The Complete History of Lemmings | Hacker News Reader

The Complete History of Lemmings

dmadesign.org

69 pointsgus_massa19 comments

Russell Kay was my boss for five years, at the game company he founded on the Lemmings royalties, great guy. Our on-hold music was from the game.

Fun fact, DMA also created the original GTA!

I think they created basically all of the GTAs, though they got bought out and changed their name:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_North

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

Those who don't indiscriminately click links may like to know that this is a DHTML clone of the original Lemmings.

Right, sorry, in a rush. It is indeed a DHTML clone of Lemmings.

> When the Arcade machine was being written, the CEO of Data East apparently wouldn't start a meeting without challenging the person to a 2 player version of lemmings

Ha!

I remember the first 2 editions so fondly. Maybe the only game I ever played with my parents (and the whole thing too). I would have been 13-14 at the time, so I'm sure I was generally a pain in the butt at that age, but that was good times.

Also reminds me of the pleasure caused by the slow propagation of information back in the olden days. I remember walking into some random PC-clone store, and discovering Lemmings "Xmas", or Wolf3D for the first time, then playing it with other people in the store. Somehow it seems like it wouldn't have been quite as fun to just see screenshots+youtube links pop up on everyone's RSS feed.

Brings back memories of interviewing game artists around that time - pretty much any one who had been near DMA (and sometimes even Psygnosis) included the lemming animation in their showreel.

That was a fun game. I never got to play it on my own computer, though, as I found out it did not work with Windows 3.1... only an old version of DOS. The words "Lemmings do not like Windows!" from the manual are still stuck in my mind.

(I always thought that some day I would get it working, but here we are 15 years later, and I still have not achieved this. LOL.)

You have two solutions: play the Amiga version in UAE or play the DOS version in DOSBox. Both will run the game almost perfectly.

... or if you're especially enterprising, I suppose you can play the C64 version under VICE.

EDIT: There is a downside with emulating the Amiga version: you don't get the neat disk gronk-noise remix of the music.

"Three sir!"

A windows version was made as well, and last I checked it runs fine in XP, dunno about Vista/7/64-bit though.

DOSBOX?

Get DosBox, http://www.dosbox.com/

What about pingus, a free software clone of lemmings : http://pingus.seul.org/welcome.html

Yes, pingus is/was quite fun.

When you choose "Quit" from the Program Manager in Windows 3.1, you're back in DOS. Couldn't you run Lemmings that way?

New hires were "...told to play Lemmings for a couple of weeks to get the idea"

So awesome. That was a great game.

Ahhh lemmings. Literally my first computer game.

A flash-based multiplayer version that allowed users to submit their own maps would be a blast. I'd probably even pay to play.

Nice read! I used to love this game on Amiga and then later on PC.

sweet memory

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