
The Making of Lemmings - tosh
https://readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-lemmings/
======
shdon
They mention 3 bronze lemmings climbing a pole in Dundee. I found them on
Google Streetview:
[https://goo.gl/maps/pqsWNpqTNPG2](https://goo.gl/maps/pqsWNpqTNPG2)

~~~
neap24
This is exactly what I did after reading the article!

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mysterydip
Not sure about the rest, but I know Mike Dailly is still in the industry,
working for YoYo Games, makers of Gamemaker: Studio. They currently have a
humble bundle going on, $15 gets you the pro version and html5, iOS, and
Android export modules. If anyone's interested in getting their feet wet on
some game prototyping, I'd recommend it.

~~~
Pxtl
I'm curious, how good is game maker for children? I'm looking to get my 9-year
old something productive to do on the pc instead of spending all his screen
time in terraria.

~~~
animal531
Have a look at Stencyl. It has many of the same frontend components as for
example GameMaker, but it also has in-editor logic programming where you can
select items from dropdowns to construct basic code with.

If you look at their webpage, just scroll down a bit and you'll see an
example: [http://www.stencyl.com/](http://www.stencyl.com/)

Even so it will probably still be a bit daunting for a 9yo to start off with,
you might have to provide some guided learning and maybe make a basic game
together.

~~~
Marazan
I can second Stencyl for kids (with assistance). It's a nice system.

------
AstroJetson
I loved all the versions of Lemmings!

There is a browser one here that I've played for people that want to try it
out.

Edited to add the link:
[http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/](http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/)

~~~
JadeNB
> There is a browser one here that I've played for people that want to try it
> out.

Where?

------
hashmp
Remember waiting for the C64 port to come out, right at the end of it's life.
It eventually game out and I played it on a demo cassette from a c64 magazine.
It wasn't great after having experienced the Amiga version. Maybe around 1993.

Just looked it up, 1994....
[https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Lemmings](https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Lemmings)

Pretty good seeing as the c64 was 10 years old at this point.

------
justinhj
David Jones was my Steve Jobs growing up. Not only did I love Blood Money, he
wrote an article on programming for Amiga Format about how the scrolling
worked including working source code. I'd been trying to learn how to write a
nice framework for my own graphic demos and mini games, but the code I found
was mostly by bedroom coders and very scrappy. His code was the kind of code
you'd expect an electrical engineering professional to write. Very clean and
well documented and technically very good. I may well owe my 25 year year
career in games (so far) to that guy, because the game I wrote subsequently
got me a game job straight out of college when I had applications in to all
the typical software companies at the time such as banks, ibm and bt.

~~~
r_smart
>His code was the kind of code you'd expect an electrical engineering
professional to write. Very clean and well documented and technically very
good.

Boy have we worked with different electrical engineers!

~~~
justinhj
haha fair point.

------
jimmaswell
A great but obscure port of lemmings is the Nintendo DS homebrew port. They
made it work perfectly with touch controls, and it plays the Amiga version's
soundtrack with a MOD music player, which you can put other MOD files in if
you want. I'm also pretty sure it uses the Amiga version's level formats.

------
macintux
A few years back I purchased for my iPad what seemed like a spiritual (hah!)
successor to Lemmings: Spirits.

[http://www.spacesofplay.com/spirits/](http://www.spacesofplay.com/spirits/)

I enjoyed it for a while, but despite its beauty it never really caught my
imagination the way playing Lemmings on the Mac did.

~~~
zakn
My brother and I are about to release yet another spiritual successor to
Lemmings [0]. It has similar gameplay, but more interesting items (flip
gravity, portal guns, etc.) and trickier puzzles. As much as I loved Lemmings,
it gets a bit tedious once you figure out the stopper / builder combo.

[0] -
[https://applepinegames.com/inklings](https://applepinegames.com/inklings)

~~~
cpeterso
Inklings' graphics are great. I love the interaction with the backgrounds. The
look reminds me of the PS3 game _LocoRoco Cocoreccho_ :

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocoRoco_Cocoreccho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocoRoco_Cocoreccho)

------
pimlottc
Just stumbled upon a good video recap of the same story, which includes the
prototype death animation test mentioned in the story:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbxyqeIylHE&t=59s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbxyqeIylHE&t=59s)

~~~
AstroJetson
That is a great video, it was nice to see all the versions. I had forgotten
about Christmas Lemmings.

Thanks for posting it!

------
wicket
Comments from a year ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9684830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9684830)

------
psyc
The unlikely predecessor of Grand Theft Auto.

~~~
krige
They actually did a far more likely one. The huge robot game mentioned offhand
in the article came to fruition as Walker, and is all about gunning down
absolutely everything in front of you, including tiny troops.
[http://hol.abime.net/1655](http://hol.abime.net/1655)

------
boznz
Awesome game, My 4 year old daughter at the time would cry when they died..
Priceless

------
gavanwoolery
For those interested, you can find one of the original Lemmings creators here:
[https://twitter.com/mdf200](https://twitter.com/mdf200) He also worked on
many other things:
[http://www.javalemmings.com/miked/aboutme.htm](http://www.javalemmings.com/miked/aboutme.htm)

------
cpeterso
> _‘The goal was to get the sprites to 8×8,’ explains Dailly, ‘but they
> actually ended up about 8×10 – hardly anyone has ever noticed this figure
> was wrong.’_

I understand how 8x8 sprites would be easier to tile than 8x10, but what is so
"wrong" about 8x10 that people might notice?

~~~
erik
Old games usually kept their sprite sizes to multiples of 8. 8x8, 8x16, 16x16,
etc. So 8x10 would have been weird for the time, and anyone who thought about
it would probably assume they were 8x8. But there was likely nothing actually
"wrong" about 8x10. I am just speculating here though.

~~~
AimHere
Nothing 'wrong', but the reason for the multiples of 8 was likely because
sprites back then needed masks so that they could handle 'holes' properly.
This was in the days before alpha channels, so there'd be spritemask instead -
essentially a 2-colour sprite that acted like a single-bit alpha channel.

And if your sprite is a multiple of 8-pixels wide, then your spritemask takes
up a whole-number of bytes, you can do funky low-level bit-twiddling to handle
occlusions and it's more efficient in terms of memory space.

------
ekianjo
Not sure if they got the chronology right in the article. Walker was indeed an
action game from DMA, but it came AFTER Lemmings. Now it's possible they got
the idea of Lemmings while working on Walker, but they should mention the
order of things properly.

~~~
digi_owl
Apparently they started working on Walker first, but then put it on hold.

~~~
ekianjo
The fact that Walker was not released until after Lemmings is not obvious from
the article.

------
jason_slack
I used to play this on a Macintosh SE when I was in high school. Loved it then
and I still love it now. For a college project friends and I made a simple
clone. Back in the day of Borland Turbo C++ :-)

------
fenomas
Richard Stanton's games articles are consistently excellent and worth seeking
out.

Also known for his book "A Brief History of Video Games".

------
toast0
Is Lemmings for sale anywhere these days?

~~~
pmoriarty
Maybe on ebay?

I'd try to find and play the Amiga version, if at all possible. That was the
state of the art gaming machine in its day, so I would be surprised if
Lemmings made for any other platform was anywhere near as good.

I think there are some Amiga emulators around, if you don't have the hardware.

~~~
Symbiote
Lemmings for the Acorn Archimedes was at least as good, if not better:
[https://youtu.be/ApPGPSH_k7I](https://youtu.be/ApPGPSH_k7I)

The Archimedes had a better CPU, which enabled better graphics. But I never
used an Amiga, so I don't know if the videos on YouTube are at the real
resolution.

(For those unaware: this is Acorn as in Acorn RISC Machines, an earlier name
of Advanced RISC Machines, i.e. ARM.)

~~~
zbuf
Does anyone know if the Raspberry Pi will run the Archimedes port of Lemmings?

The Raspberry Pi capably runs the RISC OS operating system natively on its ARM
processor, in many ways it could be considered to be the spiritual successor
of the Archimedes.

I know the hardware has changed in ways that trip up games, so it's not a
guarantee that Lemmings would work. I found some information here:
[https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=32036&p=2...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=32036&p=279057)

~~~
Symbiote
I can now confirm! Lemmings [0] is available for download for RISC OS [1], and
with ADFFS [2], and a bit of fiddling if you only have a Raspberry Pi 3 to
hand [3] (earlier versions don't need the fiddling), it runs fine, with
perfect sound, graphics etc!

I'm very pleased :-D

[0]
[http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=9...](http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=96)

[1] [https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-
pi](https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi)

[2]
[http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3...](http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=323)
and
[http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=31...](http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=313)

[3]
[https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=91&t=1401...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=91&t=140140)

------
nichochar
I loved this game so much

------
jstimpfle
> font-size: 1.9rem;

I know it's hip these days, but seriously: 2 times my browser's default font
size does not improve readability for me.

~~~
danso
On my desktop browser, the font shows ~100 characters per line, which is a bit
more than what I've seen the recommended count be for ideal readability:

[http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-
readability](http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability)

~~~
taneq
Does that not depend significantly on physical screen size, though? I'd
imagine that you'd want fewer larger words per line on a phone screen than
you'd want on a 24" monitor.

~~~
jstimpfle
I think the only reasonable approach applications can take is to layout
everything in physical sizes, and to be largely unassuming about the display
device (i.e. assume a standard (desktop monitor?) viewing distance). In
consequence a sensible default font size would be something like 14pt, etc.

If the results aren't suitable (maybe a desktop monitor is viewed at a larger
distance than a phone screen, maybe user is visually impaired, etc) then the
OS can still offer to globally or locally configure the screen with a fake
dpi.

------
bbcbasic
I played it on the Sega Master System.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Perhaps they were expecting you to have played it on a BBC? I played it first
on an Archimedes just after our school upgraded from BBC Master (IIRC).

~~~
bbcbasic
Oh I wish! I dreamed of that ha ha

------
cm2187
Lemmings is the most accurate way I can describe how people behave in large
corporations. But do the younger generations even know what is a lemming and
what I would mean by that?

~~~
bhaak
At least in German, there's the popular comic "nichtlustig" ("not funny")
which has as a recurring theme of lemmings in absurd situations trying to kill
themselves. E.g.
[http://static.nichtlustig.de/toondb/091121.html](http://static.nichtlustig.de/toondb/091121.html)

Don't suppose that just because the original source of the meme disappeared or
hasn't been experienced first hand, it doesn't live on.

In this case, the original source was the Disney documentary (as others have
already noted) and the game was already an playful interpretation of it.

I also know several people in their 20s that got handed down an Amiga to play
on when they were kids. So even younger people can have played the game and
then there have been several remakes (the last I remember is the PSP version
from about 10 years ago, although that should also run fine on the current PS
Vita).

~~~
cm2187
I actually didn't think of the gregarian aspect. To me lemmings are before
anything a video game character that, a mindless creature that will do what
it's told with not an epsilon of common sense or self preservation, and no
initiative.

That pretty much describes how many people behave in large organisations,
where a reasonably smart and educated person will not hesitate in good faith
to act against the interest of the organisation if there is a set of policies
/ personal interest / "it's always been like that" that permits it.

~~~
bhaak
I'm not sure the term "lemmings" has been used at all for this kind of herd
behavior as IMO the suicidal aspect is the most important feature if you used
"lemming".

I think nowadays "sheeple" is the more appropriate term for that kind of
mindless behavior.

