The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 70: If The Guy In Front Of You Jumped Off A Cliff, Would You Do It Too?

Having dispatched Zelda to the pit from which it should never have emerged, let’s move on to Lemmings.

That link will take you directly to a small emulated version which seems to replicate the original classic exactly. Feel free to while away a day or two on it before reading on.

Lemmings changed the landscape of computer games completely and utterly, and in a way that is increasingly impossible to do – it created an entirely new kind of game. Never before had anyone had an idea for a game remotely like this – in fact, the game was born almost by accident, like Penicillin. The prototype, according to the wiki, was a sort of demonstration for technology to be used in a different game. In fact, I get the impression it was 90% pure inspiration and only 10% perspiration, because once you’d created the programming that would allow those tiny creatures to do their things, the actual creation of those tortuous levels sounds like fun – like a contest between friends to see who can stump the others. (Opinion based entirely on supposition, needless to say. I’m sure it was a dreadful grinding nightmare, of sweat, tears and blood and each night Gary Timmons prayed to the loving God to end his life and spare him from the agonising toil.)

Both the games on the list today are games I have very little to actually say about. Zelda, because I’ve never played it, I can’t get a feel for why it should be on the list at all (the horrors of an essentially random list – it’ll happen a couple more times) and I don’t really have any desire to find out more about it. I’ll leave it to other people to explore Link – it’s not my field, or my generation, or my taste. I can’t bring myself to care.

(Ocarina Of Time is not going to be number one of this list.)

Lemmings, on the other hand, I care about too much. It’s too big. Historically, it’s enormous. It’s like Elite – the moment it came out on a coverdisk, computer gaming was reborn. It’s so simple and brilliant that it’s still imitated today, and the basic principles of the gameplay have been imbued into everything from God Games to RTS War Simulators. And yet, it’s so simple, so brilliant, so insidiously user-friendly that I can’t actually remember the moment I first played it. I remember playing it, yes – playing it and playing it, playing it to death on the Atari ST, getting through level after level. But it’s like when you first hear about vampires, or daleks, or Santa – the idea is so… so obvious, that it seems strange that there could have been a time when you didn’t know anything about it.

I’m reminded of a C S Lewis passage, where he talks about the immediate moments after death, when everything becomes clear and all doubts melt away, and the newly-freed soul laughs with joy at how foolish it was when still connected to mortal clay. When Lemmings arrived, it was something like that.

Frankly, Lemmings is beyond words, so I’ll shut up and direct you to the link at the top of this post. That’s where I’ll be spending the rest of my evening.