
The Making of Lemmings - errozero
http://readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-lemmings/
======
oneeyedpigeon
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.

~~~
derefr
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
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
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.

------
benbristow
Site seems to be down. Here's a mirror.
[https://archive.is/t96Pg](https://archive.is/t96Pg)

~~~
ionwake
Thank you

------
Symbiote
"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-
lemmin...](http://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/local/dundee/gallery-lemmings-
sculptures-find-their-way-home-to-dundee-1.115473)

~~~
jplahn
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
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 :(

------
Symbiote
"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=Qw...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=QwXthGJfHLc#t=390)

~~~
Mindless2112
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_de...](http://www.camanis.net/lemmings/files/rips/music/lemmings_demo_mod.zip)

~~~
errozero
I'll definitely check this out later, thanks.

------
sambeau
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.

------
crispweed
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..

~~~
ekianjo
> 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
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.

~~~
jbattle
that's pretty wild - the game shipped it's own custom mouse driver?

~~~
Drdrdrq
Well, define "driver"... This was DOS, so you had to listen to interrupts to
catch mouse events. It was more or less standard though, if my memory serves
me correctly.

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

~~~
aidos
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
Indeed - they became Rockstar North. Their offices are still in Scotland
(Edinburgh, though, rather than Dundee).

~~~
Rayearth
I wonder if Rockstar can sneak in a Lemmings mini game into GTA V without
getting sued by Sony.

------
learnstats2
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)

~~~
kahirsch
1823 Travels Through Sweden, Norway ...
[https://books.google.com/books?id=qrNfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA152&dq=l...](https://books.google.com/books?id=qrNfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA152&dq=lemmings+suicide)

1836 The Mirror of Literature
[https://books.google.com/books?id=amBEAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA21&d...](https://books.google.com/books?id=amBEAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA21&dq=lemmings)

1841 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
[https://books.google.com/books?id=tC4_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA449&dq=%...](https://books.google.com/books?id=tC4_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA449&dq=%22throw+themselves%22)

1874 Popular Science
[https://books.google.com/books?id=_B8DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA347&dq=l...](https://books.google.com/books?id=_B8DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA347&dq=lemmings)

1877 Popular Science
[https://books.google.com/books?id=gisDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA404&dq=p...](https://books.google.com/books?id=gisDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA404&dq=perishes+voluntarily)

1947 Life Magazine
[https://books.google.com/books?id=bkgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA81&dq=%2...](https://books.google.com/books?id=bkgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA81&dq=%22death+march%22)

1952 Boys Life
[https://books.google.com/books?id=QXO4WXYxnAwC&pg=PA50&dq=%2...](https://books.google.com/books?id=QXO4WXYxnAwC&pg=PA50&dq=%22death+march%22)

1953 Natural Religion and Christian Theology
[https://books.google.com/books?id=j0yEUu8A5hEC&pg=PA116&dq=l...](https://books.google.com/books?id=j0yEUu8A5hEC&pg=PA116&dq=lemmings+suicide)

1953 Boys' Life
[https://books.google.com/books?id=z-p67xyiQpQC&pg=PA4&dq=%22...](https://books.google.com/books?id=z-p67xyiQpQC&pg=PA4&dq=%22How+About+Those+Lemmings%22)

~~~
learnstats2
Very cool, every link! Interesting that the earlier references are to death by
self-hanging.

------
Kenji
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
Lemmings was terrific. Would it work well on modern touch-based systems? (iPad
et al)

~~~
pidg
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/)

------
lmedinas
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)

~~~
rjsw
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_
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.

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

------
Mindless2112
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)

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

------
amelius
> 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 :)

~~~
ptaipale
> 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.

~~~
knodi123
> algorithms (bubble sort is not!)

I invented bubble sort, independently, as a young self-taught programmer. I
remember thinking "Okay, I have a very large list, and I need to sort based on
whichever parameter they picked... let's see, how can I accomplish this
without running out of memory."

When I learned that sorting was a hot topic in computer science, I remember
feeling a little sheepish. When I learned my algorithm was old hat, I felt
more sheepish. When I learned it was relatively crap.... Yikes.

~~~
amelius
Well, at least you came up with an algorithm that was functionally correct.

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

------
Rexxar

        ... 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
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
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.

------
jcadam
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 ][.

------
hnur
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
The MODs are probably a better way to get the actual sound quality out of your
speakers :)

------
lisper
ObLemming:
[http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/](http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/)

------
caasih
imgur backup:
[http://imgur.com/gallery/zeDuXtN/](http://imgur.com/gallery/zeDuXtN/)

------
edem
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
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.

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paublyrne
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.

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M8
There was a good cloned game about pigs on mobile recently...

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finnjohnsen2
503 - Service unavailable :(

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martincerdeira
503 - Service unavailable :(

