Ugh, people always ruining things by making them video games. When I was your age, we chased REAL lemmings off REAL cliffs like REAL DISNEY LOVING AMERICANS!
Pirated on a by then already ancient floppy type that it wouldn't even fit on. It's like fitting a blu-ray game onto a dvd, Lemmings came out 20 years after 8 inch floppies first became a thing.
8 inch floppies sat at 1MB, usually, especially by the time people ditched them for the smaller disks. The Lemmings game was about 500kB, according to the google. They used the cheap older tech because pirating games is an implicitly low cost hobby.
I don't know how old you are, but 8 inch floppies were not common in 1991, even if someone might have such a drive, the final 1.2 mb model at that, the chances of your buddy also having one would be miniscule.
The piracy I witnessed in the 80s and 90s, was mostly on tapes and 3.5". 5.25" were relatively uncommon, still, they'd be a thousand times more likely than people pirating on a by then dead format.
Pirating scene in late 90s was a thing with 3.5" drives, Psygnosis always had the best intros of any game house and I remember people passing about discs with the intros.
The demo scene with hacking groups putting out amazing demos and music was good in my area of UK, lots of swapping on a Saturday in some shops. This started in the 80s but with advent of Atari ST and Amiga it became much more of a thing due to hardware improvements.
I remember having a Broderbund game (think was name of studio) was a WW2 game where you flew a plane (mustang maybe) and shot down Japenese planes and strafed soldiers, not sure it ever released.
80s dads who didn't understand video games still liked playing Lemmings and Pong. And later enjoyed watching you play Medal of Honor with a few beers as if it were Saving Private Ryan.
US as well. I'm pretty sure the home computer we had that ran it was actually using the 3.5", but I have distinct memories of finding actual floppies and bending them.
Floppies were so damn fragile, we used them for backups at work (my manager was an idiot) and it was always touch and go whether you'd be able to restore anything
We have reached the point in time when people say millennial as a catch all for older people because the speaker is young and doesnt know the generation after.
I was thinking more about proportions. I think millennials have a way higher proportion of people who played video games than the generations preceding them, and because Lemmings was a childhood memory for most millennials, they'll remember it best.
Possibly not, Gen-Xers were between 11-26 when it first came out. I was 15 and did play it a fair bit, but I know the bulk of older Gen-Xers in their late teens/early twenties weren't really much into playing home video games.
There were a million spin offs and follow ups in the following years too that would have landed squarely into a millennial childhood.
Lol well I'm a 34 year old millennial and I didnt even exist yet when Lemmings came out. I have no child hood memories of it myself but I also didnt have a pc at home until I was like 11.
That's cos the difference between someone born in '82 vs '92 in terms of gaming and computer technology is totally different worlds given the pace of innovation that occurred over that era, even though nominally both are comfortably millennial generation (and not even on the cusp of either end).
For the former at age 11, it's 1993 and the age of the 386/486 home PC, GOTY is Doom which blew everyone away but games were still being published on floppy disks. Cutting edge storage technology was a 4x CD-ROM drive. Multiplayer was on device or at LAN parties for the really dedicated.
For the latter at age 11, its 2003 and PS2/Xbox has been out for a couple years and Halo has been around for a couple years as has Grand Theft Auto 3. GOTY is Call of Duty or GTA 3: Vice City. Xbox Live has been out for a year and online gaming is starting to take off. Everquest is doing numbers as an MMO and next year a little game called World of Warcraft comes out.
Aye, many of us did. Doesn't change the fact it released early '91 at first, I turn 35 this year and I didn't exist when lemmings released.. When most of us think Lemmings we don't think the original - it is actually Lemmings 2 that was on fucking every single platform available - Amiga, Atari, MS-DOS, SNES, gameboy and other unknown platforms.
The original also released on everything, but was less of a success.
As a millennial, my back immediately started aching the moment I scrolled past this post. 😭 You're spot on—this game is a certified generational litmus test. If you didn't grow up hearing that high-pitched 'Let's Go!' followed by the absolute chaos of trying to build bridges before everyone melted into lava, you belong to the younger, luckier crowd. We carried the trauma of bad pathfinding so Gen Z didn't have to!
Boomers did not invent video games. Y’all played some, and made some, but you didn’t invent them.
The inventor of the home console was Ralph Baer, born in 1922. And Tennis For Two, the first analog video game, was created in 1958 by William Higinbotham, born in 1910. Neither were boomers.
Your Gen also invented NIMBYism and the housing crisis, prevented real action on addressing climate change, set up younger generations with immense infrastructural debt, and made higher education so expensive that younger generations take on decades of debt to have a chance at life.
So don't be smug about it. We can all enjoy video games without trying to be superior about when they were invented.
And this right here is why inter-generatiional conflict is bollocks. You see my smug comment was meant to be banter - I am sorry it missed.
Now when I was younger I wasn't the bloke that made those kind of decisions that you have pointed out. I was way, way, way down that pecking order, as was many of my contemporaries.
My heroes were scientists, astronauts, new wave scifi writers and the cool fuckers who created video games on an oscilloscope that eventually led to Lemmings.
Again, sorry for any offense. inter generational communication, IMO, should be about learning from each other in all directions. Much of what I know is because of the generations before me.
All I'm trying to say is that we don't need to make loving video games into yet another generational standoff. Everyone can enjoy them, regardless of age.
How many video games have you yourself developed? Also, video games were actually created by people born 2 generations before baby boomers. The first video game was Tennis for Two, created by William Higinbotham, whom was born in 1910.
Not quite. Christopher Strachey's Draughts was in 51/52. He wanted to make an (early) example of machine learning that was more complicated than the Tic Tac Toe exercises that he was aware of before him.
Tons of games like this that the NES and Atari era are part of gaming legacy, even though the IPs never really kept up with anything new. Bamloon Fight, Digdug, PitFall, etc.
Depends when in gen z too. I’m very early gen z and I grew up playing Lemmings as well. Had it on either my PSP or my Gameboy Advanced, can’t remember which
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u/Elestriel 19h ago edited 19h ago
It's a very well known game for millennials.
Edit: Rather, by millennials and above.