Back in the Day - When Lemmings Weren't 3D

Being 21, saying “Back in the day”, makes me feel old. My cousins who are six, find it normal to grow up with Tablet PC’s and laptops, and that is a sign of the times, tablets were not even invented when I was six years old!. Back in my day (I’m doing it already!) I went home to a Sony PlayStation or a Sega Mega Drive. My alternative was a PC that took 10 minutes to boot and then threw mum off of her phone call with gran, although she had only just seen her, all of this just to connect to the dial-up internet connection - before even trying to buffer the Cartoon Network website.(Rant over).

When I finished a day at school in my younger years, I always remember a game that I went to find the 3½” floppy or Mega Drive cartridge for, before waiting for MS-DOS or the Mega Drive to bring it to life in a whole 10 minutes. And that game was Lemmings.

So you have a level full of lava, obstacles, and one exit. Your job, using a combination of lemmings with different skills, is to get a proportion of your workforce to the end of that level. The catch, they spawn at the constant speed that they want to, from an attic door and these guys don’t just chill out and hang around. I reckon a lemming goes from standing still to “walking” in just 0.1 seconds!
A basic concept, but one that required expert timing and forward planning. Especially when you couldn't quite tell which Lemming you were using due to the awesome graphics of MS-DOS, I mean I swear I told that guy to climb the wall, not self-destruct?

Thankfully all was not lost to this amazing classic as it was then ported to the Sony PlayStation Portable in early 2006, developed by Team17, the same team who have always brought us Worms and the related series. These slightly improved graphics bought me some reassurance as to where I placed each of my workers, and which one I had (or not) given a parachute to, and what the others were trying to achieve by climbing the walls instead of blowing it up.

‘Damn, there’s always one that forgets their parachute’

Moving up through the levels, you were given more and more skills in your army of workers,from the blockers who turned everyone around, the climbers who wanted to be in the Spider-Man game all the way to the bombers who gave themselves 5 seconds to live then gave off a firework, the team really had a varied set of skills, either way, everyone was needed at some point.

Even as time went on, lemmings didn't grow older like us, lose hair or start a new job, no they just grew fatter and even easier to see on the screen, including what type they are and the now-HD mining pick some were wielding, as Sony announced its final port of the classic, again with Team 17, onto the PlayStation Network, which is also purchasable in disc format for the PS3, in late 2007.

An amazing old school game that provided hours of entertainment, with a varied difficulty of levels and will ever live on with me as I find hours to play classics whilst at work at home.