Lemmings

There are only a handful of games where a few seconds of footage is enough to know exactly what they are about. Lemmings is precisely such a title. A crowd of little green-haired creatures marches blindly and stubbornly forward, falling into chasms, walking into traps and into lava, and the only thing standing between them and certain doom is you. The moment you first realize that these little beings will do nothing clever on their own is the starting shot of one of the most addictive puzzle games ever.

The core of the game is brilliantly simple. The lemmings emerge from a hatch and keep going in the same direction until they hit an obstacle. Your task is to assign roles to individual creatures that change the behavior of the whole crowd: a digger burrows a path downward, a builder constructs stairs across a chasm, a blocker stops the others like a living wall and sacrifices itself for the greater good. From these few abilities arises a surprisingly deep puzzle about timing, sequence, and how many creatures you are willing to let die in order to save the rest.

Behind the game stands the Scottish studio DMA Design, released under the Psygnosis label in 1991. DMA Design is today renowned above all as the cradle of the Grand Theft Auto series, so Lemmings is in a sense a predecessor of one of the biggest gaming phenomena in history. The game was originally created on the Amiga and from there spread to practically everything that had a screen, including a version for the Commodore 64.

Working with the limited hardware of the 8-bit C64 was a challenge, because the original Lemmings featured dozens of moving creatures at once and the colorful graphics of the Amiga. Even so, the conversion succeeded and the game retained its basic magical principle here too: the pressure of making decisions under a ticking limit and the satisfaction of a well-solved level. Among the most iconic elements are the audio side with catchy melodies and the famous panic button that makes all the remaining lemmings explode at once.

Culturally, Lemmings joined the ranks of titles that defined the puzzle genre and inspired countless imitators. It became the subject of many sequels and remakes, and its creatures are to this day instantly recognizable as one of the symbols of the golden era of home computers. For many players it was the first game where they understood that thinking could be more fun than reflexes.

Why play: A timeless puzzle classic whose simple principle still reliably absorbs you for hours on end, and in which you recognize the seed of the studio that later gave rise to GTA.