Your first Lemmings experience?

[Jazzem]

Due to the lack of active topics (We should stray away from Custlemm from time to time!) I decided on a way for us all to get misty eyed. What was your first experience of this marvelous game? And what format did you first own it on? If you can't remember exactly (Like me) just enlighten us with your early days of the game, and if you can't remember those... Well you're a bit stuck

Ever since I've started playing games I've always used them regularly. And when I was young, I had two favourites:Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Lemmings. Being the owner of an Acorn Archemdies (An old computer in the vein of the Amiga), I would regularly play lots of wonderful little games, and my favourite? You've guessed. Everything about the game appealled to me:The music, the simple but addictive gameplay, the uncanny yet memorable graphics, even the "Let's go" voice! And the best thing? My whole school class thought the same. With every classroom came an Acorn Archemedies, and with every rainy lunch time came much huddling around a single monitor, taking turns to do the levels and just enjoying ourselves really. When we thought we lost the game, you would've thought the apocolypse was coming by our reactions! Fortunately it was found under a mousemat. We found various techniques too, smashing the keyboard keys always seemed to make the game run quicker! Awesome days, rainy lunchtimes were always far, far better then sunny ones with Lemmings around.

And you know what? I still play it regularly. And I love it just as much as I did back then. And for that reason, it remains a game that I'll love as long as I game, and one of my all time favourites.

[JM]

I owned Lemmings since I was like 5 or 6 whenever. When I was 12 I downloaded Custlemm and Lemedit and played several levelpaks I downloaded. I ended up making a few levels myself. When I registered on this forum I put some of my levels into levelpaks and uploaded them here. Now I've been improving and making better Custlemm levels. I've also owned Wolfenstein 3-D for a while and I'm working on a mod for that. No information has been posted on the internet yet. If you're a wolfenstein fan go to www.wolfenstein3d.co.uk . When I downloaded some custlemm levels I discovered levels with invisible terrain and was wondering how that happened. Now I made a level called "The Invisible Bridge" and uploaded it. I've also started reviewing levels on the Custlemm level list game when somebody said I should review a level because I said it was easy. I managed to get the hang of uploading the image for the level and the rest was easy. Now I've thought of better titles for Custlemm levels and told some people about them. I've also placed some levels into the original lemmings to see what the Original Lemmings would be like with different levels etc. Also thanks to Geoo89 for importing 2 features into Custlemm. A new VGASPECx file and a superfast level.

[Proxima]

I owned Lemmings for the Mac when I was around 9. Black and white, of course. Apart from "Pea Soup" being impossible (and I didn't discover that for a while anyway) it didn't detract from the enjoyment at all. I loved it ever since I started playing it, and it was one of the first games I designed my own levels for, even though I had no idea it would ever be possible to play them.

[Mindless]

I played Lemmings once at ~ age 7 at a friends house... then I didn't play the game until years later.  Nearly 2 years ago, I designed a(n ugly) website where people could download Lemmings, LemEdit, etc. because VTM's website had gone down.  Since then, it has gone thru quite a few visual revisions, until the "blue skin," at which point it was indexed by Google. (w00t!)  Now it's at in a quite stable skin, and I plan to leave it looking like that, hopefully still adding new content.  (BTW, If my site's missing your pack(s), PM me.) Anyway, back to Lemmings:  A while ago, I found that I could play Lemmings in an Amiga emulator, at which point I began my attempt to complete all the levels.  (ATM, I'm on Taxing 22.)  I'm actually not all that great at Lemmings (see previous note ), but I still love the game.

[LemSteven]

I received the game from a relative when I was about 7 or so (way back in 1992).  Unfortunately, it didn't work on our 5-year old computer.  After about a year of having an unplayable Lemmings game, my dad bought a new computer, and Lemmings worked just fine! ;D  I still play Lemmings on that same computer today.

At first, I was really too young to go much past the Fun levels -- my dad continued on from there.  Eventually, after playing the game over and over, I began to get good at it.  At this point, my dad had gotten stuck on Taxing 11.  I was good enough at that point to beat it for him.

After we beat the game, we continued with ONML, Lemmings 2, The Lemmings Chronicles, Lemmings 3D, and Lemmings Revolution.  Eventually, I didn't need my dad's help anymore.  I pretty much beat Lemmings Revolution by myself, as well as most of the Mayhem levels in Lemmings 3D.

Now, when I play Lemmings, I focus on finding new backroutes, and improving my scores where possible.  

[DragonsLover]

I played the game the first time when I was maybe 4 or 5, don't remember. It was on the Atari ST. What a wonderful game it is! I remember all the days, playing the 2-Player levels with my old best friend. I also remember that sometimes, when I was back to home, I went directly to my old best friend and we started drawing A LOT of Lemmings levels. That was really cool!

When I discovered Customized Lemmings and LemEdit, I was like: "Oh my god! Oh my god! My dream come true!". I started making a lot of levels and the result is there: all the Mikepaks.

Finally, when Cheapo was available. It's another "Oh my god! Oh my god! My another dream come true!". ;D

All of this is like a lesson: it is not necessary to have a game very beautiful, very big, with a lot of combat combos, where it is so realistic to have fun! A little game like Lemmings is enough and then, you'll probably have more fun!

I just want to ask a question to you: are old games better than the new ones? Don't you think sometimes that the games in the past where we passed most of our times are better and that are much fun to play? What do you think of that?

[Shvegait]

I must have been something like 6 when I first played it. My (much) older brother got some cracked version somehow (DOS). I only really played the Fun and Tricky levels for a long time, same with my family (all older), although I remember someone managed to pass Taxing 1 and 2, and my one sister passed Mayhem 1, but that was it!

I'm not sure when I started making levels, but it couldn't have been that much later. I remember there was this girl on my bus to elementary school who drew levels also, and we shared them on the bus.. that was fun.. I don't have any of my old notebooks though, but I'm positive they're all crap

I freaked out when I found CustLemm and LemEdit one year ago. It was just so awesome to be able to make levels... It still is, but I'm busier and lazier than ever

[Jazzem]

Thanks for your replies guys, great to hear from you all

Did anyone ever find themselves restarting the game when they were young? I did whenever I got to a hard level I couldn't do (Eventually I managed to get towards the end of Tricky-I can still remember being amazed at the Menace level, I had seen nothing like it!). I always go through each level everytime I get a new version (I've just ordered Game Boy Lemmings off ebay ).

[Winlemm]

I must have been about 5-6 years ago, im onlya kid!- when i found the revolution demo on a demo disk. About one year ago i bought Winlemm from GAME in worcestershire-thats where i get my name from!

[Conway]

My first Lemmings was on the Sega MegaDrive. While I was passing that, I also got Lemmings Tribes for the same platform, and passed most of that. It was then that I started drawing concept levels on a pad. It wasn't until a few years later that we finally had a computer in my house, but without Internet access. I looked everywhere for Lemmings in the shops, but I couldn't find it. And to make matters worse, I had seen LemEdit and all the screenshots of fan levels on the VTM site on a library computer, but I wasn't able to download anything!  

  Then I started a full time I.T. course at college, so I was able to download Lemmings, Custlemm and LemEdit and fit them all on one floppy disk to take home. (In fact, I didn't even need to download Lemmings, since somebody had left a copy sitting there on the hard disk of the very computer I was on at the time!) So I got home to try it, and it was all a bit slow and LemEdit wouldn't work because it was an XP machine.

  Then finally I remembered that we still had an old Windows 98 machine up in my sister's room, so I immediately ran to try it out. And it worked! My days of dreaming were over.

[geoo]

I think I was about 5 or 6 when I first saw it. I only remember vaguely, but I think I have the picture of "Just Dig" or some dirt style level in my head. I didn't want to play it though, I just wanted to watch someone else play.
When I had got a little older I browsed with a friend of mine though the various games, but we found Supaplex first and just played it not continuing searching.
I remember in elementary school we had an old comp. and played various games there too. I almost never played actively there though, but I remember us standing around the screen in a crowd watching; this were my only contacts to lemmings at that time.
After moving, I think in 2001, I began to play again, among other games also lemmings. I used to play a game for a few weeks or months, and after that I switched to another one. After some time, when I had played a couple of games, the cycle restarted and I continued games I played before. In 2003 I somehow found LemEdit and created a few levels, nothing special though. At the end of that year I found the Supaplex forum and stopped playing other games for over a year. In the beginning of 2005 I somehow got the feeling that I wanted to play lemmings again, and continued playing the original levels/ONML with WinLemm, later I registered here. I think the rest you may know. I still neither completed the original levels nor ONML, but at least for ONML I'm going to do it.
And yeah, I have to agree with DragonsLover, I somehow think that the older games are better. Why else should I still playing them while so many new ones exist?
Oh, and I just want to say again @JM, I didn't find those two feature, I just was the first one making a level supporting them. I got that information reading the conversation between ccexplore and Mindless in some thread, and after that I guessed that for the vgaspec file it might be the byte mentioned in rt's level format description.

[Leviathan]

My first lemming I saved was about 10 years ago when I was on a PC from someone from my family...I liked it that much that I copied the game but I never got it to work myself,so I needed to bring my PC to a PC shop to fix the problem...

A few months ago I discovered CustLem and LemEdit,which gave Lemmings a whole new dimension to me

When I was little,I couldn't pass levels like "lemmingology" etc...now I passed all original and ONML lemmings...except from my black beast: "Race against the cliches"...
I still have a few more Genesis levels to pass

One level I really hate is "from the boundary line"...I manage to fail on it in 99% of all cases

[Jazzem]

I agree with Dragonslover and geo, I generally prefer retro gaming to today's gaming. The oldies just seem to have that sort of undeniable magic, and they're generally more fun to play. Of course, I'm not pre-1997 only, I regularly invest in new games, and I am constantly losing sleep over anticipation for Mario Kart DS, but I'll have a SNES over a Gamecube anyday.

[Conway]

Leviathan, I've always used a backroute in 'Race Against the Cliches'. I never touched the ceiling.

[DragonsLover]

Newer games are good too, but are kinda much complicated. Simple games are always fun to play! If you played the game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The game isn't so complicated and it's why it was so popular and fun to play. It always depend.

Geoo: A little council: Play Lemmings and Oh no! More Lemmings under Dosbox using the corrected versions of the game. These are better than WinLemm, in my opinion.