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Comment by netcoyote | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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/).

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.

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

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

Many fond memories of The Lost Vikings!

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