Lemmings

Lemmings is one of the smartest puzzle games ever released on PC, and anyone can grasp its principle within seconds. A procession of tiny figures pours out of an entry hatch and marches blindly forward until it hits an obstacle or falls into a pit. The player never controls them directly, instead assigning roles to individual members: a digger breaks through a wall or tunnels through the floor, a builder lays down a staircase, a blocker halts the entire stream, a figure with an umbrella survives a long fall, and a bomber blows up a chunk of terrain along with himself. Each level offers only a limited supply of each ability, a time limit, and a required percentage of lemmings saved, turning the level into an exercise in managing scarce resources. A hundred and twenty levels are split across four difficulty tiers, and the last group ranks among the toughest puzzles of its era.

The DOS version made full use of what PCs had finally learned to do by the early nineties. In VGA mode, dozens of independently animated little figures move smoothly across the screen, each only a few pixels tall, yet it's always clear what each one is doing. The terrain crumbles in real time under pickaxes and explosions, an impressive trick for its day. Control belongs to the mouse: the cursor selects a lemming, the bottom bar handles skill selection, speeding up time, and the emergency detonation of the whole group. The soundtrack is a collection of folk and classical melodies rendered through AdLib or Sound Blaster, joined by digitized voice clips that stuck in the memory of anyone who ever saw the game.

Critics and players embraced it enthusiastically, the port appeared on practically everything with a screen, and it spawned a long line of expansion packs and sequels. Its influence is still felt today: indirectly controlling dim-witted charges who need the player to reshape the world beneath their feet became a genre pattern all its own. Coming back to it today, it's striking how merciless the later levels can be, and how well the combination of calm deliberation and last-second panic still holds together. The graphics have aged with dignity, and the gameplay hasn't aged at all.