The Complete History of Lemmings (2006) | Hacker News Reader

The Complete History of Lemmings (2006)

javalemmings.com

189 pointstosh39 comments

Lemmings could be the perfect VR game.

A complex 3D environment that is difficult for a camera to look around in but easy for a room scale VR player to observe. And then various analog controls built into the environment that you manipulate to help guide the miniature Lemmings to safety, sometimes requiring you to use both hands independently to manipulate different sets of obstacles in the right order.

https://uploadvr.com/hololems-brings-lemmings-real-world-via...

> room scale VR player

Jabba the Hutt?

Lemmings is one of the only games I know where (on my Amiga1000) I can plug in two mice and play two-players each with a mouse-cursor. The two-player competitive-gods dynamic is actually super thrilling and creative and I’d love to see it done again. I expect the mainline desktop OS/UI stack doesn’t know how to handle it!

I wonder if they can actually properly emulate that mode in UAE?

Yes, using the ManyMouse library.

https://fs-uae.net/docs/mouse

I loved 2 player Lemmings!

Another Amiga game we played a lot which required 2 mice was The Settlers.

You can totally set up multiple mouse(s) on Linux, and graphics cards too, and even use one machine with multiple keyboard/mouse/monitor rigs to give everyone their own X session .. assuming you've got the metal for it.

That's a different use case: one cursor controlled by multiple mice, or multiple completely independent sessions. This is two cursors in a single session - the only case I've seen is this, and even that seems messy: https://pluralinput.com/

Well, and then there's multitouch. ahem touchegg &etc.

I think the first Settlers game on the Amiga had the same feature.

There's a Lemmings clone called Lix which has networked competitive multiplayer, but I don't know how it works.

(I designed a few levels for the single-player mode which may or may not still be in the standard level pack, but didn't do much else with it.)

The Settlers 2 on PC could also be played with 2 mices.

Sweet Amiga memories :)

I recently reverse engineered the walker to get something simple but fun to animate, in the console no less:

https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl/blob/master/devlog/cons...

This is one of my favorite games of all time. I used to have it for the SNES growing up and I almost beat the entire thing over the course of many months. The toughest levels are absolutely insane.

Has there ever been a newer game with this same dynamic? For a while I wanted to make a clone, I think it would work well on a console like the Switch.

There is a very good OSS clone called pingus: https://pingus.seul.org/screenshots-0.7.html

Back in the amiga days I loved a somewhat similar one called humans. It does seem weird that such a successful game hasn't spawned more clones though.

They, as in Psygnosis, completely milked the Lemmings IP over the years. The 3d episodes were pretty bad and that was the end of it if I recall correctly.

Lemmings Revolution was particularly silly as it's basically the 2D game but superimposed onto a 3D cylinder. Luckily games have moved away in recent years from the "everything must be 3D just because" era of the late 90s.

The Switch homebrew scene is starting to come to life, so you could make that idea a reality!

He did mention that he doesn't know why no-one has made an internet connected multiplayer version... Man, that would be awesome!

How would that work? Same rules as the multiplayer mode (anyone can control any lemming, everyone works from a shared pool of skills)?

Not sure. It would require some experiments. Maybe different teams of lemmings? Or maybe a free-for-all?

Classic Lemmings had both co-op and competitive multiplayer.

Co-op is clear, as you described.

Competitive: you each have your own lemmings: blue-green vs. green-blue. You have your own start point and end point on the same map. You can only control your own lemmings. Your goal-point will accept any lemming. Hilarious chaos ensues.

I haven't played Lemmings, but a quick glance suggest the recent Mario vs Donkey Kong follow the same idea.

Broderbund's Lode Runner (on the Apple II... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzimJopP5rE), Lemmings, and the more recent Tower Defense games on iOS all have that special level-by-level, puzzle, automation game mechanic.

On Steam you can find a game called "Zombie Night Terror" which is basically Lemmings with a horror/zombie theme. I enjoyed it and was excited to play Lemmings style game

Spirits is similar: http://www.spacesofplay.com/spirits/

Much better: First hand account by Mike Dailly http://www.javalemmings.com/DMA/Lem_1.htm Also with animated screenshots of early Lemmings demos.

OK, let's try switching to from https://readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-lemmings/. Both are great, but that has had larger and more recent threads (2016 and 2015):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527519

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9684830

while this has had smaller and older ones (2010 and 2009):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729348

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876436

Recommend see this documentary about the History The Secret of Monkey Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17116024

I liked this bit on page 3: "these levels were so simple, that some under 5's managed to play the first few levels" ...and my grandma who had never used a mouse before: https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/2015/02/27/grandma-trying-lemmi...

Mike Daily has also been working on getting Lemmings running on the ZX Spectrum Next - worth a read: http://dailly.blogspot.hk/2018/04/making-lemmings-on-zx-spec...

For those who've missed it: there's a link to the original PC demo of Lemmings on the first page, behind the screenshot: http://www.javalemmings.com/DMA/files/OriginalLemmings.zip

This is great, though I kind of hoped there would be more talk of the tech vs. the art. Especially how they did those pixel-perfect collisions.

On Amiga the game slowed down significantly when you had many moving lemmings on screen so these pixel perfect collisions were probably quite expensive cycle wise.

Site seems to be down, here's Wayback:

http://web.archive.org/web/20180520203125/readonlymemory.vg/...

Edit: It's back now, but I was getting a 5xx error a minute ago.

What a fantastic game! I played it through on the A-500, some of the levels were fiendishly hard.

Everytime an Amiga post comes up I get such a wave of nostalgia :o)

Ugh, I really hate when articles have no timestamps...

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