Psygnosis (Wipeout, Lemmings etc.) co-founder Ian Hetherington has died | Hacker News Reader

Psygnosis (Wipeout, Lemmings etc.) co-founder Ian Hetherington has died

metro.co.uk

173 pointshaunter51 comments

I'm an amiga kid who grew up in Scotland, when I was young I always thought these guys were The. Coolest. Lemmings is such an amazing game. I remember the first time I saw someone play it, I had no idea how it could be fun, but as soon as I tried it, I couldn't stop till it was "done" - The only other game I've ever found as enjoyable is TIM, The Incredible Machine.

From my limited view of the world in the East German hinterlands right around the reunification, the UK simply was the pop culture hot spot of the 80's and early 90's (at least for music and video games). Almost all of the cool stuff came out of the UK. It was only with Doom that the US entered the stage :)

As an Amiga-owning Brit living in the South of Europe back then, as much as my eye was cast homeward culturally, it was also eyeing Germany quite a lot. You guys made great games too (never mind the demo scene, which Germany and the Nordics kicked British ass at) and I used to tune in to some German radio station on Saturday nights on Satellite radio and hook it up to a tape recorder so that I had electronic/dance music no one else in my school even knew about :)

- belated edit

I realise now, reading back, that you said East Germany. I forgot that was A Thing, for shame.

East Germany actually had a tiny game development community of its own ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7xndvitLa8

The computers just weren't exactly "game friendly", because custom chips like in the Western home computers weren't a thing. Think "ZX Spectrum" without ULA and half the performance.

There is a sculpture honouring the Lemmings in Dundee, Scotland:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lemmings-statue

OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2762662126

iirc, somewhere around Shoreditch/London there was a wall with their logo - i was pretty psyched seeing the owl i haven't seen in quite a while :(

Edit: just stitched 10 photos i've taken of that wall (09/2018), resized to ~iMac 5k x3 resolution and cut in 3 parts (i've got 3 virtual desktops) and set each as a desktop background.

Link: https://imgur.com/a/V6LjRDN

Sorry for the lame stitching tho :(

Jute, jam, journalism, joysticks

Fun fact, the original developer (not publisher) of Lemmings is also the original developer of the Grand Theft Auto series - David Jones.

That is some amazing multi-decade/generational spanning.

Well to be fair GTA 1 was released in the late 1990s, where as Lemmings was released in the early 1990s. So his two largest hits were in the same decade.

Lemmings was such a great and innovative game, I still have the original box and floppy and will have to play it again soon.

Does anyone know of a web emulator that would save me some time?

Web based DOS emulators are plentiful - something like "Play lemmings online" will give you a few options if varying shadiness.

Someone wrote a version using JavaScript that seems pretty straightforward (and no ads!)

https://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

It has plenty of ads now.

I'm sure someone would love to turn the game into a freemium-game where if you wish to use bricks you've got to have LemmingCoins.

oh, perhaps Pi-hole was saving me!

I do not, but there is an open source clone called Pingus that stays close to the spirit of the original: https://pingus.seul.org/

Archive.org has a bunch of MS-DOS games playable in your browser, Lemmings is one: https://archive.org/details/lemmings_original_ms-dos_201705

While that'd work, keep in mind Lemmings is an Amiga game.

MS-DOS is just one of many ports.

You'd need a amiga floppy compatible reader for the PC[1] and then use an emulator

[1] https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-118

You'd need a floppy image. It's easier to just download one.

Amigaforever's KB is missing recent developments that make this very easy, e.g. GreaseWeazle.

OMG, the mere mention of G-Police and I was catapulted back to the 90s... I loved that game!

So much so, that I tried to find a copy of it earlier this year but couldn't get one (bootleg or otherwise) that would run :(

Great memories! Sad news though.

I didn't look too closely, this demo might be a step in the right direction:

https://archive.org/details/GPOLICE

I did actually play Shadow of the beast on my beloved Amiga the other day, not that fun but a great technical show off.

Lemmings is real fun though, can't believe the first Xmas Lemmings was released 30 years ago :-)

I just switch it on for the music; not the same without the game graphics for the atmosphere. These 3.5 disks are robust; my disks are really old by now. They seem to hols better than cds.

I just started playing the Shadow of the Beast soundtrack on Spotify -- Allister Brimble was quite prolific with several hundred games scored.

It's interesting to compare the Amiga 500 with its 640x256 resolution and 4096 colors driven by a 68K processor with 68k transistors (coincidence?) and my current 4K screen driven by a 3080ti card and 28.3 billion transistors. Certainly the computing and graphics power has increased greatly, but not so the music output.

Ah Allister Brimble; another great one. SotB I is David Whittaker though or maybe you had a different point.

While Psygnosis did develop many games, they did not develop Lemmings, they merely published it.

yes, Lemmings was from DMA Design, which later became Rockstar North.

Their run on the PSX was great. The formula one games, g-police, rollcage, wipeout, the colony wars games, ...

But my favorite of their oldies is Barbarian, I'm not sure how I like this more than lemmings, probably because I used to watch my dad playing back then.

Psygnosis and England in general was a big player in the video game industry in the 90s, a bit sad that it went away since mid 00s.

Europe in general seems to have largely lost edge in gaming at the end of the '90s, probably as a result of the death of 8-16bit. Then there was a bit of a renaissance once we adjusted, with the rise of Rockstar North, Ubisoft, and CDProjektRed.

Maybe if the various English companies had converged, instead of selling to foreign interests, they could have survived.

Yeah, I want to live in the alternate universe where Nintendo still owns Rareware

Main reason the GameCube was a disappointment to me :(

There's always StarFox Adventures T-T

That could have been Dino planet! Rare were perfect fit for Nintendo consoles, not Xbox!

The US sold itself to foreign interests and aside from the anti China sentiment removed from superhero movies, and Apple kowtowing to Chinese interests it’s still the same.

> Europe in general seems to have largely lost edge in gaming at the end of the '90s, probably as a result of the death of 8-16bit.

it seems true. the europeans were a force to be reckoned with in terms of gaming during the atari st/amiga/early pc era. i suspect a lot of that talent went to one of two places: 1) they jumped ship for the crazy financial opportunities abroad 2) they stayed put, but started throwing more and more energy at the nascent and newly internet enabled open source scene

i've never seen any official numbers, but have always gotten the sense that the europeans these days are the real power players in the oss world. (much like they were in games before!). it also makes sense, i think that pre-industrialized gaming attracted creative coders, much like oss does today.

The accounts I've read indicate that it was a financing problem, mostly. Games got a lot bigger in the 90's, companies started merging and getting public listings and there was a general "corporatisation" of the landscape. This massively favored the US companies going into the CD-ROM era since it was easier to find investment capital there.

The UK's early talent advantages and successes in gaming were brought about by a combination of heavy investment in computer education at a national level and a market structured to support the marginal(the ZX Spectrum was an extraordinary price sensitive market - cheap machines, cheap tape media, "budget" game pricing), but once the games got bigger, most of those companies were quickly reduced to subsidiary roles since they weren't able to make the same big bets on production, and this reflects the dynamic across tech in Europe generally: it's just harder to build a big business.

I do suspect you're right about the dynamic with open source as well. Programmers who are purely mercenary have tended to gravitate towards the orbit of SV for the past twenty years, but Europe offers more opportunities for career open source.

> europeans these days are the real power players in the oss world

Eh, it depends. A lot of the work is definitely carried out by Europeans (particularly around KDE and Linux kernel), but when it comes to actually setting priorities, it's the likes of IBM, RedHat, Canonical, and Google, who draw the real roadmaps - and those are basically all US-based businesses.

You can observe that in the privileged position GNOME continues to enjoy, when KDE is historically much more relevant in Europe.

>but when it comes to actually setting priorities, it's the likes of IBM, RedHat, Canonical, and Google, who draw the real roadmaps - and those are basically all US-based businesses.

This. Linux is not where it is today just thanks to some passionate geeks doing charity work in their spare time but mostly thanks to the billions the likes of Sun, Oracle, Google, Alibaba, Red-Hat, IBM, SAP, Intel, Cloudflare, SGI(RIP), that have poured billions over the last decades into linux and all accompanying modules like filesystems, desktop environments, networking, etc.

All this was possible thanks to those evil megacorp bucks.

Psygnosis games were amazing! I still remember the day I got Shadow of the Beast, Agony, Bloody Money, and, of course, Lemmings. These were all iconic, 1990's Amiga games.

Lemmings. I can see those little no-brained creatures everytime I (wrongly) do something in my computer 'cause I didn't thought of all consequences.

A YouTuber named Kim Justice I feel had the best retrospective of Psygnosis as a whole. Check it out when you get a chance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvYlxnHOY-Q

They made a huge impact in the European and American gaming scenes and we're forever grateful for that.

Wipeout XL was pretty much the coolest a game could possibly be back in 1997, the other ps1 games from that era were impressive as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vuFnFQQ_pI

I remember Brattacas on the Atari ST, best played on the monochrome monitor!

Thank you mister for all the joyful hours as a kid enjoying Destruction Derby.

He worked for Imagine Software before founding Psygnosis. I went to the auction of the Imagine computers but everything went for much more than it was really worth.

Lemmings, Shadow of the Beast, Awesome, Hired Guns… psygnosis games had quite some musical talent behind them.

Shadow of the beast; Lemmings; etc. Amazing games that I played during my childhood on an Amiga 500.

Lemmings! The wonder years.

He was 69 years old.

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