Classic Game Postmortem: Lemmings

[Music] I'm Mike Daley and I was one of the guys that were involved in lemmings and we'll take you through basically how it came about and some of the things we did on the project I been around for a long time so actually I think in August that we 30 years in the games industry so I've done quite a lot of bits and pieces aside from commerce 64 going all the way through to high-end PC stuff and consoles most recently I was doing game maker studio work so kind of touched most of the bases lemmings still has a kind of fun place in my heart when he's obviously started at D me design and this was funded by a group of friends that all met in a computer club and Dundee in the mid 80s that was our first

office area of tiny little pink office with two rooms gallery Tenon's sitting in the window there and that's where all the kind of lining stuff really originated here's us in our youth I just don't look like that I'm just wearing a really good fat body suit just now we've got Garrick Timmons at the laughs then Russell Dave myself Steve armed at the bottom then Brian watts another robot may worth us all again and as I say we were in kind of two rooms so we had a bigger room at the front for development and in a smaller room at the back for office stuff that was taking over for Dave later on so lemmings really came about because of an argument Dave was busy doing a second game blood money and the artwork that he got by a guy called Tony Smith was beautiful some of the animations in it were just amazing for this time one of the sprites

it gave us was a walker same two legged Walker that was in Star Wars you remember and the kind of art are many a type thing and for its time it was a really big sprite beautifully animated so Dave really got kind of fell in love with this thing and thought there could be a game in that so he hired a guy called Scott Johnson to come in and basically take this guy and give him things to shoot some backgrounds and so on so Scott started by drawing a mind to shoot and the guy was about 16 by 16 pixels in size but you can kind of see from this that you know he'd almost be up to the cockpit level but you remember the Star Wars I thought it was you know it was huge the guys would barely come past the feet so Scott and I had this extended discussion and what I basically said he was wrong and decided to try and prove

it so I reckoned you you should try and get him as small as possible so that you got this real sense of scale when the Walker decided to just shoot everybody I initially aimed for 8 by 8 pixels I thought that would be a good size to have it so half the size he had I did have a some inspiration for this and I was doing Congress it too for work at the time and it was a game called beachhead - so you can see the guy they are throwing the grenade and he used to run out from behind a wall throw a grenade run off again promise explore was really well known for having nice smooth animation and although this guy was much bigger than I actually remembered he is actually almost 16 by 16 or myself the animation from it showed that even though you know a small blocky thing can get some really nice animation out of it the other one besides Brian had lightly he's Atari ST for one summer while he

came to America to do his summer camp so aside from learning 68000 I played a stack of games as well always was one of them always has this really cool little guy he's about five pixels high the animation sucked on it but it was a really small guy that you can run about and shoot so I like in somewhere in the middle you'd probably get a good character to work with that spawn this image now you can kind of see the guy I did is a spiky here at meheecan multicolored guy just to the right of the mouth you can kind of see that I'm walking there so I drew him he's still a little bit bigger than a I think he's like 10 pixels in all and because I came from it was coming I'd been playing eyes I did this kind of bonding down thing and then because we're kind of sadistic with that in them as well and then

just drew a whole lot of thumb this was all done in deluxe pain and deep pain has this really nice feature where you could pick up an animation and then just draw across the screen and I'll just do this a lovely animating sequence so I drew a grind on it drew the gun over a couple of lunch times and they ensured the guys like most people they kind of fail about laughing of thinking this is three rows okay immediately going there's definitely given that somewhere one thing that did occur to us when we were doing this was that it's really nice to kill them and see them get you know obliterated in different ways and it kind of hacked back to the roadrunner wily coyote thing where you can you know you can just think up huge numbers a way to destroy them so I did that 10 ton weight squashing them which although it looks like it's getting a nice crunching of the Borden's as it goes down there that was actually just because I didn't leave enough space to make it go down

evenly so it was a pure flick but it does really give a nice lemming crunching down there Gary Timmons then came along and I did the other three the hands the spin a rotor and and the mouth and just I mean there was endless ways you could go about killing these and it was clear that if we could think of a way of picking them in a game the whole thing would revolve friend I'm dying somehow because that was just the satisfaction of it all what you also did was you really fine-tune the animation the guy I've got is very rigid you can kinda see he remain on the left and Gotti's on the right it's fundamentally the same guy but he added the bouncing here and the feet kind of roll really nicely and you can kind of see that what he did although the psychedelic colors again is basically the lambing kind of coming to life and it's very close to the other one but it just has that really soft bounce and nice animation that li-ming's

is known for like the colors of the lemmings was a technical limitation like most things were in those days me again st could pretty much pick any color they wanted but we wanted to draw them in just four colors so that they were faster to draw because we wanted to have a lot to these guys to kill on the PC Eva had vga EG and CGA now VJ you could pick your colors as well and CGA was so bad you just didn't care you would just go with whatever worked so you were kind of life with EGA and we kind of came up with the blue and green so we did try flipping the dungarees in the hair had green dungarees and blue hair but it just felt this one was just so a bit more aesthetically pleasing we did resurrect it for the two player one later on now Russell K did do the first ever demo of Wyoming's the office

actually only opened in August 1989 so you can see this is only a month or so after really in the first months that we that I did the animation and then about a month later Russell found time to actually go and try and knock something up if he had a bit of inspiration from this because he had been having an argument with Dave about missile following in Blood Money you could fire of missiles I and or rockets and bombs and initially they wanted to fire rockets that followed the terrain so Russell Woods thought of a way of kind of possibly doing this similar to what salamander had so you thought maybe you can use this for the lemmings as well so he created a little demo there we go and he managed to get the hundred lemmings on there another gate was able to get or but the hundred was the kind of number that gold number we were kind of aiming for it gives you a real you know fills the screen with objects which back

then just was unheard of I think this was on an eight megahertz one oh yeah there you go getting a thumbs up so it was on an eight megahertz machine so it was a pretty slow machine but you're still able to draw all hundred li-ming's in the two frames li-ming's actually run in three so it gave a bit more time for it now one of the things to know about these when they're walking is the feet stick perfectly to the ground even today you don't really get that you know characters tend to slide about I think gallery made a really nice animation that I'm just made sure that everything is absolutely bang-on for walking so you can see here with the the lambing stone that the one site basically what happens is the feet would move one pixel to the left each time because li-ming's move one pixel at a time and that give it that kind of solidity to put it into the world just absolutely perfect so when they land on the ground because it was usually flat they were walking over you

could really see the feet just sticking and put them right into the world and he really did make it just a great job of doing that now the levels themselves were basically just gigantic bitmaps there are sixteen hundred by 160 basically five amiga screens wide and of all the special levels the menís shadow the beasts levels were stored as bitmaps on disk we obviously had severely limited desk space back there so they're all done effectively as little brushes so each metal block would be a brush that you place in the level and you can go and delete it again or you could edit it or whatever it was all kind of modeled on deluxe paints editing the levels themselves we kind of just came up with different ways of doing it I'm you know for the design of them how we were going to approach it we get to that in a second the special levels for the an extra difficulty in that because of

the color selection I couldn't use any traps I did all the different special levels so basically just have to work with a way of getting the lambing from start to stop using builders and and bashers so it did complicate making those levels and making them any good they were never quite as good as all the other ones but it was nice to see these throughout the different stages the art gallery one is interesting because that influenced how the game was going to look it was a first level that really kind of became a picture rather than just a few blocks and again I'll talk about that in a second these are some of the levels I did so when picking how to do a level and what level was going to create and I either came up with a really nice idea for or I could somebody other so they'll never guess this one or what I would basically try and make a picture so in the game there was a little mini map at the bottom that was basically a mono colored outline of

what the level was and that was really for fast scrolling because you just said the my so touching the edge of the screen would take a long time to scroll to the other end of the five screens so you could click on that and drag it but I like to kind of try and show little pictures in there of a kid so the top ones there hunter Nessie that I drew and then figured out a level to cross it and then the second one was just this shipwreck that I did there's similar things so that end a little mini map it looked like a little shipwreck I also really liked doing making the player do lots of things at the same time so the fast food catching one there the lemmings drop out two places at once and just to get them both up to the the exit and their reasonable amount of time usually with ridiculously difficult targets to achieve without losing any lemmings one of the other of my other favorite ones was its hero time which

was basically a thought of getting a level where you would use one lambing and the other lemmings would all kind of just go their own way you can't really stop them they were just kind of marching on but you had to get this other one to run ahead of them and fix things that's a great satisfaction in the fact that when we sent it down to say gnosis we'd usually get a fax with this one took five minutes this one took three minutes and little comments well this wasn't too bad and that one came back with scribbles all over the page crushing against waiting at it and it took them about an hour and a half so I was quite pleased with that one the bottom one the 6x6 was my fault as well it didn't appear in a very many ports of the game it tended to get removed I can't think why it actually started out because I was trying to get fifty five of everything so 55 Balmer's 55 release rate and so on but couldn't get the numbers to quite match up and I just discovered over they'd 66 it all kind of worked I

happened to be doing the level in the fire and brimstone style and you just immediately think that's halo 686 that sounds like a good idea turns out it wasn't now when Gary did levels he just did incredibly simplistic looking levels but they were fiendishly difficult so you can see here the levels kind of extracted from the fluff around it now that's usually what he gave to us to solve it's just this very bare-bones level and they were incredibly difficult but it was after seeing the the art gallery one that they've kind of looked at them and went yeah nobody's gonna pay for that are they so he ordered Gary to go and make the levels prettier but you can see all he did was just put all these things around the base level that didn't interfere in any kind of way now the levels when we were doing them by the time he got to the stage we were all

experts at making unsolvable so we ended up basically trying to come up with levels that would be ourselves and there'd be incredibly tough levels but we'd still solve them in a couple of minutes without any problems at all what that meant was we hugged you know 20 30 incredibly hard levels that nobody else would be able to solve so the first thing and they've got garlic to do was to take all these levels and just make simple versions of them that only really involved adding maybe a couple of scale so we gave you one builder and you have to get it right on the nail then you might give them two builders maybe a blocker and take the the number you have to see just dinah smidge and that just simplified things an awful lot so the levels could appear twice you then got Ganic to go and make basically introduction area levels things like just dig where all you had was daggers and it was pretty straightforward to kind of figure out what you had to do and it's probably one of the first games

that really had the tutorial in it although we didn't have big hands pointing and texting do XY and said it was all quite self-explanatory but once Garry put these in and he then set about making a nice difficulty curve it's probably the thing that really made lambing x' the head it was because everybody could get into at some point but fired from five-year-olds who got to like level seven and really enjoyed it all the folk they've been able to get past the first stage and the entire families being able to play it pretty much because the difficulty level was such that everybody could play it and that was going down to Gary really just fine-tuning that level so lemmings editor I did manage to resurrect my 20 year old desk I don't think it'll work anymore but I've got some video so hey now what made this unique particularly

for the time was the lemmings editor was built right into the game and for the games we've done up to this point we had a separate level editor you design it you save it off you copy it over to the game you'd run it you go that didn't work in you go back again it's obvious it doesn't work for lemmings because you have to fine-tune to pixels so you could just hit escape finish and go into the editor you make you change hit escape again and you get back into the game and let's let you just fine-tune everything just that a little bit to make it just a perfect level so as you can see there that it's holding a kind of brush that I could put diamond paste in and that's kind of where deep in as you pick up a an alien DP or deluxe pain and then you could just draw with it and we kind of model that on that this is the hero timeline that talking about before you just get that March of them and again you just go in and I this level would have been a nightmare to make of a king just hop in and out level now you've got five hundred and twelve of these brushes that

you could put down anywhere in the level but it did mean that if you wanted to delete one that was in the middle of the level you have to go into a special edit mode and then just hit enter to go through every single block do you got to the one you wanted press Delete and then carry on again but we thought it was still pretty good because Deeping can do that we've just used two bitmaps basically so here I'm kind of putting down blocks very wobbly tons like that you really do need my smarts for ball mice and I don't have one anymore so but you can see I put down the blocks and I can go and delete them again over to say that's not what I want and the actual editing of it there's there's different ways you can put down a block you can either just paint it down on top of everything else or you can kind of go into a behind mode so the block will draw behind things or you can take it so it's a masking you can cut areas away

the Lehman's themselves just walk on whatever is in the level you'll notice it and in lemmings one it's it's just a plain background there's nothing for them to walk over so any place where there's a pixel that's what they walk on so here you can see I'm going to take get a brush and then I can put it behind the background and I could draw it in there ever wanted or I can make a mask and then that becomes an idiot I can I can cut away and then when you play it just becomes a big bitmap again and then the lemmings just walk over that so making the wave always really just about trying to get this big bitmap that they can walk over that was a level that wasn't used because it's crap and you can see there as well the little green mask that I like to draw pictures in that was quite good fun objects as well could go inside the actual background that we used for the arrows

but again that was just on any pixel that happened to be there so here again you can see going through picking some kind of brush and then that can use that to take away the background and then when the lambing start we can just follow through and walk through the newly created bitmap they depending on what you want you might want to be smoother you might want to be hard drop again you just kill the brushes and then you can just scribble in whatever you wanted on these things there you can see the arrows obviously come through because we've got more pixels to go on it just use the background as a master drawing too and then that just walks through so you can see being able to go in and out of the level just you know random to fine-tune that little bit it's incredibly important to li-ming's because that's where you really just adjust things just to be just right so I

will talk about objects and the collision because I couldn't find the keys in the editor we didn't have manuals back then so I've no idea what the keys where because it was just a big bitmap the actual collision for things like metal were kind of fudged in basically what you do is go in unmarked rectangular areas and say this is solid so you can see here of the several of these over the top of things it doesn't discriminate between metal or anything else so you can see as well the at the far right it goes over some of the ground that's marked to solid as well but it's also pretty crap if it fits perfectly so when a lambing walks the collision is just under his feet so you'd be one pixel into the ground so as he walked over the metal if you did that Balmer and try to explore look at that picks and go I mean I'm in solid I wouldn't actually take in the background away and that all was good with the world

but if you happen to have a builder and built a few pixels above the collision and then did a bomber it'd be checking the collision going no that's not right and they just take big chunks of the metal it's probably the biggest feeling and the the original lemmings mechanic but we just kind of design drying that occasionally if we thought a player could cheat and get through you'll see here there's a little border sometimes that we just extend it just to make sure they can't can't achieve the way around it really matters and you can put down lots of these rectangles for whatever you needed the objects themselves you got 32 objects and you obviously had to have your entry and exit points so here I've got 4 entry points and the exit again now I love to make players do lots of things at once because it drove them mad and the rest of it you tended to use either for traps and that you've tied away sometimes underneath other things so they just didn't see them or you'd use it for a fluff water rees use just for decoration all over the place it was a really nice animation you could just

fill the level with it to give it a better movement so the front end was going to be very different and Dave initially wanted to basically have the front end just covered in lemmings and have messages come up by them having them hold up the little cards so he got me to do a prototype and I went and drew a stack of lemmings and then covered the screen so it was 320 200 screen in these lemmings and a safe I'm looking really cool it was totally bizarre you just couldn't follow what was going on so that was dropped which is a shame because you can kind of see the lemmings a nice character you can literally do anything with it and it just feels kind of right but it just it was just far too confusing so we went with a more traditional front-end which is a bit of a shame explosion now I suspect like us

when you first saw this you thought was quite funny no more so than Brian who did fall off his chair laughing as shown in this drum construction and I say from laughing at Brian which is always a good thing it did and it solved a number of things you know you've all had to be finished somehow if you got stuck in a level you had to abort it and it goes back to the initial thing of we're really like killing these guys so our way of killing them all off is a good thing the actual pixel explosion came because Dave loved defender so he really decided that I want that explosion I've been asked several times whether it's a particle system or a big spray it's basically a point cloud animation so it's basically a list of positions that are offset from an origin and then just frames of it and it was drawn by Gary to make it look pretty but I mean it was just super satisfying just nuking

them all the time and sometimes even when you were going to finish the level you didn't care you just have to do it now do you want to just comment on the graphics these days obviously when you do graphics and you port it to another system that all 16 bits that 32 bit graphics they just kind of go across you might have to resize them a bit but that's about it back in the day you didn't have the luxury you worked really hard to redraw everything so you can see the different variety there are different screen sizes different color depth different colors the second column ends the PC one so you've got Vijay eg in CGA Steve Harman that all those and you can see what I mean by CG it's just awful you know the color selection just you just kind of make best the EGA one is luminous and crap so really you need that you know amiga vga kind of look some of the black

and white ones I've got massive respect for them because if you think about it particularly in the game you need the shading to give some definition but in spectrum and the game boy one you'll need to kind of do dithering to see you know that's a shadow and so on but at the same time you've got to walk over this which meant that you'll be walking over a mask that has no pixels in its and it differs from the main game and there could be something that looks totally anti but your limey is gonna turn around then and that was just a limitation of the system you couldn't make everything just solid why or not it just looked awful and some of the other ones the Atari Lynx one was a tiny little screen we ended up having to do the panel again and it just filled the screen because we didn't have the space for it and the Sega version than the Nintendo versions and specifically the Gameboy one we had a huge respect for trying to get that five screen bitmap

into that limited memory it was incredibly well done to clear lemmings so this kind of came about because we loved playing the two-player games specifically we used to play populous and stunt car racer because we had two rooms separated by hallway we put an Amiga in each room then a null modem cable would run between them and then David thrash the life out of us whatever game you chose but the two-player game you know it was it was something that was just quite new for amigas at the time so they've got me to basically get a null modem cable connect up and then write a driver for controlling a mouse on a different screen which I did and I was able to move my son my amiga and moved on his but it kind of decided at the end that you know not everybody can calculate Amiga and TV around to their powers so you went with the kind of more that split screen thing the big bit down the

middle is just to hide the bullet because you can be bothered doing it properly you'll see the green and blue haired lemmings kind of come back again for the two-player one it's interesting though because even though you're right next to it and you can see what the other player is doing you never actually paid much attention to what they were doing you would always be concentrating on your pixel peripheral perfect clicking for your lambing and then wonder why there's screaming going on in the corner because all your lemmings are dying and it's because the other bugger sent alarming over and dug straight down past your exit and you didn't notice so it was really it was a really good tool again it's one that's I'm kind of sad that's never really been brought forward and dead appeared on the Amiga and ST versions but the PC one couldn't do back in those days you know it was almost drivers and they just didn't want you to have two mice plugged in at the same time so it just couldn't do it I was told a story as well that the data

East guy that commissioned the arcade version of Wyoming's which didn't actually come out but they did commissioned it wouldn't finish our meeting without challenging you to a two-player game that was the ending of lemmings we did start a little revolution back then there was a few Amiga games came out with all the devs around it and I think it's quite nice to see because Dave the actual team tends to get hidden a bit these days you know you'll tend to get a designer or other producer being the frontman to so I think being able to put faces to people or things quite nice no matter what I think the design document is every developer be a artist or programmer has put their own a little bit in it to make the game better and I think it's it'd be nice to see more of them this thing came about this thing came about because but we're looking for an ending and the endings were done before were rubbish so

I'd been drawing the liming in the middle from some of the signals as PR material let me go and the stuff that goes to sharks we got a stack of free stuff so I just been doodling and deep pain I've been doing what's a cartoon art and deed came up with the idea of you know we could just hover random there and and get it we had an Amiga genlock at the time so we all just kind of paused and funny pauses and then Gary Timmons went and cleared it all together interestingly this has got my only initial in the game because they didn't put my name in the game not that I'm bitter or anything but yeah this is a VM D at the bottom above you can see it there so that's my only clean up feel in there but it was it was a nice aim screen and I think we all cheered as well at the end of it which was slightly pathetic so li-ming's - now this will be mainly a Super Nintendo but we'll feel a wee bit one of the big things in linings - was obviously the addition of the scales

there were way too many scales added the original lemmings one had a really nice set of scales and a few of the new ones in laymen's to work pretty good the building are the Superman and the archer even though the at record was awful it was a really nice scale to have some of the other ones like the pole-vaulter and the magnet was really nice but samey pointless really hang glider and stuff were just silly so there was way too many I think you could have doubled the skills that we had before and still maintained a really nice kind of balance with it but David suddenly David thought that you know Mahad is hardly any skills which people are jumbles into in the end we ended up having to go back through levels and adding skills that just weren't used in any levels because there was so many of them now the lemmings editor for joinings - we did actually have a manual but by Steve Hammond and with as usual Flair and these are taken

from the manual because I forgot all about these so it was quite handy and again one of the big additions I think that really added to the game was having vertical levels anyone's one was obviously just horizontal but being able to have that kind of building up vertical or square I think was a big addition and helped a lot these were basically the sizes that fit in exactly they say memory pool I think we had about a K and a half of the the tile map because we moved from bitmaps a tile maps and these different orientations used exactly the same amount of memory so we could just change the orientation without having anything fancy li-ming's - had a a big change in technology because we didn't all notice specifically from the gameboy version and the Megadrive and snares that they

were having to try and fight against this big bitmap system and they just didn't have the memory for it so we made a conscious choice to basically do tile maps even on machines like the Amiga and st and PC so that the console versions would have a much easier time of it since I was writing the snes's fashion I was really thankful for that because it really be in a nightmare like they'd even find that means to editor having never used this before I have no idea what I'm doing in it so it's basically tile map so it's sixteen by eight tiles and unlike li-ming's one you could actually put tiles into the background - to be a picture as well they just didn't go towards the mask for the collision we also had that spare page idea which we've used since because they didn't want designers spending all the time

trying to glue together these tiny little blocks so we ended up having them a sheet that had all the blocks glued together for us and you just click on it and paste the end and it made tile design incredibly rapid you see they just gonna click in your pickup you also notice this one's being put in behind mode so that means li-ming's will just walk in front of it and ignore it and again like lemmings one this is built directly into the game for exactly the same reason you'd need that fast turnaround on a game like this the actual tile stuff was done so that you'd have a certain number of tiles available a chunk of them would be pre-allocated like this that you couldn't modify so when you started building it we basically copy that tile into a new unique tile just for that slot and then build through it or take away the ground and make that area a little bit map in its own right now the Amiga STM PC HUDs doodles of

memory for their stuff so they can kind of do infinitely the snare session didn't it had a severely restricted amount of memory so the levels had to be redesigned for the snares one so that you didn't have the kind of infinite destructibility or building of the level well this is the character map stuff that I was talking about so it was a 32-bit character map with the character number at the bottom now there's two bits in here that are interesting one is the the behind mode so basically when you were drawing the tile that would mean don't do any collision with that you could walk in front of it and that meant you could get much nicer picture than lemmings one with the plain black black background the other one is the normal defy now you remember from windings one we had these rectangular things that were a crap so what this mate was each tile that you put down you could flag as you will not destroy it you will not modify it and that gave us perfect metal detection for

a change so when it came to reallocate that tile and copy it and modify it we just look at that bet and go now we're not going to do that and that matric metal so we could destroy stuff around it but not modifying these tiles there's other things in here to do with clicking on things like the cannons there so there's offsets and collisions and stuff like that in there as well now this is from the nest one that was the memory map that I had and I was a little bit tight on memory on the vram the biggest problem with the snare session was that even though it has the lots of hardware I couldn't use hardly any of it snes's really just you could have like 16 sprites in the line when you've got I could only do 80 but when you've got 80 li-ming's in a row clearly Hardware sprites are not going to cut it so I did end up having to draw all the lemmings in software so this was on a three and a half mega at six five eight one six so it's a 16-bit sex file

to know this nests dead time of I have a four color screen so you can see at the bottom it's got a bit Plains laid out but a four color screen is just straight columns and what I could have my lemmings graphics and then just paste them vertically and then draw them in columns and it made it very fast to draw I also had other tricks like six five eight one six you could read possession zero page for those of you know what six five or two thing is and I could pick that towards the base of the graphic to shave off a few extra cycles and get in because the scheme is being transferred out of the game cycle I could also use it for explosions the filler and anything else I wanted to kind of regenerate every frame so it was super useful for that I did also have to put in a parallax background just to make it a bit prettier because they've seemed to think that console games should look nicer but the Amiga game apparently could just look as bad as you wanted it to he also didn't like the fact that it didn't smooth scroll so the

Amiga and PC versions were all like the lemmings of the original lemmy's one it's quite a juddery scroll but you can add demand that they went and smooth scrolled everything so I came up with a system to kind of interrupt scroll it and get it working and then managed to persuade them to go and put it into the Amiga versions as well so at least they were pretty to look at I did also have some of the sprites as skills so any skill that was you weren't gonna get too many in a row so you know poor voltar Magna butor Superman they were all sprites that I could draw anything where you got you know a dancer or a blocker or followers we could have loads of them they all had to be drawn in software very quickly the front end screen and Guaymas two on the snare was a few hidden things the probably the one that most people found was the little hole in the tree that was a music test you clicked that and it just cycled to music last like the define was have you

collect all the windows and doors you got a cheap mode I have no idea what the cheating would actually does it just comes up cheat mode I don't have to go back and try and figure out you click the door at the top you got what I called visual sound effects I actually had quite a lot of time at the end of lemmings to mess about I'm saying also to quite a lot of time to get things like maker chords and cartridge all kind of organized so I ended up playing for a while a good while and sort to entertain myself I put hidden easter eggs in so visual saying effects is Wayne alarming flies through the screen and you kind of yells going across all he hits again and goes if you get the little text coming above his head as he does it now there is a single pixel on that screen without any sequence points just under the two if you click it you will get straight to the end sequence it was done as a test then I thought saw that just leave it in nobody will find it so but it's super

handy if you just want to go and see the end sequence you can just find that little pixel click it you go straight there so these are the visual same defects and li-ming's too you can see this as this next one it's got that parallax background and you also notice I have snow again I was really bored so I quit snowing I did start by having snow land on the ground I had all these routines for the fella for doing plot a pixel in the level so I thought have snow come down rest on the ground that'll be really nice didn't occur to me at the time that actually if you just wait long enough that saves you having to do a builder because the snow just builds up and you could just walk up or if you'd be spent ages digging through something it's now just gonna fill that area in so I ended up having to take a and it was just decorative in front of stuff you also notice that kind of column starting tip here my random number generator was scrapped and if you left it long enough you would just get this single column kind of wobbling down

fortunately most of the levels in fact all the levels didn't run that long it was usually a white night for lunch came back and I just have this vertical column going biggie dates occasionally get these columns appear towards the end of a level but there you go this nests the ocean also gave me the hardest bug I've ever had it took me three months to track down basically a lambing we'd be walking along the ground and then every now and again he would just fall halfway through the ground and then get stuck I could not figure out for the life of me what as if we go through the cord just reading it dry running everything eventually tracked it down to the Super Nintendo has a hardware multiply it's actually got 200 multiplies one of them is tied to the mod seven stuff and it's actually in state you put it in you get the result back straightaway there was another one but you put it in and then 16 cycles we passed then you get the answer so naturally you use the one that Vincent

turns I thought as it cross the vertical blank that would reset that register it wasn't in any documentation intended live you know about it and it only happened between two six five or two instructions so when I wrote the final value and read it out in between these if there was a vertical blank answer on top and I would get the wrong answer so just occasionally a line was fall through the ground nightmare so I ended up swapping to the other multiply taking this beat it but finally figuring it out it's horrible Hardware bugs are just the hardest to find another thing I did and I did mention it was bored and I so I borrowed the super scope from Russell Kay's company because it just came up this wacky idea and I thought you know why not so if you plug a super scope into the second poor you can't aim and the lemmings just for the hell of

it and they do just blow up there's no real point to it it's so satisfying now the argument guys were going a conference and they wanted to do this thing on hidden Easter eggs that nobody you'd find so the go untouched and they asked me about it and I mean yeah this one's never been found so I told them about it they did this really nice video you can go and see it on YouTube it's really funny and I kind of get that me just shoot and they're chuckling away as well it's highly satisfying so whaling see I just want to mention one thing and they will never speak of it again so the biggest problem the Lyman's 3 is the character size now you can see there as the walk they've got the feet going specific blocks and so on and that make when ever you selected something had to be on this you know a specific boundary for them to do things that kind of got rid of that kind of instantly IMing click do something now the whole reason for this whereas we actually got

contacted by the children's television workshop who thought you know lemmings there's a lot of them we could probably count them on TV that degree but there was just too small so Dave thought oh yeah Sesame Street Oh what about that so started doing the game made the lemmings bigger kind of lost a lot the charm with it I'm putting lots of restrictions and just kind of spoiled some of it a bit and then Sesame Street didn't use it but I mean it's the third one I think certainly just broke some of the real niceties of li-ming's there's tiny wee characters and stuff I think they're really what make it now in Dundee they have taken lemmings to heart and just the game's culture and in general so we actually have a spot in the museum which is the weirdest thing ever seeing your own stuff in a museum and you're not dead yet very strange and there's also

this are being done as public artwork where they've got lemons climbing up walls just up from the original office which is again the coolest thing in the world it's very cool so the the stuff in the museum was donated by a few from DMA might pick the big climbing in there's actually DMA design sign that I pinched on the last day from one of the offices even though they've done like that because you couldn't get post pic there anymore so but it's very cool so you've got done D these things that around there it's very nice and that's it there's our source for keys now if anybody's still awake and wants to ask anything I can't otherwise you can make a break for it no oh thanks really good game in

wyms always felt like a spiritual successor to lemmings we don't speak of worms okay I mean it's just the small characters there's a few games that Kimo you got humans as well that kind of came out at the same time ones we felt bored a few things from us sure obviously they've obviously going on it's been ashamed that Sony's kind of sat on the IP for so long so yeah yeah great talk by the way that was really interesting so you mentioned you made introductory levels for the first lemmings we taught the different skills yeah how did you arrive at the conclusion that that was something the game actually needed I mean the actual levels themselves when you start with the skills particularly because it was a it was a new genre

really we always felt that was just you know you want that slow entry point and just so people can have a play with it and lemmings too we had the practice mode we could just go and fiddle but the original lemmings didn't really have that so it was really just the best way of letting people play with things and see what the outcome of them were gonna be I think okay thanks no I just want to thank you for making my middle school teachers had explode when she saw that one sick sick sick slow thank you the deep south the size thing he really didn't like that there was a big uproar it was quite amazing [Laughter] he's got no what's taken note was there a process behind coming up with the name like where other names considered for lemmings no actually it was okay pretty much when he saw the original animation he just went there like little lemmings that was it just stuck so and

it fits it perfectly that so good night just one of the you just talk about like what it might have felt like during the sort of lemmings mania of when it sort of came out I know like I've been I've found some stuff recently where there was like an odd couple of novels at the time which is interesting and a few old articles about there's a movie that might be made I mean when are we making the game you have no idea it's the same for any any game be made you have not a clue of it's gonna do well the same was true you know Dave li-ming's I'm late with a GTA and it's just he had no idea you do the game that you think is fun when it came out and it kind of exploded because we were getting hundred-percent reviews at some sometimes we're just insane you know we usually just kind of strutting about going this is cool and then you got get things like in the linings to that was that song that got done as well in a rap song it's just the hardest thing but a lot of singing even though expose know you'll get for you

know several fortresses li-ming's just walking right next wasn't stuff and it's brilliant some of the fine art and stuff that gets tons amazing so they just love it awesome also just did you see at the time like with things like oh no more lemmings and Christmas lemmings and all that softer that see like a big jump again like you know when those came out like a bit like Christmas flaming was done as a demo desk we were just because the original one came at the start of the year we wanted another one just to the main focus kinda they are so Gary Timmons it then the the lemmings with a lot of Christmas suits on and they were just really cool that we should do them over that so I did some of the animations you know that the bunch of snowman and stuff and we just did a demo disc and then like Knossos being the money people that the I ride whoo you franchise and they'd hold the align exact of it so I mean we were just kind of riding the wave and enjoying it really cool awesome I'm Eli and thank you for animating that snowman it was my favorite I did get complaints that didn't kill you but

because it was a Christmas thing we want it to be nice turns out that was the wrong thing this is kind of a random question but when it kind of became general knowledge that lemmings don't actually jump off cliffs to kill themselves and it wasn't exposed as an urban legend did you reflect on the name at all no hi I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about the sound effects you chose for lemmings cuz blowing them up was satisfying to the little sound they made before they blow up was equally as satisfying so the the sign was interesting because we did start with six teeth in Chains from movies but that was just a point where all the movie studios were getting interested in games because it was thank to make money and he thought would be a bad idea to put them in and then get sued by them so we did the random tunes just made up and then the sign defects was actually the

Scott Johnson who did the background art it's actually his mother that did all the sound effects for the dilemma it was sped up a little bit yeah getting nodes so they were sped up a little bit but she did all the same effects for that and they just fit perfectly in the original lemmings I think when you made a lemming a climber and a floater they become like an athlete yeah and I was just wondering that's cuz it had two scales just so because when you hover the cursor over it told you what it was he's a builder he's a walker so you needed that differentiation to go you've got both of those skills without trying to fill that whole space cuz it was limited down there so it's just yeah become an athlete I think we're done thank you very much you