Why "Fquiggly"?

[Prob Lem]

There were a couple of cheats in the original Amiga version of Lemmings. One was to type IMNOGOOD at the title screen, which activates an in-game level-skip option, but this one is far less interesting than the other one, because it's easily understood. It's quite well-known (and was published in plenty of magazines) that the other one - the anti-splat cheat - is activated by typing FQUIGGLY at the title screen.

But what on Earth is the "Fquiggly" thing about? It's not plain English like the other one (well, it's almost, but not quite, "Squiggly", I suppose...), but it also doesn't seem to simply be the result of random letter-mashing, either.

It got a mention in the flavour-text, specifically in the story, in the manual for All New World of Lemmings/The Lemmings Chronicles, too (I actually knew it from this first, myself, and learned of the cheat later). I've quoted the relevant part here;

The food supplies were disturbingly low as well. The food mainly consisted of the icky and horrible Fquiggly plant, so some of the Lemmings were glad when it DID run out! It made for meagre fare, but even a lack of food for weeks couldn't make a Lemming any less pudgy than he already was. They were a bit like camels in that respect, except with food and not water.

This seems like a really obscure thing to mention almost four years after the original game was released! ANWoL/Chronicles was released in December of 1994 for MS-DOS, and around January or February of 1995 for the Commodore Amiga, so by this point Fquiggly had been included both as a cheat to prevent splatting, and then later as a species of gruesome edible plant.

Since there seem to be stories about a lot of things that went into Lemmings, I wonder if there's some sort of anecdote or in-joke behind Fquiggly? I couldn't find any mention of it in The Complete History of Lemmings. Does anyone know the origins of it?

[NaOH]

That's peculiar. I would expect it is a misspelling of "Squiggly" (which brings to mind a similarly sloshy and vulgar feel as splatting lemmings do). Perhaps it was originally Squiggly, but a bit or two got flipped somewhere along the line and it shipped as "Fquiggly" before anyone noticed. Or maybe the F stands for something, like somebody's name, but its intended meaning will forever be obscured, likely forgotten even by its original creator.

Or maybe the fact that it resembles a word is completely random. Metroid for the NES had the infamous JUSTIN BAILEY ------ ------ cheat code which gives the player character god-like power (and apparently removes most of her clothes as an added bonus...). At first it was speculated this was a secret message from the creators but it turns out there are a myriad of entirely random passwords that all do similar things, governed by some complicated mathematical formula. Maybe there are other valid passwords that unlock the anti-splat cheat? ccexplore could probably tell us.