Lemmings Amiga 1991 DMA Design David Jones

Lemmings Amiga

DMA Design released Lemmings for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1991. Lemmings is an icon-driven, mouse-controlled puzzle game famous for its playability, audiovisuals and controls. The ST/Amiga versions of Lemmings are also notable for featuring 2-player split-screen mode, which the inferior IBM PC MS-DOS version lacks. [1]

Lemmings was programmed by David Jones, drawn by Scott Johnston, animated by Gary Timmons and composed by Brian Johnston and Tim Wright.

In Lemmings up to 100 little animated sprites representing anthropomorphized lemmings (little "men" with green hair and blue clothes) drop down from a trapdoor in the ceiling and begin walking unwittingly across a landscape, to their doom. To be clear, lemmings have no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. For example, they will step off a towering precipice and drown in the raging seas below or get splattered on rock-hard ground, one after the other, like tomatoes. It is up to players to intervene and save the lemmings by facilitating safe pathways to an exit that the lemmings would otherwise have no hope of reaching because they are not even looking for it.

In order to guide the lemmings-horde safely to exits, players click on icons that represent commands and then click on lemmings to assign those commands to those lemmings (point-and-click).

The commands confer abilities to the lemmings that have been assigned the command; that is, they create a type of lemming that carries out a specific command (an assignment).

Lemming-types include climbers, floaters, blockers, builders, bombers, bashers, diggers and miners. For example, the assignment of the builder is to build bridges, the assignment of the digger is to dig the earth and the assignment of a bomber is to detonate.

The idle, event-based, walk-cycle and assignment animations are impressive considering their small size.

Bashers, diggers and miners modify the landscape by digging tunnels and shafts that the lemmings can walk through and fall down into. Bashers dig horizontally, diggers dig vertically and miners dig diagonally. All diggers continue to dig until there is no more diggable ground in their path or they have been reassigned. A digger could dig a shaft, tunnel across and then mine diagonally downward, and so on, thereby creating a network of tunnels.

Commanding multiple lemmings to undertake the same assignment can increase the rate at which that assigment is carried out. It stands to reason, for example, that two bashers can bore a tunnel twice as fast as one. However, the efficiency of stacked assignments is subject to activation and animation timing to which players naturally become accustomed. Of concern in the case of bashers is the arm-swinging animation.

 

A single bomber blows out only a small portion of the landscape when detonated, but this can suffice to break through thin vertical and horizontal barriers. Blockers assume a stationary position, thereby directing lemmings to reverse their course. Climbers climb upwards on 90° walls, builders build bridges diagonally upwards and floaters safely descend from heights via parasol, aka umbrella. 

Lemmings can be nuked at any time. When the Nuke 'em icon is double-clicked a five-second countdown begins and the lemmings call out, "Oh, no!" and detonate en masse in a pixel-powered fireworks display that became famous in 1991. Nuking is used to trigger a level-restart in no-win fail-state scenarios.

Blockers only stop blocking if they are nuked and builders only build bridges of twelve blocks. A builder that has laid down twelve blocks can be reassigned as builder again in order to lay down another twelve.

All lemmings but the blocker and bomber can be reassigned commands. One lemming can bash through a barrier, climb a cliff and then float down the other side, but a lemming can only be assigned one ability at a time (commands cannot be queued up). Lemmings that have completed their assignment will return to their default state of walking unless, of course, the completion of an assignment results in them falling to their doom or otherwise getting killed.

Lemmings consists of 120 single-player levels and 20 two-player levels. In single-player mode each level in Lemmings is time-limited; that is, players must complete the level within a certain time-frame (e.g. five minutes). The number of different commands are often limited as are the usages of each command. For example, a level may only allow five blockers and five bombers; it is up to the player to utilize that command pool wisely in order to complete the level.

On top of that, each level requires that a certain percentage of lemmings survive the level; that is, that a certain percentage of lemmings reach the exit safely. In addition, the rate of release of lemmings from the trapdoor varies from level to level. The rate of release can be increased or decreased on the fly via +/- icons, but cannot be reduced below a level's settings.

On many levels players are forced to sacrifice some lemmings in order save the vast majority of lemmings (e.g., blockers and bombers).

Amiga Lemmings displays in 16-color 320x200. The active drawspace is 320x176. Lemmings levels employ edgescreen scrolling (the scrolling is pushed by the hardware mouse-cursor at the screen's edges).

Lemmings was distributed on 2x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes. It was not installable to hard disk drive. DMA Design released Oh No! More Lemmings in 1991 as an expansion to or standalone version of Lemmings. Oh No! More Lemmings added 100 levels, 10 two-player levels and six tunes. Logically, most of the levels in Oh No! More Lemmings are more difficult than the levels in the original Lemmings.

Oh No! More Lemmings was distributed on 1x 3.5" 880kB DD diskette.

Lemmings 2-player split-screen mode

It goes without saying that Lemmings is one of the highlights of the ST/Amiga games catalogues. And while the single-player mode is good enough fun for a time, Lemmings' two-player split-screen head-to-head, coop and race modes offer the most fun and replayability.

[1]

Criticism of Lemmings

There is not much to criticize Lemmings for; almost nothing, really.

• Amigas could have handled slightly larger sprites
• The screen-scrolling could have been smoother
• The original Lemmings Amiga palette was EGA-ified for porting to IBM PC MS-DOS
• Overall, Lemmings doesn't take advantage of the Amiga's custom chipset all that much

Lemmings 2: The Tribes Amiga 1993

DMA Design released Lemmings 2: The Tribes for Amiga, Atari ST and IBM PC MS-DOS in 1993. While the Lemmings 2 intro is not as good as the iconic intro of the original Lemmings, the overall presentation and audiovisuals of the sequel are superior. That said, I doubt many Lemmings veterans would have purchased the sequel two years after Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings came out, but I don't doubt that Lemmings 2 sold well enough as a worthy sequel, which it is.

In the above infographic, you can see that there are new Lemmings-types and themed levels, but that Lemmings 2 did not increase the sprite size of the original Lemmings. However, Lemmings 2 does have smoother screen-scrolling and hardware mouse-cursor movement than the original Lemmings. As well, its color palette is not EGA-ified because VGA had hit its stride on IBM PC MS-DOS. Thus, Lemmings 2 is much more colorful than the original Lemmings. A fast-forward icon was also added.

In 1993 Lemmings 2 should have been designed and programmed for the 14 MHz Amiga 1200 AGA with 2 megs of chip RAM, not A500s.

Lemmings 2 was distributed on 3x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes, and can be installed to hard disk drive.

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