Overview
The premise is as simple as it is chaotic: a trapdoor opens in the sky, and dozens of tiny, green-haired Lemmings begin marching blindly forward. They have absolutely no sense of self-preservation and will happily walk straight off a cliff, into a fire, or into the jaws of a mechanical trap unless you intervene.
Players must assign specific skills to individual Lemmings to guide the horde safely to the exit door. You can make a Lemming a "Blocker" to act as a living wall, a "Builder" to construct staircases over gaps, or a "Digger" to tunnel through the floor. Saving the required percentage of Lemmings unlocks the next, increasingly fiendish level.
Visual Archive
Behind The Scenes
An Accidental Masterpiece
The concept for Lemmings was born purely out of a programming experiment. Mike Dailly, a developer at DMA Design (the Scottish studio that would later create Grand Theft Auto), created a tiny 8x8 pixel animation of a man walking just to see how small he could render a character. He duplicated it to show off a massive crowd of them moving at once, and the studio immediately realized they had the foundation for a brilliant puzzle game.
Pop Culture Phenomenon
Lemmings was an absolute sensation. Its brilliant level design, combined with classical music covers (to avoid copyright issues) and the hilarious, destructive "Nuke" button (which forced all remaining Lemmings to explode in a shower of pixels), made it one of the most widely ported games in video game history.