A very nice topic idea!
When I started using DOSBox in autumn 2010, I played through L1 and ONML the first time for a long time, and I remember glancing through Lemmings sites. From
Lemmings Universe site I found Martin Zurlinden's custom level pack, which I tried with a great excitement and I was totally impressed.
It was though the beginning of year 2012 when I next time properly encountered Lemmings. I love playing retro games, and one day I was searching Jazz Jackrabbit music from YouTube, typing "A Cold Day in Heck" in the search bar, and then a custom level titled like that came in front of me. I had to click it - and then there was no return to the past. I was completely enchanted by custom lemmings scene, I just drifted in YouTube watching videos of Lemmings levels, always getting more and more amazed and thinking "What, you can do that in Lemmings?!?" I've written something related to this
here and
here.
I can't exactly remember how I encountered Lemmings Forums, but I was reading some stuff here before I registered. I think that the latest spark to my joining was
Tseug's level pack topic, I had found his levelpack from the Lemmings Level Database after some googling "custom Lemmings levels" or something. I remember I had no idea how to solve any level in this pack, and I had to register to the forums so I could download ccexplore's solutions for that pack. After that though, I never watched solutions from others' replays or YouTube before solving levels myself at first!
Oh yeah. I joined these forums on March 2012, so I'm one of the newest active members I guess. I still sometimes wonder if I found this community too late, because so few people seem to be interested in custom level scene anymore, which is the part I love the most. :/
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Check out
Lemmings-related web links topic! You can find a backup of the Lemmings forums from 2005 and a very little bit of Lemmings Community site. I actually recently asked Mr. K about his backup of Lemmings Community site, but he hasn't found it.
geoo and Simon had two years ago a fun competition: how many forum members they remembered through the forum history.
Link here, their lists are also there two posts down!
So, I personally don't know/remember the oldest regulars, but I've played levels of such people like Andi, Conway, Leviathan, tseug, and Tumbleweed, who never joined this current forum as far as I know.