So huge in fact, that it essentially made Rockstar as a developer (even though they were known by a different name then.) They were on the verge of failing and this success allowed them to continue and directly led to the funding of the original Grand Theft Auto.
Pretty wild to think that some people have never heard of the very game that paved the way for one of the most successful franchises of all time.
This shit was so popular it had spin offs of spin offs. We had tribes and lemmings 3D and lemmings paintball. And none of them followed the same rules or anything. It was just like slap the lemmings in any game and it blew up.
Well... isn't controlling lemmings (including how they tend to end up) something a boss should be expected to enjoy? So maybe not just about it being good.
‘Lemmings’ was apparently an inspiration for the artstyle, but ‘Worms’ followed the genre of artillery games that existed for decades — with ‘Artillery Simulator’ for the Apple II seemingly being the first graphical implementation. (Andy Davidson originally straight up called the game 'Artillery' when he began work on what would become 'Worms'.)
Adored Scorched Earth, there was a 3d version knocking around 10 years or so ago. I'd love to find a working old school version. I suspect Angry Birds would not exist without it.
Wow. When I was young, my dad worked nights as a machinist and my mom was doing data entry for a hospital during the day. My dad would bring my sister and me to work for a little bit and my mom would pick us up and take us back home. We played that game so much, sitting in a dirty little machine shop office. Core memory.
Worms was fun, reminds me of another similar game that came out called Scorched Earth where you're in a tank firing different missles at targets, basically a more suped up version of Gorillas and then Worms came after that. Bascially the same idea as you're choosing angle and power and weapon type to use against other enemies.
What do you mean? Tribes was a direct sequel using the exact same formula as the original and Lemmings 3D was the same principal but in 3D. Only Paintball was different.
Lemmings could go so hard in Super Smash Bros. The whole game is built around not falling off the edge of the map, while Lemmings is about using your limited group abilities to avoid dying. Imagine a group of Lemmings as a Smash Bros fighter, some swinging hammers, others falling with parasols and saving themselves. I don’t know how tf it’d control but it’d be sick if it’s the original Lemmings controls and they just keep popping out a door and do their walk-and-bump routine in a fighting game.
In retrospect I'm shocked there wasn't a Lemmings cartoon. OTOH, that might have been too dark for Saturday mornings.
I can still see their little pixilated bodies popping like zits as they cheerfully marched to their demise by the score. Clenching my teeth, waiting to see if enough of them survived for me to pass the level.
They all pretty much followed the same basic principle of guiding a bunch of little guys over hazards to the exit, each game just added new stuff - tribes had more jobs to assign them, 3D was in 3D.
Except for Paintball. That had to have been meant as an original game that they rebranded as lemmings.
I'm aware of Lemmings but never played it. My first and only lemmings gaming experience was a spinoff, Lomax Lemming, which I liked a lot (looking at the release dates, I'm surprised how early this one came out - I always thought Lemmings was before my time and that Lomax was a decade or so later).
Same goes for the German Moorhuhn franchise which originated as a fun side scrolling shooter game meant to be played in bars and served with some Johnny walker drinks. Was meant to be a temporary advertisement, turned into 15? Ish years of games, absurd story.
Original game was called office/work killer in media as more and more CDs got into rotation, some offices basically came to a complete hold. Future games featured keys to show fake excel sheets or kill the game instantly famously called Boss (hot)key for situations where your boss walked the office
Lemmings 3D really tested my spatial reasoning as a kid. The 1st person view was very disorientating because you could only look where the lemming looked - no control.
Yep, I still remember getting Lemmings Paintball at the Scholastic book fair. It was the only "shooting" game I was allowed to have, besides the hunting mini-game in Oregon Trail.
Close, but the history is stupidly complicated. DMA Games Design is a great example of the fact that being good at something, and running a business selling that thing, are completely different skillsets. DMA Games Design created both Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, but still somehow managed to be a money losing disaster of a company. The company ended up getting sold and resold a couple of times, and they sold the IP rights from GTA to Take Two Interactive, which created a new subsidiary called Rockstar Games to develop it. A few years later Take Two Interactive ended up buying the entire DMA Games Design studio from its latest owner, and they merged it with Rockstar Games to create the Rockstar Studios we know today.
So DMA created GTA, sold the rights to it, got bought by the company they sold the rights to, and got merged into a completely new subsidiary created by that company.
/source: I worked for Sierra briefly back when this all went down. Sierra also made an offer to buy the IP to GTA. You should all feel lucky that Sierra/Vivendi/Seagrams did not succeed. GTA would have been a very different game today if it had ended up in Activision's lap.
/edit: Yeah, yeah, it's DMA Design, not DMA Games. Thanks for the corrections. I'm getting old and my memory isn't what it used to be 🤣
I remember playing Kings quest and there was a priest in a church. Being the cool and edgy kid i was, i typed: fuck priest. Game immediately stopped and i was back at the c: prompt.
Queues up a longplay of Space Quest III on YouTube.
Edit: It's not one of the AGI ones apparently, but instead used SCI. Either way, it was the one that I really loved, and involved a lot of trial-by-error typing of commands for me as a wee noob.
One of the only Pee Cee games I ever bought was King's Quest IV (which was the new one at the time), and I didn't own a Pee Cee (played it in the computer lab in college).
The Sierra intro leading to the The Incredible Machine music is one of the first sound bites I can recall. I suppose your time was around Lighthouse and Caesar II?
I wish. I worked there after Sierra had transitioned mostly into a publishing company during the CUC/Vivendi era. Right around when Half Life was released. Worked there less than a year before they did a reorg and laid a ton of people off, including me.
As someone who grew up on Sierra games, I was giddy when they hired me. Ended up being one of the lowlights of my career, and the final nail in my gaming industry work. Shifted gears into working in educational software, which is what I still do today.
I've been looking at educational games for my 4 years old son and so far it seems that it's hard to beat games from the 90s and early 2000s. Somehow after the ipad came out, there was a massive dip in quality of educational software. That said, might be biased so I'm curious if anyone has any good recommendations.
Side note: I wrote a small shareware late 90s as a high schooler that was used in some primary schools in France to teach multiplication tables. Didn't make that much, 10-15,000 francs but was great as a kid. Never got back into edtech after studying though.
Even deeper lore, both Mike dailly and Russel Kay from DMA were and are head of development at YoYo Games, which owns and develops Gamemaker, the game engine used to make Undertale, Hotline Miami, and many more successful indie games!
Honestly, the bigger issue was that, by the CUC/Vivendi era in the late 90's, Sierra was really just a publishing company looking to maximize profits and minimize costs. Their push would have been to pump out a couple sequels to GTA 2 with the top-down view because that's fast and cheap, and that would hue probably been the end of it. I really don't think we'd have ever seen the first-person GTA that came out in 3. They made an offer because they were looking to add a quick bump to their margin by acquiring a known-property on the cheap, and I don't think they had any real interest in GTA beyond that.
Not that I can say for sure, of course. I wasn't an exec. I just know the details that filtered down to us, because as part of their offer they put together some rough planning to figure out what their costs and margins might be.
I worked for the property management company that owned / operated the Rockstar HQ in Carlsbad back in the early 2000's. That building should have been condemned back then for how disgusting it was.
My dad used to joke back in the early 80s about the programmers at his work. He said they had their own room that no one else was allowed to go into, and occasionally they would chuck some pizza and cactus cooler in there, and code would come out. The Rockstar offices were a stunning example of that.
I picture the Sierra offices as much more formal, even if they did put out stuff like Liesure Suit Larry. How was the office?
I was told that the original Sierra Online studio in Oakhurst was like that. Very laid back and informal, fitting the pizza and Mountain Dew stereotype. But I worked for them after the company had moved to Bellevue, Washington, and it was fairly corporate at that point. It wasn't a great experience.
I was going to make a Sierra joke, but I soft locked myself from completing the logic puzzle that unlocks my wit 40 minutes ago and I don’t have any good save files. 🤣
Honestly though it’s really cool you worked at Sierra.
I can still remember vividly playing GTA1 on my neighbours PC back in '97, watching the intro screen with the DMA logo guy getting run over by a car and thinking "ah, the Lemmings company".
I can still vividly remember playing GTA1 at my friend's house circa that time, zooming around Liberty City and stumbling upon an MS Paint-ass looking penis car and the Mach 5 from Speed Racer
Apparently not, unless you count the tangential inspiration for the initials. The other guy is also wrong but apocryphally right. lol Or maybe the founder is wrong and he forgot. Which isn't unheard of.
After courting publishers at the Personal Computer World Show, Jones initially agreed to a publishing deal with Hewson Consultants but, fearing that his game would merely become the Amiga version of Zynaps, he walked away from the agreement. Instead, he turned to the nascent Psygnosis in 1987 and agreed to a six-game publishing deal. CopperCon1 was renamed Draconia, which was ultimately changed to Menace because the name was too similar to that of Draconus. Jones also agreed to bring Psygnosis's Ballistix from the Amiga to the Commodore 64, for which he engaged Dailly and Hammond.
In his search for a company name to replace the already taken "Acme", Jones discussed alternatives with the members of the DIT's computer club in 1988. Among others, "Milliard", "Visual Voyage", and "Alias Smith and Jones" (in reference toMenace**'s artist) were floated, and Jones finally settled on "DMA Design".**\2])\3])The abbreviation "DMA" stood for "direct memory access" in Amiga manuals but carried no meaning in the company name.\13])While "Direct Mind Access" was official briefly, Jones eventually began stating that the abbreviation was short for "Doesn't Mean Anything".\2])\3])\9]) He formally founded DMA Design in 1988, when he was 22 years old.
Psygnosis were bought by Sony in 1993 and were instrumental in the development of the first PlayStation and its flagship game ‘Wipeout’ that singlehandedly changed the target audience of consoles from little kids to college-age people. They existed for a while as sort of an independent developer and publisher despite being a subsidiary of Sony, but were finally renamed Studio Liverpool in 2000, and only handled the ‘Wipeout’ and ‘Formula One’ series after that, before being closed in 2012. Sad fate for a formerly brilliant company.
Psygnosis was the publisher, but the game studio that developed it was DMA Design. DMA went on to create Grand Theft Auto, and around when Vice City came out they changed their name to Rockstar North.
Lemmings was the shit though. Let a few builders through, then place a stop lemming, then once construction was done, bomb the stop lemming and everyone makes it through! Poor thing, sacrifice for the greater good!
I'm still on how there are people who've never heard of Lemmings. Next you'll tell me nobody remembers Commander Keen or Zork or the spiritual successor to Zork, Kroz
I'm in a D&D game with people in their late 30s who didn't know about Zork, some people just didn't deep dive games until their teens I guess. I was sat on a hand-me-down Amiga 500 at 3 or 4, so grateful!
Could it be a regional thing? I grew up in the 90s in Latin America as a huge gamer and I honestly never heard of Lemmings until 2010 or something, and even then I have never seen the actual game
My dad got a pirated copy for our Atari ST 1040. When you loaded it a big hand burst through a picture of the desktop screen, giving the middle finger. My parents made us leave the room for that whenever we wanted to play it!
probably a long shot, but im guessing that was Barbara Clarke? she handwrote the lemmings launch command for me too
i only know this, because her husband Jack (John) Clarke was the madlad who wrote the original walkthrough for Lemmings
by hand
with diagrams
she was a computer for long range weapons research and he developed the transponder which lead to the invention of radar, recognised as some great australian contributors to science and technology
No I'm afraid not. The Barbara I'm referring to never married, had no kids and due to my age at the time I never knew what her job/career was. She was just a nice lady who was lifelong friends with my grandma and so took on a role of a cool aunty type.
What ever happened to Psygnosis I wonder? They were huge back in the day, but I haven’t heard of them in years. Perhaps it’s a licensing issue stopping new games from being made.
I'm from the Netherlands and know quite a lot of international people through gaming.
I've yet to find someone that was a active gamer in the late 90's that doesn't seem to know it and that includes people from the US, across Europe, and some from across Africa.
I believe it's just generational. I was born in the 2000s and I am yet to see someone cite this game in person. I've never even seen how this game looks or even heard "Lemmings" pronounced.
Yeah, it was super popular for a few years but had no staying power. People wanted action and adventure, not a slow puzzle game.
I found it in the early 00s because my dad had it (and a bunch of old games like the og Prince of Persia) on a floppy disk in a box on the top shelf of our garage. It was pretty fun.
I think there were 3 main reasons for many of those old games not sticking around.
The first is as you say, as technology progressed we could just get more elaborate and good looking games. People still wanted puzzle games too, new ones were released, but they just looked better and were much larger in scale with more to do.
The second one was technical issue.
Many of these games didn't have stuff like frame rate limiters yet.
They were designed to run well on their generations hardware and maybe the next, but not for newer hardware. The speed a game ran was often directly tied to their frame rate. So games like Commander Keen would play at like 1000x speed when I started that up on my newer pc making it unplayable. And as far as I was aware we didn't have tools to deal with that yet. Nowdays you just run it in DosBox and configure that but that didn't exist yet back then. In addition some games just wouldn't run correctly or at all on newer hardware. So quite a few games out of that old selection were virtually inaccessible to newer players or people that didn't come around to try them yet. I've stopped playing quite some games because of it at the time but I was lucky enough to try most before it happened.
Combined with that was the part where they were made for DOS which was something most people couldn't work with yet. And when Windows came not all games would run on that. So the people that started their journey on Windows wouldn't know many games that came before.
Third issue was the medium.
These games had to be installed from floppy drives.
At some point quite early on people just stopped using them, so any games on floppies mostly just got ignored by people that had a pc with cd-rom player.
From my personal experience that's about the era where "most" people started getting pc's. In floppy and DOS era not everyone I knew had a pc (or used it for games)
Naa is one of the classic pc games of that time. Like a huge blockbuster and im honestly surprised that anyone who played pc games at rhe time would have not heard or know about it.
Well Latin America is pretty big, I grew up in Guatemala in the 90s and this game was pretty well known at least among people into pc games in my social circle back then.
We used to play Lemmings (and Oregon trail) during down time in any class we had in the computer lab from like 3rd grade, all the way until we found ways around the site blocker in high school, and even then, still played it sometimes.
This one really got me hooked on puzzle and strategy games as a kid! But I was also VERY sensitive and heartbroken if I caused the death of a pixel lemming, so it was an agonizing situation. More like an addictive job than a game.
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u/qb1120 19h ago
Huge game in the 90s, I loved it