mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

This puzzle game by Scottish studio DMA Design takes as its inspiration the myth that lemmings (arctic rodents) mindlessly fling themselves off cliffs. In the game, lemmings (pixelly humanoids with green hair and blue leotards) fall from a trap door and begin marching mindlessly to the right, oblivious to cliffs, fire, lakes of acid, and other deadly hazards. When they hit a wall, they turn 180 and march the other way. It's your job to guide as many of them as possible safely to the exit.



To accomplish this, you can assign individual lemmings one of eight skills: Climber (climbs vertical walls), Floater (uses an umbrella to survive falls), Bomber (explodes after 5 seconds, leaving a crater), Blocker (stands in place and won't let other lemmings past), Builder (builds a staircase), Basher (digs a horizontal tunnel), Miner (digs a diagonal tunnel), and Digger (digs a vertical tunnel). Each level offers a limited number of skill assignments, so you have to use them strategically to create a path for the others.

Lemmings was wildly popular in the '90s, spawning multiple expansion packs, sequels, and spinoffs. As a child I don't know if I was really aware of what a global phenomenon it was, but it was certainly a phenomenon in my house, considering the countless hours my brother and I spent trying (and usually failing) to stop the cute little dummies from marching to their doom.

The base game has 120 horizontally scrolling levels split into 4 difficulties (Fun, Tricky, Taxing, Mayhem). As kids I think we could do all 30 Fun levels, which all felt familiar on my recent replay, but I don't know that we got that far on any of the others. Each difficulty is a linear progression where level completion awards a password that you have to write down somewhere to get back to that point the next time you play the game. If only I still had our precious, crumpled sheets of loose leaf filled with columns of smeared passwords, carefully engraved by pencils awkwardly gripped in grubby little kid-hands, I could tell you exactly how many levels we knew how to beat!



But the passwords are the same for everyone, so nowadays you can find the full list online and skip levels as you please. What a time to be alive. Replaying as an adult, I mostly cruised through Tricky, but some of the Taxing levels had me stumped. I eventually decided I did not have time to attempt full completion (120 levels!!) and watched a Let's Play for most of Mayhem.

As a filthy cheating casual, I can tell you that this game is hard. To make it through you have to understand some non-obvious game mechanics, some of which I remembered but others I never knew. (A Climber won't climb a wall if you make him a Builder and build into it. If a Builder hits a Blocker, he turns 180 and keeps building.) Though you have to use the mouse to assign abilities, using the mouse to select abilities eventually becomes way too slow and you have to learn to touch-type the function keys. From what I saw of better players than me, it appears that sometimes your timing has to be pixel-perfect or you can ruin your whole attempt and have to start the level over. Some of the higher levels aren't conceptually difficult, it's just a matter of maintaining perfect execution over several minutes, never fumbling or misclicking.



As a kid I suppose I was blissfully unaware of much of this, as I obviously found the shallow end more than compelling enough. I think part of it was that the lemmings themselves are so cute. Their walk cycle and animations are surprisingly smooth and charming for the sprites being so minuscule. (I especially love how the Builder turns to the camera with a shrug after building the last step. How the heck do you get that to read on a sprite that's only 10 pixels tall?!) The art design of the levels is appealingly varied and weird, from ancient architecture to pastel caverns to flaming hellscapes.

Lemmings also has some of the most deranged and horribly catchy music I've ever heard in a video game, offering funky remixes and mashups of classical pieces with traditional children's songs and 1950s novelty records. Itsy Bitsy Spider with interpolations of both Chopin's Funeral March and Wagner's Bridal Chorus? Sure! Yes! This makes complete sense as a backdrop for a puzzle game about oblivious rodents, and will absolutely not be permanently etched into my brain for the rest of my life!

As a child I'm not sure I was able to understand how bizarre this all was, but I do remember my brother and I made up lemming-themed lyrics to some of the songs. (To this day, when I hear Offenbach's Can-Can, a deeply buried neuron still fires off "lemming, it's a little lemming, it's a little lemming...") That was probably fun for our parents.



The only thing I didn't really like about Lemmings was that in many of the levels you can't save them all. You're not supposed to—each level has a minimum required survival rate that's usually less than 100%—but I wanted to. I always felt bad about sacrificing some to save the rest, even if it was obviously what you're supposed to do. The death animations are not gory but were still slightly horrifying to kid-me (especially when they die of falling damage and go splat). I get the sense that unlike me, the developers were not sensitive about pixel-people meeting a terrible demise, which I suppose was confirmed a few years later in 1997 when the studio released their other big hit: the original Grand Theft Auto.

Lemmings was first released for the Amiga (in fact, it's the #1 rated Amiga game on MobyGames) and was quickly ported to (checks notes) every platform known to 1991 gamerkind. I had the DOS version, which meant that I missed out on multiplayer. Apparently this feature allowed two people to play specially designed levels at the same time, competing to get more lemmings into their own base. It sounds fun, but DOS didn't support two mouse inputs. But it's fine; in our house all games were deathmatch multiplayer, in the sense that my brother and I were constantly fighting over the controls.



Within months of the game's release, the clamor for more resulted in an expansion pack—I want to call it a DLC, but of course it was not downloaded but sold as a physical boxed release—called Oh No! More Lemmings, which added 100 more levels. I did not have this as a kid and have not tried it, but it's said to be very difficult. I did, however, have at least one of the Holiday Lemmings packs, which offered new winter-themed levels where the lemmings were wearing tiny little Santa suits.

My original plan for this post was to combine it with a review of Lemmings 2: The Tribes (which I actually liked better), but then I spent too much time playing the first one and also blathered on far too long about it, so we'll have to save that for another day. (In my youth I also played the much maligned 3D Lemmings, which even at the time I remember thinking was deeply misguided. Unfortunately it was only an early harbinger of the late-'90s glut of 3D games in genres that had no business being 3D.)

The original Lemmings is unfortunately not commercially available. If you've misplaced your floppies/cartridge, various releases are available as abandonware. I was playing the DOS release on DOSBox, which runs fine but you may need to edit some files to defeat the copy protection. If that doesn't sit well or sounds like too much trouble, there are also several fan-made freeware clones that are supposed to run on modern systems, though I have not personally vetted any of them.