Happy Birthday Lemmings | Hacker News Reader

Happy Birthday Lemmings

scottishgames.net

435 pointsTimothee140 comments

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.

I loved the Lost Vikings as a kid! It's actually charmed me about as much as Lemmings, though if I had to pick, I still prefer Lemmings' dark humor.

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.

Does anyone know if there's a good way to play Three Vikings on a modern laptop or iPad?

You want to look into emulators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator . vAmigaWeb is an Amiga emulator that should also work on iPad. https://vamigaweb.github.io/doc/about.html

It's included in the Blizzard Arcade Collection, which you can at least get on PC today for $9.99 USD.

Two more memorable clones (that also changed the formula a bit, but the basic premise of "save x critters to progress" is the same) are "World of Goo" (https://store.steampowered.com/app/22000/World_of_Goo/) and "Spirits" (https://store.steampowered.com/app/210170/Spirits/).

Many fond memories of The Lost Vikings!

Just wanted to say I loved The Lost Vikings, thanks for many good memories :)

Just want to express how much I also loved The Lost Vikings!

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.

Ah, no wonder my favourite game from the "modern era" was Commandos. Lemmings, The Lost Vikings, and Cannon Fodder were my top 3 from Amiga times.

Thanks for the good memories.

OMG Cannon fodder ... You just nostalgia memories me

"war has never been so much fun".

The title song was impressive for the time. I still remember it vividly.

Almost every week since that game came out that songs comes into my head. It's way too catchy.

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.

DHTML Lemmings is still playable in a modern browser: https://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

It's dated 2004, but I'm convinced I remember playing it earlier.

I definitely played it around 2001 when it was posted to slashdot!

Can I please get some codes to do further levels?

The furthest I have handy is 12: KOMHCMOMCX

a shame it has no sound

It used to (see control.js) but it doesn't seem to be working anymore.

The first version is from 2003: https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/18377456#1...

It got taken down shortly after that by BREIN, the Dutch copyright watchdog, but it lives on as Pumpkins.

Amazing that JS from the Internet Explorer era still works well 20 years later.

Some more context from the author: https://crisp.home.xs4all.nl/lemmings/brein1.html

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:

function setcookie(id, cookievars) {

  document.cookie = id+'='+cookievars+'; expires=Monday, 20-May-2030 05:00:00 GMT';

}

Anyone know why this is hosted on a metal band's website?

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]

So maybe somebody uploaded it in support.

  0: https://crisp.home.xs4all.nl/lemmings/lemmings.html

Dynamic HTML? This thing doesn't use canvas, pretty cool.

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 :)

> Of course, I'm sure it predates being able to effectively use the canvas...

Predates it at all. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ca... says browser support didn't come until 2005 at the earliest.

Whenever I pass this building in Sheffield, I immediately think “you need bashers this time”.

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/acse/department/facilities/diamo...

Lemmings tourists might also appreciate the statue in Dundee: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lemmings-statue

(OK, also linked in the article.)

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!

Part of the linked documentary inverviews the box/poster/etc artist, who had never worked on a computer game before.

I loved Lemmings (the game) as a kid! But as an adult, I found out everything I thought I knew about lemmings (the animal) was a lie: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-wilderness-lemming-s...

It always blew my mind how well animated the 12 pixel high lemmings were. The dynamics were incredible.

yes!!

Sorry, did I say 12 pixels? I meant 10! [1]

Zooming out on that image it all comes flooding back - they have such swagger! The animator deserves an award of some sort.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/WAltx1l.gif

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.

I worked out the rescuing your blocker trick on my own, but had to learn the build to turn around trick from a strategy guide.

How do you rescue the blocker?!

I think the acceptable ways to find that out is watching a parent or older sibling play the game, or figuring it out yourself ;-)

You remove the ground it is standing on, and it stops being a blocker.

Exactly. If you have some steps to spare, make a lemming make steps, then make him a blocker. A badger can remove what he’s standing on later.

Damn it. Took that long to learn.

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.

Tomb Raider is another British classic.

Yes! Together with GoldenEye 007 (obviously) and Donkey Kong Country.

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.

There's a little bit written about it on Wikipedia but I wish I could find the documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmings_(video_game)#Developm...

O. My mistake, thanks for letting me know

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

Many of those traditional or folk songs I first heard in Lemmings.

"Dad, are they playing Lemmings music?"

"It's called Pachebel's Canon, it's from the 17th century!"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QwXthGJfHLc&t=118s

(And I choose that one as the forlorn, mournful sound seems most appropriate as all the lemmings march to their death.)

Documentary: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RbAVNKdk9gA

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

One version even included Scotland the Brave.

Back in the era when video games had music.

https://archive.org/details/lemmings_2_the_tribes_1992

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"

Annnnnnd now I'm playing Lemmings.

We need some modern games like Lemmings or the "classic" 2D Worms.

HOW did they do that pixel-perfect terrain destruction anyway?

> We still don't have any modern games like Lemmings or the "classic" 2D Worms.. or do we?

Noita comes to mind. Also includes some pretty wild fluid dynamics.

> HOW did they do that pixel-perfect terrain destruction anyway??

Usually the terrain is a bitmap, and various effects paint/erase it.

The video framebuffer isn't rendered from the game state, it is the game state.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitter

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.

eets (2006) is similar.

>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.

Apples to oranges. Doom is a different genre.

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.

> Everything can be improved upon

Arguable. I've seen variations of Tetris, but never improvements. Nor do I think you can improve stud poker, or Go.

Some of the early versions of Tetris only let you rotate one direction. Adding counter rotation is a clear improvement.

I like the multiplayer versions over the years. The Tetris Effect is pretty fun, although maybe not strictly an improvement.

I'm a little on the fence about 7-bag, because it's a little too evenly distributed, but early Tetris had some gnarly distribution.

Tetris Effect is Tetris polished to a freakin diamond.

I enjoy it a lot, but some of the people I've shared it with find the atmosphericness distracting and prefer a Tetris that's only business.

I had an old job once where the team all played Tetrinet and it was fun, but it did feel very different from normal Tetris.

You can still improve the UI and UX around the gameplay. See the various online Go or Chess servers for example.

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)

Doom, like Lemmings and Worms, was the first of its kind and you won't be able to recreate the experience just by redoing the graphics.

Not to mention that when people say "improved" they usually mean "adding more stuff". More isn't necessarily better.

Worms was already a remake of Scorched Earth, wasn't it?

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!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artillery_video_games

[3] https://macintoshgarden.org/games/dome-wars

Til from the list that the game was officially called "Gorillas", not "Gorilla" (as in gorilla.bas)

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.

Haven't they stopped making FPS games? Multiplayer first dudebro "properties" don't count.

Serious Sam seems to survive. They tried to continue Doom but it wasn't Doom so much. What else is there?

“boomer shooter” is the genre tag you want to look for. https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Boomer%20Shooter/

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).

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)

AIF?

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.

Interesting! Thanks!

I remember enjoying a later version of lemmings called lemmings tower or something similar. It was pretty cool.

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/

There's also King Arthur's Gold, which is a free multiplayer game that I'm sure only has like ten players online these days but is an absolute hoot regardless: https://store.steampowered.com/app/219830/King_Arthurs_Gold/

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!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur%27s_World

The humor is occasionally (often) crude, but Zombie Night Terror is a fantastic modern Lemmings-style game.

You run a zombie invasion, the zombies have attributes not unlike the ones from Left 4 Dead, but the gameplay is pure Lemmings.

https://www.zombienightterror.com (Incidentally the best game I've ever played on an iPad.)

> We need some modern games like Lemmings or the "classic" 2D Worms.

Yes we have.

https://hedgewars.org/

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.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/tin_hearts

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).

https://www.gog.com/en/game/urbek_city_builder

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.

LOL I just played through Lemmings in one of those DosBox emulators a few days ago ... so much fun!! The music alone brought back some good memories.

the amiga version is the best though

The Amiga version had multiplayer! Of course it was better! So many good memories...

is it possible to play the multiplayer through emulators by the way?

I don't know actually. You would need to be able to hookup two mice.

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 :)

I played Lemmings on my Amiga 1000. Later when I bought a 386DX PC Clone I bought Lemmings for DOS and VGA.

Open Source version is Pingus: https://pingus.seul.org/

Me too man!! What an amazing time that was.

First time I ever stayed up all night playing a game it was Lemmings. Second time was Angry Birds lol. I don't game much.

The Acorn Archimedes (origin of the ARM CPU) version said "Goodnight all! Hope you've not been up all night!" when you quit.

So many memories

vgalemmi

tgalemmi

Don't know why I still remember those.

Also see https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=5306.0 for info on where to find and play Lemmings!

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

Lemmings was a game that I thoroughly enjoyed at the time. Happy birthday!

I played this on the Amiga when the game first came out. Loved it.

Let's go!

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)

OSS remakes: NeoLemmix, Lix

In-browser: DHTML Lemmings

Second best way: Amiga emulator

Best way: a SNES, a Lemmings cartridge, and a CRT TV!

I remember Lemmings! I remember getting into programming by trying to make games because of games like Lemmings!

So where is the outlet?

(I just did a search for Ludum Dare, and it seems ... dead?)

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.

[0] https://flashlight13.medium.com/ludum-dare-54-hidden-gems-by... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ludumdare/

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:

Dead? The schedule page [1] has recent and upcoming instances scheduled, at least:

    Ludum Dare 54 — September 29th - October 2nd, 2023
    Ludum Dare 55 — April 12th - 14th, 2024
    Ludum Dare 56 — October 4th - 7th, 2024

I never tried it, I don't have a quickly accessible game programming framework. Nor the time, heh.

[1]: https://ludumdare.com/#schedule

If the Lemmings games were remastered and slated for release I'd pay full price in a heartbeat.

I'm sure a Kickstarter for this purpose would be very well received.

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).

I played revolution as a kid, it was fun! I wonder if it still runs on modern hardware

There is a game in development that combines the lemmings esthetic with base building.

The Settlings: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1771110/The_Settlings/

Another game in the opposite spirit (different graphics, similar gameplay): https://humanity.game/

Oh I enjoyed Lemmings. Nice flashback.

> Nice flashback.

Another great game from that era ;)

From another world.

Flashback 2 came out a few months ago: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2008420/Flashback_2/

My first contact to computer games. Now thinking of introducing computers with this to my 5 yo

Why has a modern-graphics remake of Lemmings not happened? Surely it'd be a hit?

Not the same, but some similar modern games:

- Pikmin

- Zombie Night Terror

- Humanity

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.

I was a poor child when Lemmings came out, so I didn't have a PC.

You can play it today.

love that game

a classic.

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