Lemmings series
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"Let's Go!"
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Lemmings is a puzzle-strategy video game franchise originally developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis for the Amiga in 1991 and later ported for numerous other platforms.
The game was programmed by Russell Kay, Mike Dailly and David Jones, and was inspired by a simple animation that Dailly created while experimenting with Deluxe Paint.
The objective of the game is to guide a group of anthropomorphised lemmings through a number of obstacles to a designated exit. In any given level, the player must save a specified number or percentage of the lemmings in order to advance. To this end, the player must decide how to assign limited quantities of eight different skills to individual lemmings, allowing them to alter the landscape and/or their own behaviour so that the entire group can reach the exit safely.
Gameplay
The gameplay is pretty simply, you have to save as much lemmings as possibly (minimally definited percent of the number of the lemmings).
It was divided into a number of levels, grouped into four (or five) difficulty categories.
Each level begins with one or more trap doors opening from above, releasing a steady line of lemmings who all follow each other.
Levels include a variety of obstacles that prevent lemmings from reaching the exit, such as large drops, booby traps and pools of lava.
The goal of each level is to guide at least a portion of the green-haired, blue-robed lemmings from the entrance to the exit by clearing or creating a safe passage through the landscape for the lemmings to use.
Unless assigned a special task, each lemming will walk in one direction ignoring any other lemming in its way (except Blockers), falling off any edges and turning around if it hits an obstacle it cannot pass.
A lemming can die in a number of ways:
- falling from too great a height, drowning or falling into lava or water.
- falling off the bottom edge of the screen
- being caught in a trap or fire
- being assigned the Bomber skill.
Every level has a time limit; if the timer expires, the level ends and the player is evaluated on the number of lemmings rescued.
To successfully complete the level, the player varies from level to level, and the player must assign the skills carefully to successfully guide the lemmings. There are eight skills that can be assigned:
- Climbers climb vertically though fall down if they hit an overhang.
- Floaters use a parachute to fall safely from heights.
- Bombers explode after a five-second timer, destroying themselves and any destructible landscape in close proximity, though not damaging other lemmings or traps.
- Blockers stand still and prevent other lemmings from passing; lemmings that hit a Blocker simply reverse direction.
- Builders build a stairway of 12 steps.
- Bashers, Miners and Diggers tunnel horizontally, diagonally downwards or directly downwards respectively, but cannot break through steel barriers.
While the player is able to pause the game to inspect the level and status of the lemmings, skills can only be assigned in real-time. Lemmings are initially released at a rate predetermined by the level (from 1 to 99). The player can increase the rate as desired to a maximum of 99, and later decrease it down to, but not lower than, the initial rate. The player also has the option to "nuke" all the remaining lemmings on the screen, converting them to Bombers. This option can be used to abort a level when in a no-win situation, remove any Blockers that remain after the remaining lemmings have been rescued, or end a level quickly once the required percentage of saved lemmings has been reached.
The four (or five if you count "SUNSOFT") difficulty groups – "Fun", "Tricky", "Taxing" and "Mayhem" – are used to organise the levels to reflect their overall difficulty. This rating reflects several factors, including the number of obstacles the player has to surpass, the limitation on the number of types of skills available to assign, the time limit, the minimum rate of lemming release, and the percentage of lemmings that must be saved. Some versions have additional difficulty ratings with more levels in each.
Development
Lemmings
Mike Dailly, the first employee of DMA Design and one of the programmers for Lemmings, provided a detailed history of the development of the game titled "The Lemmings Story" in 2006. David Jones, founder of DMA Design, has also commented on the development and success of Lemmings.
The inspiration for gameplay came as a result of a simple animated character sprite in an 8×8 pixel box created by Dailly using Deluxe Paint as part of development for Walker, then envisioned as a sequel to Blood Money. Dailly was able to quickly produce an animated graphic showing his creations moving endlessly, with additional graphical improvements made by Gary Timmons and other members of the DMA Design team to help remove the stiffness in the animation. One member, Russell Kay, observed that "There's a game in that!", and later coined the term "lemmings" for these creations, according to Dailly. Allowing the creatures to move across the landscape was based on a Salamander weapon concept for Blood Money and demonstrated with the animations. Levels were designed based on a Deluxe Paint interface, which allowed several of the members to design levels, resulting in "hundreds of levels". There were several internal iterations of the levels, each designer challenging the others. Dailly pointed out that David Jones "used to try and beat us, and after proudly stabbing a finger at the screen and saying 'There! Beat that!', we'd calmly point out a totally new way of getting around all his traps, and doing it in a much simpler method. 'Oh...', he'd mutter, and scramble off to try and fix it." They also sent internally tested levels to Psygnosis, getting back the results of their testing via fax. While most were solved quickly, Dailly commented that "Every now and again though, the fax would be covered in scribbles with the time and comments crossed out again and again; this is what we were striving for while we were designing the levels, and it gave us all a warm fuzzy feeling inside."
Each of the designers had a somewhat different style in their levels: Dailly's levels often had titles containing clues to what to do (such as "It's Hero Time", suggesting that one lemming had to be separated from the crowd) and generally required the player to perform several actions at once; Gary Timmons's levels were minimalistic, with popular culture references in the titles; and Scott Johnston's (whose mother was the first voice of the lemmings) levels were generally tightly packed. Dailly was also responsible for the "custom" levels based on other Psygnosis and Reflections Interactive Amiga games, including Shadow of the Beast, Menace, Awesome and Shadow of the Beast II.
These "crossover" levels also used music from those games, though in ports these levels have been removed or altered to remove such references. After they developed most of the hard levels, they then created several simple levels either by copying the existing ones or creating new layouts; as Dailly states, "This I believe is where many games fall down today, they do not spend the time making a good learning curve." Timmons is credited with the official drawings of the lemmings, as necessitated by the need of Psygnosis for box cover artwork.
Lemmings 2: The Tribes
Lemmings 2 was developed by British developer DMA Design and published by Psygnosis, although programmer Brian Watson stated that the publisher played a more involved role in "helping with the game design and production" for the sequel.
Development was marked by considerable pressure to recreate the crossover success of the original game, and greater time was dedicated by lead programmer David Jones to consider how the game would port to multiple platforms. Developer Mike Dailly stated that the sequel's focus on tribes was conceived as a way of creating a more open-ended structure to the game, with Dailly describing the feature as "a way to give (the player at least some choice) when stuck on a level" and "create more gameplay and make the game last longer."
The inclusion of a fast forward feature was adopted from an aborted arcade port, with the feature originally intended to complement "the fast pace of arcade machines".
All New World of Lemmings
Mike Dailly, programmer at DMA Design, recounted that "Lemmings 3 was a bit crap … more to end our commitment to Psygnosis than actually do a good game. The larger character size really spoiled it, but it was done like that because we had been approached by the Children's Television Workshop who wanted to use the character and the game; they wanted the characters to be bigger, and that really complicated things, and spoiled it. By the end of Lemmings 3, I think we were all ready to move on."
DMA Design head David Jones similarly remarked, "We needed a break for a while after Lemmings. Three years of hell."
Why They Make You Go "Yippee"!
Overall
- First of all, this franchise had quite complex and original mechanics and gameplay for the early 1990s, which revolutionized the genre of logic and arcade games.
- This also catapulted Psygnosis to greatness, thanks to which they later created such series as Wipeout, Destruction Derby, Ecstatica and Rollcage, despite the downhill in late 90s.
- A completely original gameplay consisting of collecting a certain number of lemmings so that not too many of them die.
- Usually very nice graphics, especially in older games (as well as Lemmings 2: The Tribes), due to how colorful and detailled they are for their time.
- While disturbing, the killing animations can be pretty creative.
Lemmings 1 and "Oh No! More Lemmings"
- An absolutely great soundtrack (by Tim Wright and Brian Johnston), especially for a game released almost at the very beginning of the 1990s, which fits the game's atmosphere perfectly.
- Some of the tunes are very nice to listen such as:
- "Can Can"
- "Twang" (Ten Green Bottles)
- "Dance of The Reed Flutes"
- "Tim 1" (Rainbow Islands)
- "Tim 2" (Smile if You Love Lemmings)
- "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain"
- "Intsy Wintsy... Lemming?"
- Some of the tunes are very nice to listen such as:
- The levels are very creative especially for the early 90's standards.
- While some of the consoles are bad (like CD-i , 3DO, Amiga CD32, Commodore CDTV, PC-FX, Game Gear and Atari Lynx), it's still holding the candle and are actually good ports.
- Interestingly, some ports (like all Playstation ports, Windows 95, Atari Lynx) do have an "fast-forward" option to make the pacing faster.
Lemmings 2
- Graphically, it's an even bigger improvement over the previous game considering that many of the objects are more detailed.
- Level selection is more convenient and complex than in the previous game, which is a nice improvement.
- You can finally pick any weapons and tools to make them run, swim, and use weapons.
Lemmings 3
- The game is full of plot and cutscenes, which is something of a revolution, especially since the previous parts have no plot at all.
- You can finally save all of the lemmings by making the blockers walk.
3D Lemmings
- Fairly impressive graphics for the half of the 90's although it hasn't aged very well.
"Oh no!" Qualities
- Some levels are way too hard to complete, especially for some of the "Taxing" levels, "Mayhem" and "Sports" tribe
- Some of the killing animations can be pretty disturbing for a game that was rated E.
- SNES port has a killing animation that shown blood (when they get smashed by the rock) felt out-of-place for a children's game.
- It also didn't make sense where they censored blood in their port of "Mortal Kombat" in SNES.
- SNES port has a killing animation that shown blood (when they get smashed by the rock) felt out-of-place for a children's game.
- While the computer and console ports being a good idea, some of them weren't strong or downright bad.
- The Atari Lynx port, while decent, somehow shorted all levels, mostly likely to fit the screen.
- The PlayStation 1 and 3 versions are considered slightly inferior, due to using the PS and PS3 controller, and it can be clunky to control, though the PS1 does have Mouse controller to make thing easier.
- The PlayStation 3 port, while not bad as NES port, felt more lackluster.
- While iOS port is still good, somehow has a different plot and limited powers (60 (or 120) which can be annoying sometimes.
- The NES port (by Ocean) of the first game is also considered to be a terrible port due to lacking a lot of levels, having poor graphics and 14 lemmings rather than 100, this is because of the technical limitation.
- The Game Boy Color port is even worse due to the lemmings walk even slower.
- The ZX Spectrum port lacking the graphics.
Reception
Both the first and second parts of the series were met with critical acclaim and are considered to be among the best PC games of all time, while the latter, although still quite warmly received, were not met with such acclaim.
Lemmings
The original sales for Lemmings on the Amiga topped 55,000 copies on the first day of sales; in comparison, Menace sold 20,000 copies and Blood Money sold 40,000 copies cumulatively. With all ports included, Mike Dailly estimated that 15 million copies of Lemmings were sold between 1991 and 2006. In 2011, Luke Plunkett from Kotaku placed the figure at over 20 million, a figure which has been quoted as far back as 1997.
Lemmings 2: The Tribes
While it was not quite as popular as Lemmings was, nor was it ported to as many platforms, it was the top-selling Amiga game in February 1993 and the top-selling PC game in March 1993.
It was well received by some critics, who widely considered it to be better than the original game.
Bruce and Margaret Howden of Compute! commented "This sequel is packed with cute, engaging new features, more Lemming abilities, and oodles of new scenarios. If the original Lemmings was a perfect arcade game, then this is perfection improved upon." Computer Gaming World stated that Psygnosis had done "a first rate job with this sequel ... Lemmings 2 really is twice the game its predecessor was", with "lovingly designed" puzzles and "delightful animations", and concluded that it would be one of the "better purchases of the year". Computer Gaming World praised the game's "lovingly designed" puzzles and highlighted the game's "delightful animations, clever puzzles, soundtrack with original music for each tribe (and) people-friendly interface."
All New World of Lemmings
A reviewer for Next Generation gave the DOS version three out of five stars, commenting that "Although the basic idea is still to save the suicidal beasts, DMA has carefully avoided the 'more of the same' trap by increasing the size of the lemmings, laying down some fantastic new backgrounds, and adding a host of features ... An excellent new perspective on an old stand-by."
Trivia
- An arcade version was planned but later canceled.
- The actual level editor for the Amiga release of Lemmings that the original developers used is still around on a floppy disk owned by one of the developers, although for years they could not get their computer to read the disk. Eventually they found a way to read the disk and preserve its contents, but the dump cannot be released online without Sony's permission.
- Music was originally created by Brian Johnston (Scott's younger brother), who sampled bits of copyrighted music. This had been common practice, but at that point there was a growing awareness of music copyright. Psygnosis asked Tim Wright to replace the offending tracks, who often used arrangements and reworkings of classical and traditional music to avoid copyright problems.
- The only tracks that wasn't replaced is "Can-Can", "She'll be Coming 'Round the Mountain", "Ten Green Bottles" and "How Much is that Doggie in the Window".
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