A swarm of little green-haired creatures marches blindly towards its doom and only you can save them. Lemmings, released by the studio DMA Design in 1991, is one of the most addictive and inventive puzzle games of all, and on the Atari ST it was among its home platforms.
The principle of the game is ingeniously simple. A stream of lemmings pours from an entrance, going ever forward regardless of chasms, lava or traps, and your task is to bring a sufficient number of them to the exit. To do this you assign professions to individual lemmings: one digs a tunnel, another builds stairs, another blocks the rest, yet another turns into a climber or a parachutist. From these simple elements arise levels requiring careful planning and precise timing, often under the pressure of a ticking clock.
DMA Design, the Scottish studio that later became famous as the creator of the Grand Theft Auto series, created an unexpected worldwide hit with Lemmings. The game enchanted players with a combination of a cute appearance, black humour and surprisingly deep gameplay. Hundreds of levels divided into difficulty categories offered an enormous portion of fun, and the game quickly spread to dozens of platforms, from home computers to consoles.
Culturally, Lemmings became one of the defining titles of its time and one of the most ported video games in history. The characteristic sound of Let's go and the moment when a lemming blows itself up with the cry Oh no wrote themselves into players' memory. The series continued with a number of installments and add-ons and the brand has survived to this day in various forms, including mobile games.
Today Lemmings remains a textbook example of timeless game design that works regardless of the graphical possibilities of the era. Its magic lies in a perfect balance between accessibility and depth.
Why play: For the ingeniously simple and timeless puzzle concept from the future creators of GTA, which entertains even after decades.
Game 14 of 72 for Atari ST
The same title elsewhere (9)
The Amiga is Lemmings' home platform and offers the reference version, with the full level count and smoothest mouse control. The DOS PC version stays very close, keeping mouse control equally precise, with EGA or VGA graphics only slightly adjusted. On the Commodore 64, developers had to split the game across multiple disks due to limited memory and reduce scrolling smoothness, yet preserved most levels. Portable versions for Game Boy and SEGA Game Gear suffer from small screen resolution — in hectic scenes with a hundred lemmings on screen it's hard to keep track, and D-pad control never quite matches mouse precision. On SEGA Mega Drive and Super Nintendo you play with a gamepad cursor, slower than a mouse, but both are colorful and include most original puzzles.
