Lemmings | Code Like It's 198x

A Lemmings level starts with a trapdoor creaking open. Tiny figures with green hair and blue clothes drop out and walk. They do not stop for cliffs, water or fire, and the only way to save them is to change what some of them do: this one digs, that one builds a staircase, that one stands still with arms out and turns the others round. The lemmings were eight pixels tall, and there could be a hundred of them on the Amiga screen at once. Lemmings was written in Dundee by DMA Design, published by Psygnosis early in 1991, and by 1997 had been converted to 21 formats.

Explore the skills, shared terrain and small interventions that get the crowd home in our Lemmings study.

Fast facts

Developer: DMA Design, Dundee.
Publisher: Psygnosis, at £24.99 on the Amiga, Atari ST and PC.
Released: early 1991 on the Amiga. Edge later dated the release to 14 February 1991.
Team credited in 1991: Dave Jones (programming), Gary Timmons (animation), Scott Johnston (graphics) and Brian Johnston (music), according to The One. Mike Dailly and Russell Kay also worked on the game.
Levels: 120, in four ratings of 30: Fun, Tricky, Taxing and Mayhem, plus a two-player mode.
Reception: 96% in The One.

An animation that became a game

DMA’s accounts of where Lemmings came from do not agree in the details, and Edge noted in 2001 that “attribution of credit for the Lemmings concept depends upon who you speak to”. The versions do agree on one thing: the game began as a few seconds of animation drawn in Deluxe Paint, with no game in mind.

The earliest account, in The One in January 1991, credits Gary Timmons with a Deluxe Paint animation “that showed a gun on cliff and lots of little guys walking up and being blasted”. The team thought that if a player could control the little guys “and get them to do lots of things at once to avoid mass mayhem they’d have a really playable game”. According to the magazine, six months of design came before any code, and programming started in June 1990.

Later accounts put Mike Dailly at the centre. In Edge in 2001, the DMA programmers Scott Johnston and Mike Dailly had been arguing about how small a sprite could be and still have character: Johnston said it could go no lower than 16 pixels, and Dailly thought he could go down to eight. “It all happened in a day,” Dave Jones told the magazine. A programmer had made an animation of “a bunch of little guys walking up a steep slope, and being blasted at the top by a big gun … I just thought – there’s a fun game in that.” Dailly’s own version, in Retro Gamer in 2007, is that the team was working on Walker, which “featured lots of running men”, when he made his eight-pixel animation, and that he had added “a couple of deaths” which everyone found funny. “It was suggested that they were like lemmings – and the name stuck!” Gary Timmons told the magazine. Retro Gamer’s 2012 history of Psygnosis says it was Russell Kay, who later wrote the PC version, who commented that there was “a game in that”, and that the demo was first shown to Psygnosis at the PCW Show in 1989.

Eight jobs

Every lemming walks until it hits something, then turns round. The player’s tools are a row of icons at the bottom of the screen, each with a limited number of uses on that level. There are eight jobs:

Climber: scales vertical walls, and stays a climber.
Floater: opens an umbrella and survives a fall that would otherwise kill it.
Bomber: a five-second countdown appears over its head, then it explodes, taking some of the scenery with it.
Blocker: stands with arms out and turns the others back. It cannot be changed back, so the only way to release a blocker is to blow it up.
Builder: lays a short staircase of bricks. When the bricks run out it goes back to walking, and the player has to give it the job again to make the staircase longer.
Basher: punches a tunnel horizontally, but not through metal.
Miner: digs diagonally downwards.
Digger: digs straight down.

Other icons change how fast the lemmings come out of the trapdoor, pause the game, and set off every lemming at once with a mushroom cloud. Each level sets a time limit and a percentage of lemmings to save. Amiga Format pointed to one that asked for 99% of the 100 starters. “Eight abilities is just about the right number,” Jones said in 1991. “Only six of those take effect straight away and two don’t.”

The game’s skill was in combining jobs, and in timing. A blocker could hold the crowd while a builder bridged a gap; a basher could open a pillar just as the queue reached it. “Lemmings thrives on panic, lateral thinking and accurate mouse work,” wrote Amiga Format. Mistakes were cheap to try again, because a password for each level meant a player never had to replay one already finished.

Small sprites

The size and the colours came from the hardware. To put many lemmings on screen, Timmons told Edge, “I reduced the number of colours to three [two bit planes] so they could be used as sprites in a game with many onscreen at one time.” The green hair was chosen because “it was easy to just slide the RGB sliders in DPaint to values for green”. Dailly told Retro Gamer that the colours also had to work on the PC’s EGA graphics, and that the PC version had to cut the maximum number of lemmings on a level from 100 to 80.

Timmons’s other job was to make eight pixels look like a character. “The challenge of the animation was in getting the player to believe he is really seeing the lemmings as illustrated on the box cover, and not just a small bunch of pixels,” he said. Miners had to look as if they were working hard, and bashers as if they had “big, heavy fists”. Several levels borrowed scenery from other Psygnosis games: ZZAP! spotted landscapes from Shadow of the Beast, Menace and Awesome.

Sound

The lemmings talk. They shout “Let’s go!” at the start of a level, and there are cries of “Oh no!” and “yippee”. Dailly told Retro Gamer that Brian Johnston did the sounds, and that Johnston’s mother supplied the first lemming voice.

The music was rewritten late. Tim Wright, a Psygnosis musician, told Arcade in 1999 that Brian Johnston’s original music “was based on famous movie themes, but then I got a call two weeks from launch telling me to recompose it”, because of copyright. What replaced it was nursery songs and old popular tunes, such as “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” and “Old MacDonald”. Dailly remembered it slightly differently in 2007: the team had wanted old TV themes like Mission: Impossible, “but Dave and Psygnosis got nervous and the idea was dropped”.

Reception and sales

The reviews were outstanding. The One gave the Amiga version 96%. Amiga Format called the concept “incredibly original” and summed the game up in one word: “Perfect”. Arcade recalled in 1999 that the French magazine Génération 4 had given it 110%. In a survey of the year 1991 Amiga Action wrote that Lemmings “took the leisure industry by storm”. Jones told Edge in 2001 that the game was in the top 20 for two years.

Sales figures grew with the retelling:

January 1992: “in excess of 365,000 copies across all formats” (Amiga Format).
1995: over two million copies worldwide (CU Amiga, May), and over three million (Amiga User International, June).
January 1997: Edge wrote that the games had “shifted 20 million copies of the groundbreaking puzzle game across 21 formats”.
2012: “estimated to have sold over 15 million copies” (Retro Gamer).

The later totals probably count the sequels and every conversion. None of these sources says how the figures were measured.

One kind of attention was unwanted. Jones told Edge that the game made network television in the southern United States for “inciting devil worship”, because on some lava levels “the lemmings would jump into the mouth of a fire-breathing demon to finish the level”.

Conversions

Lemmings was designed and written for the Amiga, PC and Atari ST at the same time. Russell Kay programmed the PC version, and Dailly started the ST version, which Brian Watson finished. By Dailly’s account DMA itself also wrote the Spectrum, CD-i, CDTV and Atari Lynx versions. Commodore gave Lemmings away with its CDTV CD player in 1991.

Other companies wrote most of the other conversions:

ZX Spectrum (128K only), reviewed in CRASH in December 1991, with 60 levels, 15 in each rating.
Super NES and NES, published by Sunsoft in 1992. Sunsoft also published the Mega Drive version. Dailly thought the Super NES and Game Boy versions were very well done.
Commodore 64, which arrived late. Commodore Format’s cover line in December 1993 was “Lemmings is finally here”.
Master System, Game Gear, Game Boy, Macintosh, Sam Coupé and FM Towns, among others. Edge counted 21 formats by 1997.

Dailly said that the computer versions played best: “The game was designed to be played with a mouse, so the ones that used a mouse worked best.” Jones agreed, telling Edge in 1997 that Lemmings “didn’t translate particularly well to consoles” because it needed a mouse or some other analogue input. Two unofficial versions came from fans. In 1996 two French programmers, Olivier Zardini and Antoine Vignau, working as Brutal Deluxe, wrote LemminGS for the Apple IIGS. It was never sold; they gave it away with their graphics program. Brutal Deluxe has since published its source code.

Sequels

Oh No! More Lemmings (late 1991) had 100 new levels, sold as a data disk or a stand-alone game. It “was supposed to be a data disk”, Dailly said, “but since the traps were code-driven this wasn’t possible”. The level editing had also changed hands: these were “the first batch of levels to be made by folk other than the original team”.
Christmas Lemmings began as a promotion: a few levels with lemmings in Santa outfits, given away on magazine cover disks. Psygnosis then sold further Holiday Lemmings editions.
Lemmings 2: The Tribes (1993) had twelve tribes, each with its own skills, from space to Highland. Players could tackle the tribes in any order, which meant being stuck on one level no longer stopped the whole game. Dailly thought it had “some great tech, but the game was overly complex”.
All New World of Lemmings was DMA’s last Lemmings game. It cut back to three tribes and fewer skills. More games were planned, but DMA sold the rights to Psygnosis.

After that Psygnosis made Lemmings without DMA: 3D Lemmings for the PlayStation in 1995, the platform game Lomax, and Lemmings Revolution. Lemmings Paintball was written by Russell Kay at his new company, Visual Sciences. None of the later games repeated the original’s success, and Jones said of the 3D version, “That wasn’t one of the best.”

The series stayed with Psygnosis’s owner, Sony. Team17 remade Lemmings for the PSP, which amused Dailly, since DMA had always thought Worms was borrowing its ideas. There was also an EyeToy game for the PlayStation 2, and a download for the PlayStation 3. A free-to-play Lemmings for mobile phones followed in 2018. Dailly himself went back to the game for the ZX Spectrum Next. His Next Lemmings is on GitHub, and anyone may use the code, but not the original game’s graphics or levels.

Sources

The One issue 28, January 1991, pp. 46–50: review (96%; prices and formats; “100 ‘situations’”), “The Art of Rodent Design” (team credits; Timmons’s Deluxe Paint animation; six months of design; programming from June 1990; Jones on the eight abilities and the grading), and “And Still to Come…” (Walker).
Amiga Format issue 20, March 1991, pp. 62–63: review (the jobs, the password system, 99% of the 100 starters, “Perfect”).
ZZAP! issue 72, April 1991, p. 75: review (four ratings of thirty levels; two-player mode; scenery from Shadow of the Beast, Menace and Awesome).
CRASH issue 94, December 1991: ZX Spectrum review (60 levels, 128K).
Info issue 45, December 1991: Lemmings with new CDTV units.
Amiga Format issue 30, January 1992: news of Oh No! More Lemmings (100 new levels; “in excess of 365,000 copies across all formats”).
Amiga Action issue 29, February 1992: the year 1991.
Nintendo Power issue 34, March 1992, and issue 37, June 1992: the Super NES and NES versions from Sunsoft. Sega Visions, August 1992: the Genesis (Mega Drive) version from Sunsoft.
Amiga Format issue 46, May 1993: Lemmings 2 and Walker reviewed as DMA Design/Psygnosis games.
Commodore Format issue 39, December 1993: cover (“Lemmings is finally here”).
CU Amiga, May 1995, and Amiga User International, June 1995: sales of over two and over three million.
Edge issue 27, December 1995: 3D Lemmings on the PlayStation.
Edge issue 41, January 1997, pp. 52–58: DMA Design studio visit (20 million copies across 21 formats; Jones on consoles and the mouse).
Arcade issue 2, January 1999, p. 174: “Timewarp” (Jones on Dailly’s animation; Tim Wright on the music; Génération 4’s 110%; DMA selling the concept to Psygnosis; “That wasn’t one of the best”).
Edge issue 94, February 2001, pp. 134–137: “The making of… Lemmings” (the release date; Johnston, Dailly, the 8- and 16-pixel argument; Timmons on the animation and the colours; the eight professions; the charts; the television complaint).
Retro Gamer issue 10, 2004: LemminGS by Brutal Deluxe.
“The Making of Lemmings 1 and 2”, Retro Gamer issue 39, 2007: interviews with Mike Dailly and Gary Timmons (Walker; the name; EGA; 100 and 80 lemmings; the sounds; the tunes; the conversions; Oh No!; Christmas Lemmings; Lemmings 2; All New World of Lemmings; the later games; Team17).
“Psygnosis”, Retro Gamer issue 108, November 2012, p. 25: Russell Kay’s “a game in that”; the 1989 PCW Show; Tim Wright; “over 15 million copies”.
Brutal Deluxe, LemminGS source code, brutaldeluxe.fr (web, secondary): a disk image offered as “the complete source code”. https://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/sourcecode/lemmings.html
“Lemmings (video game)”, Wikipedia: the 2018 mobile game (web, secondary).
Mike Dailly, Lemmings for the ZX Spectrum Next, github.com/mikedailly/Lemmings: the licence (web, secondary).