Back in 1994/95 when I was 7, me and my friend from Spain who was staying for the year in Britain found Lemmings and got a bit obsessed and I never really looked back. I got quite famous for it: even 4 years later one guy was still telling me how if I got a Playstation I could get Lemmings 3D (and I did, eventually, but much much more recently, and only by chance when I found it in a car boot sale). Similarly I've always had an obsession with Tintin, for even longer, and all my classmates have known about that. Even now my flatmates at university know that I like Tintin, because it's easier to show that I do...
Anyway, I digress.... yes.... first thing about Lemmings I ever saw was actually the gamebook in a book sale at my school, but my dad found a demo of the game at basically the same time, on a MacFormat floppy disc or something. What's more, it was an exclusive demo (I found it again more recently and it says that it was made especially), which contained the levels Only Floaters Can Survive This, They Just Keep On Coming, Lend A Helping Hand..., and And Then There Were Four.... . Me and my dad basically learnt Lemmings on that second, although by hesitant experimentation only. Floaters were already pretty obvious from the first level, and blockers and exploders had obvious uses. Miners were fairly self-evident as well, and I must have worked out climbers too. Builders, diggers and bashers took a bit longer: diggers again I must have just worked out. Builders were a source of amazement when we first actually tried them, for I had thought that they were wearing a stop sign, which couldn't be good. Finer points like the fact that you could build twice to get a longer bridge took a wee bit longer. Bashers took quite a bit longer because it's more difficult to time them properly if you don't know what you're doing, making it seem like the skill does nothing, so we used to try and use a complicated system of miners, which was impractical.
And once we'd got that the remaining levels were, while of harder difficulty, a lot easier to work out.
I played this over and over for quite a while because my dad wouldn't get the game immediately.
Me and my aforementioned Spanish friend read the gamebooks avidly, as well. They didn't make much sense at all at first because the storyline is heavily based around the storyline of The Tribes, especially in the first, although the second wasn't even out at the time. Avidly to the extent that we practically had contests over it and things like that. There were other things like how I eventually worked out a quick way of doing the shadow maze, and he practically refused to believe me. He also had Christmas Lemmings on his computer later on, but I never got to play it in the end, basically because his dad didn't really like computer games, except "educational ones". (who says lemmings isn't educational, eh? :
) I also once got my teacher to read it to us in class, but that fell through after a few days iirc.
And I think it was for a Christmas (possibly birthday, but I doubt it because that's too close to the start of the school year) present that my dad got me the Lemmings/ONML combo boxset thingie for the mac. Never looked back. Amazing game ever since.
Other Lemmings escapades.... hmm....
I did design my own levels at some points in my life but they've almost all disappeared except ones I've done more recently. I made a couple with screenshots and "Fine Artist", which was a paint program for children, quite a few years later so maybe at the age of 12-14, even with Lemmings walking about on them and stuff, but only in the sand tileset. It was also fairly obvious that the game was made of tiles, even at the age of <10, and a couple of times I imagined what a new tileset might look like; one idea was some kind of flat-roofed house, a bit like one from Sim City 2000 (but let's not go there!).
Another fun thing I once did was with another friend, who I first met when I was 8, so it must have been that year, or the one after, but he had an Atari, and a copy of Lemmings for that (though he didn't play it as much as me). One time we played the two player version, which was simply amazing, as far as I was concerned. He never let me play it again though, even though I asked him he would just say I was obsessed or something (well fair enough). I don't think he enjoyed it as much (though he did); I remember he quit when we got to the last level; partly because it was too hard--I think I did both players for that level or something.
I only finally found out how to edit levels a couple of years ago, at least, but not more than 4 years ago. I don't think it was that long ago though. I think it was when the Lemmings Universe board was still around, and I definitely joined that board. I think I was jealous of people who had Lemedit, so I got ResEdit out and experimented with the code to work out how it worked. It had a convenient template, as I said somewhere else, so it wasn't toooo difficult, but it did take ages. And since then I've designed a lot more levels, but only a few are still around, and only a few have been implemented. I feel like I ought to do a couple more now given that Lemedit works now, and Cheapo when I'm at home.
And that brings me up to the present. My life story, ladies and gentlemen.
There's a few other unimportant details that I've left out, partly because I've now run out of space. This limit sucks, Andy.
