thedrexster 3 hours ago

Man, the soundtrack of the original Lemmings is indelibly etched into my brain -- cheery MIDI tracks of everything from classical music to folk tunes.

  • danwills 2 hours ago

    Same here! However a friend had an Amiga and the music there was sample-based like a demoscene 'tracker' (but in a proprietary format), so it also had that lovely sample-based aspect ;) I still listen to extracted/covered versions of some of those to this day!

    • danwills 2 hours ago

      I just learned that one can get the mods here (lemmings 2 actually even used a real tracker called OctaMED!):

      https://www.camanis.net/lemmings/music.php

      Such a classic sound! Reminds me of the similarly brilliant Star Control II soundtrack (which was also tracker music)!

bluedino 7 hours ago

So many parallels with Angry Birds.

Appeals to all groups, released on every platform. Then come the sequels, special editions (like Christmas Lemmings), and then it just kind of faded away.

Lemmings just didn't get a movie and merchandising.

herniatedeel 3 hours ago

Quite the line: "a case of mordant laddish humor ramming slightly askew."

georgemcbay 7 hours ago

> For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991

DMA Design later created the GTA series and was rebranded Rockstar North when they were acquired by Take-Two. So they did end up creating a giant franchise (though "perennial" could certainly be debated given the gap between GTA 5 and GTA 6).

In any case the principles involved have probably been too busy sleeping on mountains of GTA 1-6 money to lament the untimely death of Lemmings too much.

That said, as a gamer I personally prefer Lemmings.

  • jtbayly 7 hours ago

    It’s actually mentioned in the article.

TacticalCoder 7 hours ago

oh noooooooo!

  • romland 7 hours ago

    In my mind, and I have not played it since the Amiga days, it's a very curt "oh no". Amazing, I can still hear it!

    • georgemcbay 7 hours ago

      I can still hear it as well.

      I can also still hear "First there was Menace... Now, Psygnosis presents... a DMA Design game... Blood Money. (there's a whole lot more coming...)".

      DMA had very good sound design for the time.

      • romland 6 hours ago

        Yeah, absolutely! Blood Money. I am almost embarrassed that I remember so many of the samples!