Lemmings is such a fun game! I played many hours of it trying to perfectly solve its many puzzles.
Lemmings inspired Ron Millar, a designer at Silicon & Synapse (later Blizzard Entertainment), to invent The Lost Vikings, our first original game: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Vikings
The original design for Vikings was very similar to Lemmings but saw massive changes during the course of development, going from many Vikings to five to eventually just three.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the Lemmings devs for inspiring our efforts.
Haha I didn't know there was such a direct connection!
When we were building Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, I think the games were referenced the most were actually both Lemmings and The Lost Vikings, with Cannonfodder as a 3rd one - there was very little inspiration from the RTSs that Commandos was apparently more similar to.
Yeah, the ambivalence between "oh, I want to save every one of these cute little critters" and "f** this, I'm sick of it, I'll just click 'nuke' instead of pressing the escape key to restart" was really something special...
The Lost Vikings was one of my favorite games growing up. There have been so many attempts to copy the formula (e.g. Trine) but none have been so memorable or endearing. The character and level designs are wonderful.
I remember watching my folks play both games as a child and then doing so myself. Not sure which I got through first but know they were both before i turned five as it was at our first house. Have been contemplating playing then again as it's been 30 years now. Still have the floppy's in storage, lol. Such great games.
In 1991 I was writing games and in those days you had to think a lot about how many moving objects there were on the screen and how many you could fit within the frame rate etc. So that gave games that 'arcade' feel where the player controls one spaceship (say) and it can have 8 bullets on the screen at one time and enemies attack in waves of six etc. I suppose at that point processors were moving beyond those limitations but games were still conceived in those sorts of terms.
When I first saw Lemmings I was just amazed as to how it ignored all of that. The player controls up to 100 characters. The gameplay was freeform, you could dig through whatever, build a ladder wherever. It was a real paradigm shift. You can set ten lemmings to explode. When they do, the framerate will drop to a very slow lag. But that doesn't matter, because its fun.
Absolutely wild this doesn't use <canvas>! I remember playing this way back in the day, before I was a SWE, and didn't really appreciate that fact. Of course, I'm sure it predates being able to effectively use the canvas... but still! Super cool.
I can't seem to find it online anywhere, but I'm also reminded of the knockoff game "Flea Circus" which I played in grade school :)
This aged really well, I had no idea how impressive this was when I first played it either. The only thing is the cookies, which might break after 26 years:
From what I see, bot the developer of the DHTML version and the band are from Netherlands, and the developer had to take the game down from his site [0]
I wonder why the open source ports never caught on like they did for other games. In any thread about Transport Tycoon, it's five minutes until people start talking about OpenTTD, yet NeoLemmix and Lix are barely known, despite all the innovation and custom level design taking place there.
My dad got my family our first PC for Christmas in 1990. Back then I didn’t know anything about PC gaming, and when my dad took me and my brother out to pick out games, our decisions were driven mostly by the box art.
The first game I ever bought was Sim City, which I thought had some really intriguing box art. And my brother bought King’s Quest V. Such a great introduction to PC gaming for a couple young kids.
And I remember when Lemmings came out, it had really distinctive box art. I had no idea what it was about, but I remember it caught my eye and I wanted it from the first time I saw the box. It turned out to be completely different than I was expecting, but also incredibly fun and satisfying.
Never judge a book by its cover, but choosing PC games by their box art worked surprisingly well!
I can't be bothered to check if the article mentions this, but apparently the game was born as a challenge for the artist to draw the smallest animated character that was still recognizable!
There was one level that stumped me for a long time, it was the level that introduced the one dig direction game mechanic. I was young and there was no internet to look up a solution.
One night I dreamed the solution, how obvious it was! Even now I still remember this experience when confronted with an intractable problem.
The UK has some of the most interesting video game studios in the world. I didn't know that "Lemmings" had been created by Rockstar! Rare is also from the UK.
I loved lemmings as a kid, and bits of the soundtrack get stuck in my head to this day (I know a lot of it is just chippy arrangements of otherwise famous public domain music, but the arrangements were great). Even at the time it was a really original concept in a way that people seldom manage, like something that could have (but as far as I can tell didn't) become its own "genre" of game
I could have sworn I saw a documentary where they talked about having legal issues with some of the music, because some of it (e.g. "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountains") was not public domain.
Also, if you're not being facetious and actually didn't notice, they do have a youtube embed of the full documentary made in 2022 at the bottom of the linked article. I haven't taken the time to watch it, but maybe that's the one you're thinking of
Other well-known tunes include the ouverture from Orphée aux enfers by Offenbach (better known as "the can-can music") and How much is that lemming, er, doggie in the window
The video linked in the article jogs some old memories, wow. The soundtrack to Shadow of the Beast was something else...
Lemmings was such an amazing game. I didn't speak English at the time, and I never understood why the pause button had little critter feet on it. Only years later it came: "paws"
>We still don't have any modern games like Lemmings or the "classic" 2D Worms
That's like complaining we haven't made a modern Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson or that we haven't remade The Godfather.
If the originals are so simple, accessible, and so good, what more could you bring to the table with a new modern version to guarantee a big sales success to offset the risk and cost of starting such and endeavor when gamers can just play the existing originals.
Not everything needs a reboot/remake, especially if perfection has already been achieved.
> If the originals are so good and can be played today on modern systems, what more could you bring to the table with modern versions to guarantee a big success.
That's a weird deduction. Everything can be improved upon. Why do we have loads of modern games like Doom, for example? It was good too, and can be played today on modern systems.
Some genres, like Worms, just peak much sooner than others, like Doom, and don't benefit from newer graphics or technological improvements. Just like UX design, at some point you peak, and any more changes you try to add for the sake of improvements, just end up making the product worse.
Look at current commercial operating systems or at Reddit. They also made a 3D Worms game a while back and it was a massive flop. Often, simpler is better.
Sure, everything can always be improved an you might hypothetically be able to build an even better Worms game than the original, but since the bar is already so high, you have very little chance of topping it and all the risks of failure.
I'm still waiting for FMV games to come back into fashion. They were a neat blend of theater and adventure games (which is another genre that doesn't get enough love)
Wow, then in that case we should stop making any FPS games because we already have Doom, no more RPGs because Ultima exists, and no more movies because there's Bambi.
Oh, I didn't necessarily mean retro. Just not a multiplayer focused IAP fest.
A decent single player shooter with a story, atmosphere etc.
I believe Far Cry may still qualify but I don't get games that require an account with the vendor (UPlay, Rockstar Social Club and other crap like that).
Worms is in the same genre as Scorched Earth and owes it a lot for inspiration, but it adds a ton of distinct weapons and movement technique that certainly qualifies it as it's own game.
Yeah! This genre is called "artillery games" [1] and it has an impressive number of titles going all the way back to 1972! Scorched Earth is at least the 16th game in the genre, albeit the most famous pre-Worms.
My favourite iteration growing up was called Dome Wars [3] and it's not even on that Wikipedia list!
I mean Android is sadly lacking of any of these kinds of games. There were great Worms clones back in the day as well, now there are afaik, none.
It reminds me of rock as a genre. As a teenager, rock stars were everywhere, but there's barely any new rock bands after 2010. It doesn't mean the genre has achieved perfection, but everyone who would be doing rock is now doing something else.
There was a resurgence in Interactive Fiction about 10 years ago, which evolved into AIF (thanks internet), which then disappeared in just 1-2 years, to be replaced by all these Ren'Py games.
There's a huge gap and demand for Guitar Hero type of games, but nobody wants to make them. (Maybe related to the decline of rock, as there's still beat games)
Adult IF. There's some incredibly detailed mechanics, but I'll spare the details. And once people couldn't make the mechanics better, they had to focus on plot, puzzles, or images (though puzzles went against the spirit of IF). It got to a point where there were large communities like the roguelikes, awards, and suddenly it collapsed after things got too ambitious or I guess after everyone has seen everything in the genre.
I think there might be a resurgence now or later with Twine and Patreon though.
That may have been the case for the original Lemmings — where the background is black so you can collision test directly against black pixels — but newer games have background textures.
If you want to have complex backgrounds and terrain textures with pixel-perfect collisions and terrain modification then you’ll likely want to keep separate buffers for foreground and background. Then your game engine would operate on a bitmask for collision and destruction of terrain, and you’d construct the framebuffer by blitting [1] the foreground and background using the mask to select between them.
For example Amiga and most 16-bit consoles could just have two (or more) playfields (like layers or screen size sprites) superimposed on each other. For the game code those pixels would still be "black", well, transparent, even with background graphics showing through.
No blitting required, playfields were drawn by the display hardware at scanout.
Not the pixel art style that you seem to mean but there is a recent lemmings 3D style game called Tin Harts. I haven't played it yet but it looks interesting.
Also, it is voxels rather than hand drawn pixel art but I thought Urbek did a great job at feeling like that era of game. It is as much a puzzle game as a builder (there are a number of levels of upgrade that require other buildings within a certain distance).
While I wouldn't quite call Liero "modern", dating from 1998, the modern part is that you can play it multiplayer in your browser instantly: https://www.webliero.com/
King Arthur's Gold looks familiar! Must be an homage to the hidden gem King Arthur's World [1] for the SNES. I played the heck out of that game. Fantastic music and clearly an interesting take on the Lemmings genre!
I still remember the day I walked into my local games store and bought it off the shelf. It was flying off the shelves. I think there was a cover disc demo the previous month which had started the hype machine.
I remember seeing this game for the first time in a computer shop - back when they still had a demo machine for you try to out new games. I came in totally blind, never heard of the company or the game before. It was like no other game I had ever seen. 15 minutes later, I took a copy home. I was hooked.
Truly one of the greatest puzzle games of all time.
I first played Lemmings on a Mac IIsi, and later on an Amiga 1200. I remember the pixel-perfect timing being brutally difficult with the low-quality Amiga ball mouse, but I played it enough that I can still hum all the tunes.
I remember that the "P" key was your friend... and I never thought the Amiga mouse was bad quality, but maybe those shipped with the Amiga 500 were still better, I used to clean it regularly, and of course I hadn't used optical mice until then :)
First video game I remember playing. Dad worked at a warehouse for the local school district and when I’d go to work with him, he’d set me up on their IBM PC and let me play lemmings the entire day. Truly loved that game
I was totally addicted to the SNES version. I’ve been wanting to play this game again forever. What is the best way to? (Computer version is fine too, never played it)
Pretty sure Ludum Dare is still around; a friend competed in a recent one.
The website looks a bit behind, with a YouTube video and calls for signups for a 2022 event. But the competition still seems to be running and got "an avalanche of submissions" for the most recent event in September 2023 [0]. Maybe you can find more about it on Reddit [1], and there's also mention of a Discord server.
And the answer is: the organiser went and built a new website at https://ldjam.com and does a _really_ bad job of redirecting users to the new one. So all you see on the old main website is stale content and inactivity. :unimpressed_shrug:
Unfortunately Sony has been sitting on the IP for Lemmings for quite some time now and hasn't done a lot with it. There was a mobile game a few years ago however (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sadpuppy.l...), but apparently the free version is pretty ad-infested (haven't tried it yet).
There was also "Lemmings Revolution" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmings_Revolution) which is over 20 years old by now, but tried to translate the original concept into something that would look good in 3D. I thought it was ok, but didn't enjoy it quite as much as the originals (which of course could have something to do with the fact that I was younger when I played the original games).
Tim Wright's Lemmings music is low-key brilliant. It has a deliberately rough and dorky instrumentation with very "synthetic" trumpets and accordion (You can make much "better" instrumented music on the Amiga, and we know Tim could do that too!). It is somehow as cute and vexing as the little critters themselves. And yet there's that subtle element of old English-Scottish folk that makes it magical.
Lemmings inspired Ron Millar, a designer at Silicon & Synapse (later Blizzard Entertainment), to invent The Lost Vikings, our first original game: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Vikings
The original design for Vikings was very similar to Lemmings but saw massive changes during the course of development, going from many Vikings to five to eventually just three.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the Lemmings devs for inspiring our efforts.