Stuff you did/thought when you first played Lemmings

[Simon]

Nostalgia topic, share your stories.

I first played the game at age 6 or 7, and most of these episodes are indeed from about that age.

I got stuck in Fun 11 (Keep your hair on Mr. Lemming). I didn't even guess what one-way arrows meant. The friend who first showed me the game saw I got stuck there, and claimed "You got stuck in that world? That's one I consider really easy...", proceeding to solve the level for me.



I got some kind of retaliation though. When the same friend played Tame 18 (Lemmings for Presidents), I told him the green crystal pieces (see above screenshot) in the ground were rockets, and you could have your lemmings shot high into the air if you went into them. He dug into the crystals -- nothing happened, of course -- and continued to dig out of the level, having to restart.

We weren't sure what the minus/plus buttons on the left of the skill panel did at first. Our dads initially suggested these buttons had some effect on worker lemmings. It took a while to see how they changed the release rate.

I drew large versions of the eight L1 skill icons once, one per sheet of paper, and decorated my room with them. My brother tore some of them apart (he was 2 or 3 years old back then) and hung up the floater icon at the top of the wall.

I played many times through the Fun and Tame levels starting from level 1, also many times through Tricky up to From the boundary line. (A huge jump in Tricky difficulty, never solved it as a kid.) I played the higher difficulties whenever I felt like it, and also managed some progress through them. However, I had huge respect of the hardest difficulty in each game. After all, the L1 Mayhem opener level is a huge steel-only level with a death drop from the entrance and massive steel walls to build onto, and the ONML Havoc opener level has a hidden icicle. My dad also solved levels back then, we worked together on our level code lists.

When I read in the L1 manual that there was a two-player mode, I tried to get a second mouse to work, but the PC version doesn't have the two-player mode. The manual was merely written to explain all L1 ports at once. Looking through it years later, I see the English section of the manual actually mentions that there's no two-player mode in the PC version, but the German translation doesn't have this note. MS-Dos/Windows 95 themselves are able to use two mice though, I've played split-screen Settlers 2, an RTS/economics simulation, against a friend.



I played endless hours of practise mode in Lemmings 2, almost always on the medieval map. When I loaded up the game in Dosbox over 10 years later, my mother came by once and stated "I vividly remember that catapult!"



As kids, my brother and me also played the Lemmings 3 practise map several times, mostly throwing grenades into "other people's lawns", i.e. from the bombs/grenades group into the spades/bricks group. Does anyone actually do much other stuff in the L3 practise level besides playing with the grenades? I suppose the L3 practise level doesn't get played much at all nowadays, as the L2 practise mode is so much better with the free skill choice.

I've finished L3 with zero losses a few years ago, but as a kid, I usually just saved one lem. There is a certain L3 level in the last third of Classic, it has two hatches, one must save the other, and the spawn order is second hatch first. I don't think I made it past that as a kid. I reached the end of another tribe, but couldn't understand the subsequent English message telling me to save more lems per tribe. ;-)

I wasn't able to run Lemmings games properly after getting rid of MS-Dos at first, especially L2 is a beast to get to run natively. This added a layer of mysticism onto the fond memories, and I'm sure it has contributed to how I view the games these days.

(Apropos Tame 18 earlier... geoo should deduct a point from his quiz score: He claimed that Tame 19 was Lemmings for Presidents, and answered so quickly and securely that I took it for granted when scoring the answers later. )

-- Simon

[finlay]

I didn't try L2 or L3 until this year... although my mum got a nostalgia trip from hearing the ONML music when I was playing it earlier this year.

When I learnt how to play Lemmings, it was through repeated playing of a mac demo of the game, which included Fun 2, Tricky 9, Taxing 4 and Mayhem 18. I had my dad helping and learning too, but a few very basic techniques took us quite a while to deduce. For instance, building multiple bridges in order to make a longer bridge. Bashers took a while too, because first of all, there are very few places you can use them on Tricky 9 anyway because it's full of metal, but the fact that you have to be right up against a wall before you use them took a while to get the hang of. For ages we'd been using a miner to get through the small one-way block on the left of the level and chancing it as to whether the guy would be able to build his way out the top of the thing...

Anyway, it was repeated playing of those for ages before my dad finally gave in and bought the full game (with ONML too, fortunately). And then probably months before I ever completed either game, sadly with the help of a guide or with solutions fed to me by my dad at various points, which I should probably be ashamed to admit, but for heaven's sake, I was only 7. I think I prefer ONML now because I sometimes have had to work out a lot of the levels from scratch, particularly in Havoc, in a way that I rarely have to do with L1 because I've either played it more or just had the solution fed to me.

I do remember finding Crazy impossible on ONML, you see, especially straight after Tame, so it took me much longer to get to the later levels half the time.

[Simon]

Yeah, both the ONML and L2 music is catchy and long-term memorable.

The design of the demo version is flawed if they don't include a terrain-rich 20-of-everything level early on. Basher and consecutive builder placement aren't obvious at all for a newcomer. "They just keep on coming" is a horrible level to introduce bashers.

Just keep 'em coming, noble fellows of the forums out there. geoo hadn't played Lemmings until he was 14, but others might have something?

-- Simon

[Clam]

I don't remember a whole lot, since I must've been all of 5 years old when I first played. I do remember feeling a great sense of satisfaction at completing the Fun rating . At some point later on, a list of passwords appeared (not sure how, I certainly didn't do it), so of course out of curiosity I went and tried out some of the later levels, including 'Rendezvous at the mountain' - which I solved - but not the really challenging 'Save Me'. I don't feel it spoiled the game for me though, but then again this is probably because I was so young.

ONML: I remember getting past the early Crazy levels pretty quickly, despite the obvious difficulty spike. I didn't get far through the later ratings though.

L2: Like Simon, I had a great fondness for the Medieval practice level and the catapult .

L3: I scrambled a minimal amount through the Classic tribe, following that one level where you have to jump each lemming individually over a gap, or otherwise be extremely efficient with skills (which of course I wasn't at the time ). Barely touched the other tribes until I rediscovered the game later on. Also, I didn't know there was an 'adult mode' back then. Probably for the best


It's notable that I didn't have the original DOS games for long before we upgraded to Windows, and the games disappeared mysteriously (I still don't know how my dad got them in the first place). Much later on, I got the Windows version (Orig/ONML) and pretty much breezed through the lot.

[Gronkling]

I must of started playing when I was two or something. I can't really remember much from then though. I remember thinking the first 'We all fall down' was super hard and impossible and that I was the master of lemmings once I completed it.  I used to design 'levels' on pieces of paper as well but most of them were boring massive building and hero lemming stages. When I finished fun I thought that it was a huge achievement, which it probably was for a 3-4 year old! I never had any other lemmings games though apart from the ONML mac demo. I used to think lemmings were clowns as well for some odd reason.

[DragonsLover]

Oh, I was around 6 I think when I played Lemmings for the first time on the Atari ST. That was unforgettable! Unfortunately, in that time, I didn't know floppy disks could be easily damaged and I remember that, when the surface of the floppy was dirty, I washed it under the water of the sink. But hopefully, I think someone stopped me right on time for doing so and the game still worked even though a crash could occur at the beginning of the game, especially when the Atari ST was hot. Silly me.

Whatever, I remember that at first, I watched my brother play. I also remember the days where I spent some great time in 2-Players mode with my old friend. We made sort to keep ending level with a tie game so that we could always get access to the next one. I also remember drawing tons and tons of Lemmings levels, with steel blocks represented with a dot in the middle of a rectangle. For some easiness, I always just drew "dirt" style levels. My old friend drew Lemmings levels too. In fact, each time after school, we ended drawing levels at the same time, day after day.

I may still have some old drawings somewhere. My mother would know.

I don't remember how far I reached the game in the old time. It's been a while.

Still on the Atari ST, I made some levels into NeoChrome in different themes. I already made a post about that, but I think it's on an older forum. I may repost them back if you want.

[finlay]

I met a friend when I was 8 or 9 who had an Atari with Lemmings. We played through the entire 2 player mode one day, although he got bored on level 18 or 19, IIRC, and left me to complete level 20 alone. We never played it again, even though I was still good friends with him for a few years after that (we kind of drifted apart a bit during our teens)... I think he saw through the thin veneer covering my obvious obsession.

Still haven't played 2 player since then, come to think of it. But when I look at the screenshots of the levels or load them up in an editor, they do really ring a bell for me.

[DragonsLover]

But would it be possible to import these multiplayer levels into Lix or it would conflict with copyrights? It it does, then the only solution would be to recreate these levels in the editor.

Same thing for ONML multiplayer levels.

[Simon]

Both players need the Lemmings terrain, and at least one needs the levels. Lix will then render and play the levels. The game has documentation on where to put the files, I merely don't offer them for download out of paranoia. Hunt around the web mindlessly, or feel chatty.

The old levels are still fun for nostalgia purposes. Some of them were already rebuilt with the free terrain styles, too. ;-) However, most of the Lemmings multiplayer maps feel grindier than what we usually play today, see geoo's rabble topic about multiplayer styles.

-- Simon

[namida]

I understood the game surprisingly well. However, I did once while stuck on Mayhem 19, try messing around with codes and accidentally got the one for the next level... I swear there were also some other weird glitches that happened with it, but considering how long ago that was probably just me thinking the next few levels were really weird. I did eventually beat it, and it was Mayhem 29 (of course) that I got stuck on. By getting a code for level 30 (I looked this one up, no lucky guesses this time), I managed to beat it. It wasn't until about 10 years later I finally managed to beat Save Me. (I had long since beaten it on Master System, which doesn't have Save Me, by then.)

ONML, I didn't really properly play until about 5-6 years ago. I beat the majority of it quite quickly (within a week) once I started, but one level in Havoc (Lemming About Town) had me for a good few weeks... >_> (EDIT: Re-reading this post now, I should note that I had no trouble working out how to solve it, but there was some positioning issue or something in the Windows version that made it really hard to actually execute.)

Lemmings 3D, I somehow got the idea that you're meant to use virtual lemming mode... so naturally, I'm now used to playing it almost entirely with virtual lemming on. In terms of levels, Chocolate Drop was one I found surprisingly complicated, as was Fun Fair. I eventually beat Chocolate Drop but had to get a code for the next level after Fun Fair (again, this level remained unbeaten long past me beating the rest). I have however never managed to find the intended solution to Final Maze (mostly because I'm not a huge fan of the "work out where stuff sends you" type levels), instead going for a nice backroute I found very quickly. I actually found a lot of backroutes throughout L3D, unlike in the original where my solutions generally match up to what most other people find. (Spaghetti Junction and Tower of Lemlab are two levels I loved backrouting especially, although I did find the intended solution to both).

[Proxima]

Ooh, nice topic, I only just discovered it 

Let's see. I first played Lemmings aged 9 at a friend's house, and remember having difficulty with Fun 7 because of the lemmings getting stuck in that pit We got the game ourselves not long after, and it took me a couple of years to get through nearly all the levels. From the early stages of learning, one "roadblock" that stands out is Fun 16 -- I hadn't got multiple building worked out, so I was trying to go along and then up! I also took a long time on Tricky 19 (I found the harder dig/bash solution, as I did again on Tricky 23, rather than the reverse miner) and Taxing 6. As for Taxing 11... don't even talk about that one! I never thought of using a dig pit, and insisted on trapping the crowd with miners. The higher categories felt like ventures into unexplored and perilous territory -- we'd been stuck on Mayhem 2 for a while, and my dad was very impressed when I presented him with the access codes for 3-10 all in one night.

Of course, that "nearly" is because I was playing the Mac version, on which Mayhem 26 is near-impossibly hard, and it was a further ten years after completing the rest of the game before I beat that one level. We also got ONML a couple of years later, and I beat it up to Havoc 16 in a fairly short time, then polished off the final levels more slowly.

I also designed loads of levels on paper -- "Changing of the Guards" and "Behind Bars" are from those, though when I remade them, I just kept the layouts the same, changing the skills to make them into genuine puzzles. In fact, one thing I did in quite a lot of my paper levels was design layouts that would be quite tricky, then chicken out and only require 1 lemming to be saved!

I played L2 just once, at a friend's house. He was stuck on one of the Egyptian levels, and I helped him pass it. (Looking at the maps on The Lemmings Solution, it was Level 9, and our solution was a little different from the one shown.) I've still not played any of the other games.

[mobius]

I played DOS Lemmings on a Windows 3.1 when I was around 5. It was my sisters and she played it first and showed me how to play and my dad. I think I had two or three other games on DOS like Pole Racer, none of which I really enjoyed or played nearly as much as Lemmings.

I played through all of Fun when I was that old. My favorite levels were the (my self titled names for the levels since I didn't pay much attention to the title on the title screen plus I didn't like them very much) 'The spider web', the pyramid, 'the dragon' (You Live and Lem, I'm not sure why I called it this; I guess I thought the terrain on the right side kind of looked like the head of a monster). My least favorites were "as long as you try your best and (in tricky) Lemming Drops because I thought it was frustratingly difficult at the time.
I played through tricky all the way to 'Postcard from Lemmingland' and never beat it. apparently my sister didn't either because I found the codes she kept and they stopped at that level.
I tried to go ahead on Taxing and beat the first level, and the second after a long time and lots of difficulty then never passed 'Heaven can't wait'. I thought: no blockers??? this is impossible! I tried Mayhem but never beat Steal Works (I wasn't, however, stumped at the entrance surprise. Although I doubt if I would've saved enough from the beginning if I ever actually made it to the end) I thought Heaven can't wait was harder.
I never knew about right clicking to invert priority  " title="Angry" class="smiley" /> " title="Angry" class="smiley" />
I often did things differently, for example on 'There's a lot of them about' I always multitasked. I don't even know if I ever realized I didn't have to or not, I just figured this is the way it needed to be done. I also never made all the lemmings on 'Bitter Lemming' floaters. I always built up from the bottom.

I remember discovering then that blockers were weird and you could push lemmings through thin walls with them. that was about the extent of my glitch interest then.

Somehow I never heard of ONML, the Tribes or 3D Lemmings, all of which I'm sure I would've loved.

Eventually I found Lemmings Revolution in a Scholastic magazine and got that. I was closer to ten then. I  played that a lot & got close to the end but never beat the game. Then I found Lemmings paintball after and beat that game, and found the windows version of the original and ONML. And finally beat the game when I was a teenager, then of course was overjoyed to discover ONML and found that game much more difficult.

One thing stands out to me now that I think about it; there isn't a single lemmings game I don't like. (even though I never played Tribes and 3D Lemmings I've seen them and I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy them) I can't say that for any other video game series.

[Akseli]

Very nice topic, I shall also share my childhood memories.

Lemmings has always been my clear favourite computer game series ever, no one game is close to it - and so it is still nowadays. Most of my memories relates to ONML, which was the most important game for me for some reason, but I remember playing original Lemmings, Lemmings 2, Lemmings 3 and even Lemmings 3D (demo version), too in the 1990s. The only thing I remember from L2 is the first level of Beach tribe, and afterwards nobody found that game from our computer anymore, what made me a little sad. From L3 I remembered best the training level but not much else. My parents recorded sometimes with a camcorder our live and in one video my big sister plays Shadow tribe level 2 of Lemmings 3. I recognized that level from that like 16-years-old-video when I played L3 last spring and it was quite a nostalgic moment.

My mom was the one who played the game with me and we wrote levelcodes down to a paper when we made progress in L1 and ONML. I'm born in 1991 and these memories are probably from -95-96. I remember clearly when we solved a snow level in Wild ranking and it came a time for me to go to sleep. I asked my mom still: "Can I have a look at the next level?" My mom clicked the next level button. The title screen of a brick level came in front of us. "Can I look closer at the level?" I asked, and we clicked so the level started and we pressed the pause button. The level looked interesting and we perhaps yet thought how to solve it, but then I went to sleep. I clearly remember that moment, so I can nowadays tell that the level was THE SILENCE OF THE LEMMINGS. Then the snow level had to be ICE SPY, even though I remembered only the tileset of that level.

I also remember that one day I went to a sauna (yeah, we Finnish people go sauna very often http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauna), took a shower and dried myself with a towel. Then I went to the computer room and took a look at the levelcode paper, and few waterdrops still dropped from me and hit the paper, and the colour of the letters written by some red pencil spread a little. The trails are still there, but the letters are fully unterstandable, so the incidence didn't do any harm. I remember also that we were proceeding already in mid-Wicked at that time, and I guess we played ROCKY ROAD that night! (Haha, my memories focus seemingly on the all-caps titled levels...)

Finally, Havoc 5 "There's a madness in the method", was the level we got really stuck on. One day I and my mom searched the levelcodes for the rest of the Havoc levels from the Internet, and those codes (Havoc 6-20) are written in our paper with a blue ballpoint pen, all the other with some red pens. I tried many levels, but I'm quite sure that I didn't pass any of them immediately. Also, for some reason, the levelcodes were wrong for levels 18-20, so Where Lemmings Dare was the hardest level I got access to. And I tried it so many times without succeeding, I wanted so highly to see how the very difficultiest levels of ONML looked like. I remember that I thought that Havoc 20 had to be a massive brick tileset level which probably requires 100% saved. So, when one day we searched again the levelcodes from Internet and the code for Havoc 20 worked, I was really excited. It was a surprise for me that the boss level of ONML wasn't a brick level, it was a rock level ! It was though very hard.

I have all our levelcode papers still and I think that I'd never throw them away. I also drew many my own levels in papers and I have a lot of them still. The only existing level I have drawn is Where Lemmings Dare, maybe I tried to solve that level with my drawing! When I was 11, I drew levels that I saw in my dreams. For larger maps I linked many A4-papers with adhesive tape. I have found drawings of my imaginary levels in all tilesets but Pillar and Crystal. In addition to L1 and ONML maps, I have also drawn one Lemmings Revolutions map.

We moved into a new house in 2002 and I know that I finally beated both L1 and ONML for the first time in that house, so I have been more than 11 years old at that moment (And I was the only one in my family who still played Lemmings...). Then was the long period that Lemmings didn't work in our computer anymore. When in autumn 2010 my brother helped me with DOSBox, the first games I played with it were Lemmings games (of course..)! On last winter I got a HUGE Lemmings itch again by accidentally watching custom level videos in Youtube (it was Pieuw whose miraculous levels strongly amazed me). Thanks for DOSBox (thanks my brother :>) and Abandonia (heard from my sister about this page, thanks :>) (and thank you my dad and especially my mom, for everything... :'>), for the first time of my life I played through Holiday Lemmings 1994, Lemmings 2 and Lemmings 3 in this winter-summer 2012 period, achieving some of my greatest childhood dreams ever.

[Mikex62]

I first saw Lemmings on my brother's PlayStation 3. I never played the game. When I first played Lemmings, I did it on the SNES. I used to call the Lemmings, "Lemmingtons" as my habits came from the PlayStation 3 screen (whenever you hover over a game.) The first level I got stuck on was "A task for blockers and bombers" as I did not use the Bombers at all. The first line was easy, but the second one was horrible. I never got past it until 2012 where I got the actual copy on the SNES. Believe it or not I am up to "WHAT A AWESOME LEVEL". Recently I bought a copy of Lemmings for the Commodore Amiga. But I did not have a Commodore Amiga yet. 

[Pooty]

I also had fun with the Medieval practice level, but I had the SNES version, so no catapault. Instead, it was a playground for archers and ballooners. I'm sure you can work out what I was doing.

Also, Fun 11. "Keep your hair on Mr. Lemming". *Put my hair on the TV*.