Format: Various Publisher: Psygnosis Developer: DMA Design

Few games have legacies comparable to that of Lemmings – a title that has appeared in some form or other on nearly 30 consoles and operating systems since its creation in 1991.
Obviously the appeal of the game is enduring, but successive sequels have failed to add a great deal to the dizzyingly entertaining puzzles of the original. So much of the first game got it right – and it’s only in the light of underwhelming attempts to build on the franchise that the delicacy of that design has been revealed. The individual lemmings in your care can be assigned just eight different skills, helping them overcome obstacles and allowing you to guide the group to safety: digging through obstructions, climbing up vertical surfaces, blocking the path of other lemmings, and so forth. With each level restricting your quota of skills to dispense, the player is forced to be economical and think carefully about the sequence in which the skills are employed in order for the path to safety to be cleared.
It’s perhaps exactly the right number of concepts to juggle. The complexity of the puzzles being limited to combinations of only a few elements means that each stage feels possible, even though it may be agonisingly difficult. Clearly this is key to the enjoyment of puzzle-based games, a genre which can all too easily rely on bombarding a player with options to exponentially increase the difficulty rather than using thoughtful game design to tease out ever more Byzantine conundrums from a strict set of parameters.
The art style of the original is also something that later games haven’t been able to capture, feeling the necessity to show the game moving beyond the technical limitations that informed the original’s charming pixel-art, eventually making an ill-advised switch to 3D. Numbering 120 on the Amiga version, the levels ranged from the incredibly minimalist to the vividly realised, taking in caverns, hellish lairs and ancient ruins. Players of the game will remember being astonished by The Art Gallery, a level which showed exactly what could be done at the time in terms of realistic light and shadow using the power of Deluxe Paint – the software whose design was adopted for Lemmings’ own editor.

A great deal of what is pleasing about Lemmings is defined by its visual approach, and the way the team surpassed restrictions that were placed upon the game’s aesthetic by the technology of the time. In fact the entire design concept was a result of its art style, rather than the other way around: the idea for the game began as an argument between designers Scott Johnson and Mike Dailly about how few pixels could be used to create a recognisable animated character. The result was a looped animation in which lines of small, colourful men marched across the screen to meet with various unpleasant fates – some crushed by a large weight, others evaporated by a laser. It was Russell Kay (who would later program the PC version) who first suggested that there was a potential game in this, bestowing the ‘lemmings’ tag to the traipsing legions, oblivious to surrounding dangers.
Much of their distinctive look is therefore a result of working to limitations – even their green hair was a choice made in order to fit in with the 16-colour palette of early graphics solutions. But it’s their animation which really makes the game. Despite being a mere ten pixels high, each lemming not only conveys its current occupation at a glance but does so emotively. Walking lemmings seem to jaunt along merrily, the green mop of hair bouncing on their head; lemmings assigned with the blocker skill stand with stoic duty, arms outstretched, looking to either side like policemen directing traffic; a lemming set to detonate shudders with despair before exploding.
The game’s triumph was to put across a sense of your charges’ guileless personality; it made an emotional connection that was alien to coldly abstracted puzzle games like Tetris. Who didn’t feel a pang of pity when they first heard a lemming squeak “Oh no!” before exploding? (And who didn’t then cackle while setting the entire population to nuke?) Lemmings is a game that is not only mechanically ingenious in its conception, but innovates hugely in the aesthetics of its execution, compelling you to pit yourself against it via wit and character as much as it does through the draw of the challenge itself.
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