Lemmings celebrates twenty-fifth birthday

Lemmings came out for the Amiga on February 14, 1991. That same year, the game also came to the Atari ST and MS-DOS, among others. The title sold 55,000 copies for Amiga in its first few days, which was an all-time record at the time.

The game has been a mythical game for generations. Of course there were also the necessary cheat codes to start in later levels. Since Amiga supported connecting two mice, it even included 20 special levels to play with two people. On the Atari this was possible with a mouse and the joystick. In the multiplayer levels, both players see the same playing field on a split-screen. The goal is to get more lemmings, regardless of color, into your base.

The lemmings drop from a hatch at the top and all run in the same direction, without stopping for danger. By equipping some lemmings with certain abilities, such as digging corridors, building stairs or holding back the rest, a course has to be created to get them safely to their final base. Sometimes it is necessary to blow up certain lemmings, for example to clear the way after placing a stop-lemming, or to make a hole in a wall. The number of times a function can be used also varies. For example, it is not possible to use lemmings indefinitely with a certain function.

The idea that lemmings always follow each other is based on a myth that they would follow each other blindly. This was once staged in a Disney movie, White Wilderness, in which lemmings rushed off the cliffs one after the other.

Special variants of the game were also released, such as Xmas Lemmings and Holiday Lemmings. The last Lemmings game came out for PlayStation 4 in 2014. The game can be played online in the MS-DOS variant via Archive.org.

Tweaker crisp made an improved version of a proof of concept of the game in dhtml in 2010. The first version of this is from 2003. Thanks to deathgrunt for reporting it.

6 hours, 15 minutes and 3 seconds, a full Lemmings game