Mike Dailly was there at the start of both of DMA Design’s famous games. By his own account, Lemmings began with a few seconds of animation he made to win an argument about how small a sprite could be. In the mid-1990s he wrote the prototype city engines that grew into Grand Theft Auto. Since then he has worked on game-making tools, and in recent years he has become one of the most active developers for the ZX Spectrum Next, writing its best-known emulator and a new version of Lemmings for it.
Fast facts
- Start: one of DMA Design’s first employees, from Dundee’s Kingsway Amateur Computer Club.
- At DMA: programmer on Lemmings, chief Super NES programmer on Lemmings 2, lead programmer on the early Grand Theft Auto prototypes. He left in 1999.
- Later: Visual Sciences, Realtime Worlds, and YoYo Games, where he was lead developer of GameMaker: Studio.
- Spectrum Next: the CSpect emulator; Lemmings; ports including Super Crate Box and Mercenary.
- Award: lifetime achievement at the Scottish Games Awards, 2023.
Dundee and DMA
Dave Jones founded DMA Design in Dundee, and its first staff were his friends from the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club: Russell Kay, Steve Hammond and Mike Dailly. By November 1990 RAZE listed Dailly as co-programmer, with Dave Jones, of the Atari ST version of Lemmings. The same issue found him converting Psygnosis’s Shadow of the Beast to NEC’s PC Engine CD-ROM for the Japanese market. He called the console “gorgeous” and its development system “tacky”, but had still managed 17 layers of parallax scrolling on it.
Lemmings
DMA’s own accounts of where Lemmings came from do not agree, and the Lemmings entry sets them side by side. The earliest, in The One in January 1991, credits a Deluxe Paint animation by Gary Timmons. Later accounts put Dailly at the centre. In Edge in 2001 the story was an argument between Dailly and Scott Johnston: Johnston said a character could go no smaller than 16 pixels, and Dailly thought he could manage eight.
Dailly told his version to Retro Gamer in 2007. The team was working on Walker, which “featured lots of running men”, and he argued that they could be made smaller:
I had maintained that they could be 8 pixels tall (rather than 16). So I created a small animation that demonstrated the new size and showed it to the rest of the guys. However, as luck would have it I had created them walking over a landscape and had added a couple of deaths for them. This struck them all as pretty funny, and from then on the ideas on how to use them came thick and fast.
Gary Timmons then reworked the walk and animated the other actions. Dailly explained that the lemmings’ colours came from the weakest of the target machines. The team wanted the game to look the same everywhere, and the PC’s EGA graphics limited the choice to green hair with blue clothes or blue hair with green clothes. They preferred the green hair. He started the ST conversion, which Brian Watson finished.
For Lemmings 2: The Tribes Dailly was DMA’s chief Super NES programmer. He began the conversion early in 1992, and SNES Force published his diary of it in January 1994. The Super NES’s hardware could not help with the core of the game, lemmings walking over a landscape that they changed as they went. “This was one of the hardest sections to do as it can’t use any of the nice SNES hardware,” he wrote. “The processor is put through hell.”
Grand Theft Auto
By the mid-1990s Dailly was lead programmer at DMA. According to Retro Gamer’s 2008 history of the series, he had written an engine called Rotation that drew isometric cityscapes from a camera the player could turn. It became the first Grand Theft Auto prototype. Then Bullfrog released Syndicate Wars, and Dailly decided his city looked too similar. Edge’s 2006 account adds that he had been impressed by the perspective in Sega’s Clockwork Knight, and a chance remark about top-down racing games gave him the next idea: “It occurred to me that although I had a side-on engine, all I needed to do was add a floor, and it could be an above engine.” The result was a top-down city of simple block buildings. Gary Penn, who joined DMA in 1996, remembered Dailly as “constantly creating these interesting technology showcases, one of which was this top-down view of a world full of simple boxy polygon structures.”
The game was pitched to BMG as Race’n’Chase and came out in 1997 as Grand Theft Auto. Eighteen months into development the whole city was rebuilt. “Mike Dailly came up with a new technique to draw 24bit colour tiles instead of the low-res ones we were using,” one of the team told Edge, and every tile and graphic in the game had to be redrawn.
Dailly left DMA in 1999, before Take-Two bought the studio and moved it to Edinburgh, where it became Rockstar North.
Game-making tools
After DMA, Dailly worked at Visual Sciences, the studio set up by his DMA colleague Russell Kay, and at Realtime Worlds, which Dave Jones founded in 2002. From 2010 to 2018 he was lead developer of GameMaker: Studio at YoYo Games, the company that makes the GameMaker engine. In November 2023 he received the lifetime achievement award at the Scottish Games Awards.
The Spectrum Next
Dailly wrote CSpect, an emulator of the ZX Spectrum Next, to develop his own Next software, and other developers adopted it. Next Magazine called it the “go-to emulator”. He withdrew it from public use in late 2025, then made it available again after the community reacted. CSpect has also been used as an engine to put Next games on Steam. “I don’t like Z80; it’s clunky and annoying,” he told Next Magazine in 2025, “yet the machine is such fun to write for.”
His Next software includes a new Lemmings, written from scratch for the machine rather than converted. Its code is on GitHub, copyright Dailly 2017–2020, with permission to “use any and all code in whatever manner you wish”. The original game’s graphics and levels are excluded, and a converter lets owners of the Windows version use their own copies. He has also written Kingpin, a first-person shooter in the style of Wolfenstein 3D, and he was working on a Next port of Super Crate Box at the end of 2025. Over Christmas 2025 he took apart the Spectrum version of Mercenary with SkoolKit, a set of tools for disassembling Z80 programs, and rebuilt it as Mercenary Enhanced for the Next. “I’ve always felt the Spectrum version should have been the best version out there,” he told the magazine.
Sources
- RAZE issue 1, November 1990: Lemmings credits; the PC Engine Shadow of the Beast.
- The One issue 28, January 1991, pp. 46–50: “The Art of Rodent Design” (team credits; Timmons’s animation).
- SNES Force issue 8, January 1994: interview with Mike Dailly and his Lemmings 2 diary.
- Edge issue 94, February 2001, pp. 134–137: “The making of… Lemmings” (Johnston, Dailly and the 8- and 16-pixel argument).
- Edge issue 164, July 2006: “The Making of Grand Theft Auto” (the city prototype; Clockwork Knight; the top-down engine; the 24-bit tiles).
- “The Making of Lemmings 1 and 2”, Retro Gamer issue 39, 2007: interviews with Mike Dailly and Gary Timmons.
- “The History of… Grand Theft Auto”, Retro Gamer issue 50, 2008: Dailly as lead programmer; Rotation; Syndicate Wars.
- Wireframe issue 51, May 2021: DMA’s first employees from the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club.
- Wireframe issue 66, September 2022, p. 84: Gary Penn on Dailly’s technology showcases.
- Next Magazine issue 8, June 2025, pp. 32–36: Simon Butler’s interview with Mike Dailly (CSpect; Steam; Super Crate Box). Issue 11, December 2025: CSpect withdrawn and restored; Kingpin. Issue 12, February 2026, pp. 15–16: Mercenary Enhanced.
- Mike Dailly, Lemmings for the ZX Spectrum Next, README, github.com/mikedailly/Lemmings (web, secondary).
- “GTA & Lemmings Co-Creator Mike Dailly Wins Lifetime Achievement Award”, Time Extension, November 2023 (web, secondary): leaving DMA in 1999; Visual Sciences, Realtime Worlds and YoYo Games; the award. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2023/11/gta-and-lemmings-co-creator-mike-dailly-wins-lifetime-achievement-award
- “Mike Dailly (game designer)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): lead developer of GameMaker: Studio, 2010–2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Dailly_(game_designer)