari's ability to support a mouse and a joystick simultaneously. Each player is presented with their own view of the same map, can only give orders to their own lemmings, and has their own base. The goal is to get more lemmings into one's own base than the other player. Gameplay cycles through the 20 levels until neither player gets any lemmings home.Oh No! More Lemmings
Oh No! More Lemmings is an expansion for the game. It contains 100 more levels, leading to 150 levels in total, including the two-player levels.Development
Mike Dailly, the first employee of DMA Design and one of the programmers for Lemmings, provided a detailed history of the development of the game titled "The Lemmings Story" in 2006. David Jones, founder of DMA Design, has also commented on the development and success of Lemmings.Image:Lemming animation.gif|left|thumb|Gary Timmons changed Mike Dailly's lemming walking animation to make it appear less stiff.
The inspiration for gameplay came as a result of a simple animated character sprite in an 8×8 pixel box created by Dailly using Deluxe Paint as part of development for Walker, then envisioned as a sequel to Blood Money. Dailly was able to quickly produce an animated graphic showing his creations moving endlessly, with additional graphical improvements made by Gary Timmons and other members of the DMA Design team to help remove the stiffness in the animation. One member, Russell Kay, observed that "There's a game in that!", and later coined the term "lemmings" for these creations, according to Dailly. Allowing the creatures to move across the landscape was based on a Salamander weapon concept for Blood Money and demonstrated with the animations.
Levels were designed based on a Deluxe Paint interface, which allowed several of the members to design levels, resulting in "hundreds of levels". There were several internal iterations of the levels, each designer challenging the others. Dailly pointed out that David Jones "used to try and beat us, and after proudly stabbing a finger at the screen and saying 'There! Beat that!', we'd calmly point out a totally new way of getting around all his traps, and doing it in a much simpler method. 'Oh...', he'd mutter, and scramble off to try and fix it." They also sent internally tested levels to Psygnosis, getting back the results of their testing via fax. While most were solved quickly, Dailly commented that "Every now and again though, the fax would be covered in scribbles with the time and comments crossed out again and again; this is what we were striving for while we were designing the levels, and it gave us all a warm fuzzy feeling inside."
Each of the designers had a somewhat different style in their levels: Dailly's levels often had titles containing clues to what to do and generally required the player to perform several actions at once; Gary Timmons's levels were minimalistic, with popular culture references in the titles; and Scott Johnston's levels were generally tightly packed. Dailly was also responsible for the "custom" levels based on other Psygnosis and Reflections Interactive Amiga games, including Shadow of the Beast, Menace, Awesome and Shadow of the Beast II. These "crossover" levels also used music from those games, though in ports these levels have been removed or altered to remove such references. After they developed most of the hard levels, they then created several simple levels either by copying the existing ones or creating new layouts; as Dailly states, "This I believe is where many games fall down today, they don't spend the time making a good learning curve." Timmons is credited with the official drawings of the lemmings, as necessitated by the need of Psygnosis for box cover artwork.
The two-player option was inspired by then-current games Populous and Stunt Car Racer. DMA Design initially wanted to use a null-modem connection between two machines to allow competitive play, but ended up using the ability of the Amiga to have two mouse pointer devices usable at the same time and thus created the split-screen mode.
Music
Music was originally created by Brian Johnston, who sampled bits of copyrighted music. This had been common practice, but at that point there was a growing awareness of music copyright. Psygnosis therefore asked Tim Wright to replace the offending tracks; he often used arrangements and reworkings of classical and traditional music to avoid copyright problems.Ports and expansions
The game's popularity on the Amiga led to its rapid porting to many other platforms, and it is regarded as one of the most widely ported video games. Within a year of its release, the game had been ported to the Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, IBM PC compatibles, and Super NES. David Jones stated that after porting the game to 20 systems, he stopped keeping count of additional ports. Other official ports were released for 3DO, Archimedes, Apple IIGS, Classic Mac OS, CDTV, Commodore 64, NES, Master System, Mega Drive, PC Engine, CD-i, and X68000.The license to the Lemmings intellectual property had remained with Psygnosis, which became part of Sony Computer Entertainment in 1993 but ultimately folded in 2012, leaving Lemmings as a Sony property. Sony has used that to craft more modern remakes. In early 2006, Sony released a remake of Lemmings for the PlayStation Portable, developed by Team17. It features all 120 levels from the original game, 36 brand-new levels as well as DataPack support, and a user-level editor. Every level in the game is a pre-rendered 3D landscape, although their gameplay is still 2D and remains faithful to the original game. User levels can be constructed from pre-rendered objects and distributed by uploading them to a PlayStation-specific Lemmings online community. The soundtrack also marks the final video game score created by longtime composer Tim Follin after he announced his retirement from the industry in mid-2005. In October 2006 the game was ported by developer Rusty Nutz for the PlayStation 2 with use of the EyeToy. The basic change in the concept is that the player must stretch and use their limbs in the recorded picture to aid the lemmings.
| Platform | Released | Developer | Publisher | Note |
| Atari ST | 1991 | DMA Design | Psygnosis | |
| MS-DOS | 1991 | DMA Design | Psygnosis | |
| ZX Spectrum | 1991 | DMA Design | Psygnosis | |
| PC-98 | 1991 | DMA Design | Imagineer | |
| Classic Mac OS | 1991 | Presage Software | Psygnosis | |
| Super NES | 1991 | Sunsoft | Psygnosis | |
| Archimedes | 1991 | Krysalis | Psygnosis | |
| Commodore 64 | 1992 | E&E Software | ||
| CDTV | 1992 | DMA Design | Psygnosis | |
| FM Towns | 1992 | 4000Do Inc. | Imagineer | |
| X68000 | 1992 | BANDIT Inc. | Imagineer | |
| NES | 1992 | Ocean Software | Sunsoft | |
| Game Gear | 1992 | Probe Software | Sega | |
| Master System | 1992 | Probe Software | Sega | |
| Amstrad CPC | 1992 | DMA Design | Psygnosis | |
| Mega Drive | 1992 | Sunsoft | SunsoftNA/JP SegaPAL | |
| PC Engine | 1992 | Sunsoft | Sunsoft | |
| 3DO | 1993 | DMA Design | PsygnosisNA Electronic Arts VictorJP | |
| Lynx | 1993 | DMA Design | Atari Corporation | |
| CD-i | 1993 | DMA Design | Philips | |
| SAM Coupé | 1993 | Chris White | Fred Publishing | |
| Game Boy | 1993 | Ocean Software | Imagineer | |
| CD32 | 1994 | DMA Design | Psygnosis | |
| Windows | 1995 | Visual Sciences | Psygnosis | Bundled with Oh No! More Lemmings |
| PlayStation | 1998 | Psygnosis | Psygnosis | Bundled with Oh No! More Lemmings |
| Game Boy Color | 2000 | J-Wing | Take-Two | Bundled with Oh No! More Lemmings |
| J2ME | 2005 | iFone |
Image:Lemmings Christmas Demo, for Amiga, 1991.jpg|thumb|left|200px|A floppy disk containing Christmas Lemmings for the Amiga