Lemmings

Little green-haired creatures that march mindlessly toward certain doom unless you help them in time. Lemmings from 1991 ranks among the most brilliant logic games ever, and on the Amiga, its home platform, it showed itself off in full glory.

The principle is perfectly simple and at the same time inexhaustibly deep. A stream of lemmings pours from an opening, walking straight ahead, falling off cliffs and calmly striding into a chasm. Your task is to assign individual lemmings roles: diggers, bridge builders, blockers, floaters or, in extreme cases, the one who blows himself up. From the available abilities you must piece together a path that leads the required number of creatures to the exit.

The magic lies in how great depth arises from few rules. Each level is a puzzle that often has more than one solution, and the pressure grows with time and with the number of lemmings you are looking after. The game can be relaxed and insanely tense at the same moment.

Behind Lemmings stands the Scottish studio DMA Design, that is, the people who later created the Grand Theft Auto series. Even here you could see their sense for ideas, wit and gameplay. The title became an enormous commercial hit and was ported to just about everything that had a screen, from consoles to handheld devices.

Lemmings went down in history as one of the defining puzzle games of its time and still entertains today with its purity. It is proof that great game design does not need complexity, just a perfect idea taken to its logical conclusion.

Why play: A brilliantly simple idea with enormous depth; one of the best puzzles home computers ever received.