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Lemmings
Developer	DMA Design
Publisher	Psygnosis, Sunsoft
Designer	David Jones
Released	February 14, 1991 2006
Genre	Puzzle
Mode(s)	Single player Multiplayer (on some systems)
Ratings	ESRB: E (Everyone)
Platform(s)	Commodore Amiga, various
Media	Two 3.5" floppy disks, various
Input methods	Mouse, Keyboard, D-pad, Analog stick, other various

Lemmings is a puzzle computer game, developed by DMA Design (now Rockstar North) and published by Psygnosis in 1991, originally for the Commodore Amiga. Lemmings was one of the most popular computer games of its time and several games magazines awarded the game maximum review scores. The game has inspired numerous ports to other systems, including most recently a port to the PlayStation Portable in 2006, and several sequels.

The creatures in Lemmings are based on the popular myth of lemmings mindlessly moving into danger en masse. In order to save a minimum number required for each level, the player must determine how to assign a limited number of eight different skills to specific lemmings that allow the selected lemming to alter the landscape, to affect the behavior of other lemmings, or to clear obstacles as to create a safe passage for the rest of the lemmings.

Contents 1 Gameplay 1.1 Two-player mode 2 Development 3 Ports 4 Reception 5 Sequels 6 Songs 7 References 8 See also 9 External links

Lemmings is divided into a number of levels. Each level consists of one or more entrance points and one or more exits. The goal is to guide a certain percentage of "lemmings" (bipedal creatures with green hair) from the entrance to the exit. Unless assigned a special task, each lemming will walk in one direction ignoring any other lemming in its way (save for Blockers), falling off any edges and turning around if they hit an obstacle they cannot pass. They die if they fall from a great height, fall into water or lava or off the map, or get caught in a trap; they also die after being assigned the bomber skill.

To successfully complete the level, the player must assign certain lemmings specific skills. The quantity of skill assignments of each type is generally limited, requiring the player to best use the skills to solve each level. There are eight skills that can be assigned. Two skills stay with the lemming regardless of how they are reassigned: "Climbers" will climb any vertical surface they hit, and "Floaters" can safely fall off from heights without injury. "Bashers", "Miners", and "Diggers" cause the assigned lemming to dig across, diagonally downward, or directly downward, respectively, through destructable material until they emerge into open air, hit indestructible material, or are reassigned. "Builders" create a rising stairway of up to 12 steps, with audible cues when they are nearly done with their task to allow the player to reassign them if a longer stairway is needed. "Blockers" will reverse the direction of all lemmings that hit them, and cannot be reassigned unless first the ground under their feet is removed. (They can be exploded, though.) "Bombers" will continue whatever they were doing prior to assignment, but after 5 seconds (indicated by a countdown timer above their head) they will stop and explode, taking a small chunk out of any destructible environment around them.^[1]

The player can adjust the rate of entry for the lemmings from the minimum set for the level up to 99, the fastest release rate. The player also has the option to "nuke" all the remaining lemmings on the screen, converting them all to Bombers, either to quickly forfeit in order to retry a level or to remove any Blockers that remain after the rest have been rescued.

The original Amiga Lemmings also has 20 two-player levels. This took advantage of the Amiga's ability to handle two mice simultaneously. Each player is presented with their own view of the same map (on a vertically-split screen), can only give orders to their own lemmings (green or blue), and had their own base. The goal is to get more lemmings (regardless of color) into one's own base than the other player. Gameplay cycles through the 20 levels until neither player gets any lemmings home. The Atari ST also has a 2-player mode, one player using the keyboard or the joystick, and the other using the mouse.

Two-player levels are also present in the Sega Genesis and Super NES versions, along with some levels unique to those versions and produced by Sunsoft, their developer.

Mike Dailly has provided a detailed history of the development of Lemmings entitled "The Lemmings Story".^[2]

Originally, the concept of the gameplay results as a quick demonstration of being able to create an animated character in a 8x8 pixel box as part of development for Walker, 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 other members of the DMA Design team. One member, Russell Key, 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. There were several internal iterations of the levels, each designed challenging the others. Dailly pointed out that Dave 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 comment's 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.

See also: References in Lemmings level names

Each of the designers had notable features in their levels: Dailly's level names generally clued the player to what to do (such as "It's Hero Time", suggesting a single lemming was to be assigned all necessary skills to open the pathway to the exit for the other lemmings) and generally required the player to perform several actions at once, Gary Timmons's levels were minimal with popular culture references in the title, 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, such as Shadow of the Beast, Shadow of the Beast II, and Awesome; these 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 created 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."

Music was created by Brian Johnson, Scott Johnson's younger brother, and Scott's mother was the first voice of the lemmings. 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-present games Populous and Stunt Car Racer. They 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.

See also: Comparison of Lemmings ports

The popularity of the game on the Amiga led to its rapid porting to many other platforms, and is considered to be one of the most widely-ported video games of all time, together with Pac-Man and Tetris.

Known commercial ports of the original game include: 3DO, Acorn Archimedes, Amstrad CPC, Apple IIGS, Arcade (prototype only), Atari Lynx, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga CD32, Commodore CDTV, DHTML, MS-DOS, Hewlett-Packard HP-48 series, Macintosh, Mobile phone, Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom), Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Nintendo Super Nintendo Entertainment System/Super Famicom), OS/2 (demo only), Palm, Philips CD-i, SAM Coupé, Sega Game Gear, Sega Master System, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, Sinclair Spectrum, TI-82, TI-83 plus, TI-89, TI-92, UIQ and Windows.

While all ports share the same basic characteristics of the game, there are a number of significant differences, generally related to hardware and control restrictions. This may include how skills are assigned, the number of difficulty levels and individual levels within each port, and exclusion of certain words and levels due to their connotation or legal standing,

A notable unofficial port of the game was made to the web browser-based Javascript, entitled DHTML Lemmings, used to demonstrate the power of the scripting language.^[3] A homebrew Nintendo DS version has also been created.^[4]

In early 2006, Sony released a remake of Lemmings for the PlayStation Portable handheld console, developed by Team17. It features all 120 levels from the original game, 36 brand new levels as well as DataPack support (similar to the Extra Track system featured in Wipeout Pure), and a "UserLevel" 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. UserLevels can be constructed from pre-rendered objects, in a similar manner to unofficial level editors such as LemEdit for DOS Lemmings and LemmEd for Amiga Lemmings 2: The Tribes. UserLevels can be distributed by uploading them to an exclusive 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.^[5]

Later in 2007, Team17 produced a similar remake of Lemmings for the Sony PlayStation 3 for download through the PlayStation Network. The game has the similar graphical improvements as the PSP title, as well as on-line scoreboards and additional levels developed for high-definition display, but lacks the ability to create and share levels as the PSP version offers.^[6]

The game was also ported for play on the PlayStation 2 with use of the EyeToy in October 2006 by Rusty Nutz. The basic change in the concept is that the player must stretch and use his/her limbs in the recorded picture to aid the lemmings.^[7]

The original sales for Lemmings on the Amiga topped 55,000 copies on the first day of sales; in comparison, 'Menace' sold 20,000 copies and Blood Money sold 40,000 copies cumulatively. Several gaming magazines of the time gave Lemmings perfect scores. With all the ports included, it has been estimated that over 15,000,000 copies of Lemmings have been sold since 1991.^[8]

Lemmings is considered to be a gaming classic. In their review for the PSP port, Gamespot identified that "Lemmings is a game-design classic that is as compelling now in its newest iteration on the PlayStation Portable as it was 15 years ago."^[9] In 1996, Computer Gaming World listed Lemmings as the 12th best game of all time out of 150 games. EDGE Magazine listed Lemmings as the 82nd top game of all time in a July, 2007 list.^[10]

Lemmings has also been called a predecessor of the modern RTS video game genre. As noted by 1UP, "The biggest difference is that instead of trying to outmaneuver another player's army, you're trying to outwit the level designers' cruel design sensibilities."^[11]

In Terry Pratchett's novel Interesting Times, an army of golems is controlled in a fashion reminiscent of the Lemmings user interface. When readers asked if this was deliberate, Pratchett responded, "What? Lemmings? Merely because the red army can fight, dig, march and climb and is controlled by little icons? Can't imagine how anyone thought that... Not only did I wipe Lemmings from my hard disc, I overwrote it so's I couldn't get it back." ^[12]

Lemmings has inspired a number of sequels, some which have modified the core gameplay but still involve the use of lemming skills to rescue lemmings. Xmas Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings contain the same gameplay as Lemmings but provide a different set of levels to the player. Lemmings 2: The Tribes introduces several new types of skills that can be assigned to the lemmings in addition to new levels. Similarly All New World of Lemmings (The Lemmings Chronicles in North America) alters some of the core mechanics of gameplay by reducing the number of key skills and adding other mechanics more typical of a two-dimensional platformer. Both 3D Lemmings and Lemmings Revolution brought the game into the third dimension with skills to take advantage of the additional dimension.

Two additional sequels were made which drasticatically alter the general gameplay. Lemmings Paintball is an isometric action game where the player takes part in a lemmings paintball match. The Adventures of Lomax is a side-scrolling platformer where the player controls one lemming named Lomax to save other lemmings in a similar manner to how Sonic the Hedgehog rescues his friends who were captured by Eggman.

At the time of Lemmings creation, there was a growing awareness of music copyright. Therefore, most of the level themes are arrangements of classical and traditional (i.e. public domain) tunes.

• "The Galop from Orpheus in the Underworld" (the music often used for the can-can)
• "Rondo a'la Turk" (from Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 11)
• "Dance of the Reed Flutes" from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite
• "Dance of the Little Swans" from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake
• "Twang" - A song that uses melodies from traditional song "Ten Green Bottles", Chopin's funeral march and Wagner's "Here Comes the Bride".
• "London Bridge is Falling Down"
• The English folk tune "Forest Green" which has been adapted into the hymn "All Beautiful the March of Days", mixed with the melody from the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain"
• "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?"
• Exclusive to the Sega Master System version are adaptations of:
  • "Scotland the Brave" (Fun 15)
  • "My Old Man (Said Follow the Van)" (Fun 17)

A total of 17 songs featured in the game.

• Pingus
• CLONES

• Lemmings at MobyGames
• Lemmings Universe — Lemmings information, pictures, news, and walkthroughs
• A review of Lemmings published in Compute!

v • d • e Lemmings video games
Lemmings · Xmas Lemmings · Oh No! More Lemmings · 2: The Tribes · All New World of Lemmings · 3D Lemmings · Lemmings Paintball · The Adventures of Lomax · Lemmings Revolution