Lemmings
GameBy DMA Design · Released Feb 14, 1991
Lemmings is a puzzle-platform game developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis in 1991. Players guide a group of lemmings through hazardous levels to a designated exit. The gameplay involves assigning specific skills, such as digging or building, to overcome obstacles and avoid traps.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Lemmings, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
About the game
- Released
- Feb 14, 1991
- Developer
- DMA Design
- Publishers
- Krisalis Software, Psygnosis
- Genres
- Puzzle
- Platforms
- Acorn Archimedes, Amiga CD32, Commodore CDTV, Amiga
- Links
- Wikipedia
Game data from IGDB.com
Documents about Lemmings
The Assemblage of Peripheral Game Development: A Case Study of Dundee
The Dundee video game development cluster, located in a peripheral Scottish city, represents a compelling case study of bottom-up innovation driven by the constant recombination of socio-material resources.
- Dundee's video game cluster, a post-industrial Scottish city with no major platform holder or dominant multinational publisher, is studied as a case of how peripheral creative industries form, using DeLanda's Assemblage Theory rather than top-down policy as the explanation.
- The cluster comprises around 43 local studios, mostly small and medium-sized enterprises, concentrated within roughly 500 meters of one another.
- Key territorializing forces include DMA Design's founding in 1988 and the launch of Abertay University's games degree in 1997, with Abertay providing a steady talent pipeline and informal coordination.
Soft Launch Sonar: 15 New Games, 14 Are Iterations, 1 Is Probably Doomed?!
The mobile gaming industry is currently defined by a pervasive copy-and-iterate strategy, where studios prioritize the refinement of proven mechanics over original innovation.
- The mobile gaming industry is currently dominated by a copy-and-iterate strategy, with 14 out of 15 new games identified as iterations of proven mechanics rather than original innovations.
- Development is heavily concentrated in the Turkish market, where studios such as Rollic, Spike, and Grand Games scale operations by replicating the mechanics of industry leaders.
- Developers are increasingly utilizing niche regional markets, such as Zimbabwe, for soft-launch testing to gather performance data while avoiding market saturation and legal scrutiny from major incumbents.
Of Mice and Lemmings: Ludic Subjectivity and Interface in a Historical Context
The document analyzes the 1991 game Lemmings, arguing that its design and unique "ludic subjectivity" were deeply intertwined with the historical context of computer hardware and game industry practices, specifically the rise of the mouse-based interface.
- The paper argues that Lemmings (DMA Design, 1991) is inseparable from the rise of the mouse-based graphical interface, and that its design and player positioning emerged from that hardware and industry moment.
- Lemmings sold an estimated 15 million copies yet had limited influence on later games and has received little scholarly attention.
- Lemmings grew out of experimentation rather than established genre conventions, combining a character concept originally designed for Walker with a terrain-tracing algorithm first intended for a missile in Blood Money.
Classic Game Postmortem: Lemmings
The development of Lemmings represents a landmark achievement in early 1990s game design, originating from a desire to create humorous, sprite-based destruction within the severe technical constraints of 8MHz hardware.
- The core gameplay loop of Lemmings was built around the ability to manipulate terrain in real-time, allowing players to use brushes to edit bitmaps and create paths for characters to navigate.
- The game's broad appeal was driven by a carefully tuned difficulty curve, which allowed players of all ages—from five-year-olds to adults—to engage with the content at their own skill level.
- Technical constraints necessitated the 'nuke' feature, a point-cloud animation explosion, which served as a functional way to abort levels while providing a satisfying visual reward for the player.
A Short and Simple Definition of What a Videogame Is
Nicolas Esposito's 2005 DiGRA conference paper proposes a compact, academically grounded definition of the videogame as a stepping stone toward new design methods.
- The paper proposes a short, reusable academic definition of the videogame as a game played through an audiovisual apparatus that can be based on a story, intended as a foundation for future videogame design methods.
- The author argues that serious videogame studies only began in recent years, even though the videogame industry was already more than thirty years old at the time of writing (2005).
- The definition is grounded in established game theory, drawing on Caillois, Huizinga, Zimmerman, Crawford, Kramer, and Juul's account of automation and rule enforcement.
Companies behind it
As the documents state it.