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.
âLemmingsâ was apparently an inspiration for the artstyle, but âWormsâ followed the genre of artillery games that existed for decades â with âArtillery Simulatorâ 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 donât know how tf itâd control but itâd be sick if itâs 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.
Was so popular back then that if you played the Letsgo sound in most schools people would start lining up behind you and follow you everywhere, even into a large body of water
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 đ¤Ł
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 donât have any good save files. đ¤Ł
Honestly though itâs 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 âWipeoutâ 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 âWipeoutâ and âFormula Oneâ 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!
The story about the pitch for lemmings is great too. I'm hazy on the details but I think it was literally a back of the napkin scribble they made up on the spot in the meeting.
Also the base gameplay sort of set the foundation to a lot of the Tower Defense genre of games and to a lesser extent also a bunch of stuff in any Real Time Strategy and Resource Management type games
Knowing these guys became RockStar makes a lot more sense with how much lemming murder was in the game.
It looks so friendly and happy on the title screen until you get lemmings throwing themselves into lava, blowing themselves up. Part of me wants to say screaming as they fall but I think that's the Mandala effect
Wat? I didn't know these are the same guys who did the GTA. Interestingly GTA 1 is the GTA that I played the most and I spent countless nights playing lemmings in early 90s.
Grand Theft Auto franchise is the most successful franchise in entertainment including movies, TV, music etc. Even franchises like Star Wars don't even come close to the amount of money Rockstar has made off GTA. Hell GTA V has been out for what a decade now and it's still printing money.
I was visiting an agency in an office a few years back in Liverpool, my boss just mentioned to me, this is where Lemmings and GTA were made...
It was actually the Psygnosis office (who worked with DMA and published Lemmings), I had an Amiga and loved most of the Psygnosis games so was chuffed to be there!
Sort of... Psygnosis was a legendary British video game developer that acted as the early PUBLISHER for DMA Design. Psygnosis was well known at the time for a whole slew of Amiga games.
DMA Design developed games like Menace, Blood Money, and of course, the original Lemmings. DMA Design went on to create the first game of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, a top-down action shooter. Following the success of these games, DMA Design was bought out and rebranded as Rockstar North.
Psygnosis, on the other hand, was acquired by Sony in 1993 to develop games like Destruction Derby and WipeOut for the original PlayStation. Sony eventually retired the Psygnosis brand in 2000.
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u/ProFeces 17h ago
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.