from Hacker News

The Complete History of Lemmings

by mkl on 10/23/25, 9:18 AM with 3 comments

• by com2kid on 10/23/25, 10:44 AM

  I can legit say that lemmings helped me get through a rough patch in my childhood.

  Playing the Atari ST version on a machine a teacher brought in from her house is a core memory. Sadly the other kid I played with didn't have such a happy outcome later in life, but I can say that a large part of my moral compass comes from the time I spent in an at risk school program watching troubled kids get discarded by the world. Thankfully I had a loving family to go back home to, but most of my classmates did not.

  Then the district shut down a successful early intervention program for the most vulnerable of children. I wish nothing but ill will and suffering upon those who made that particular "fiscally responsible" decision.

  I remember how sad the teachers and therapists looked, being forced to throw kids back unprepared into a school system that had already failed them. Even us kids could see how wrong everything about the closure was.

• by whitehexagon on 10/23/25, 12:06 PM

  I still have fond memories of traveling down to London to visit a computer trade show, and leaving the Psygnosis stand with a giant cardboard Lemming, window deco Lemmings, and a much prized Lemmings Demo disk, which is still sat in a box here with the full game.

  I think that was the same show I came away with DevPac, probably my best tech investment ever, and maybe a 10?MB hard disk. I often wonder what happened to the assembly code for my two player pacman game, level editor included.

  68k & Amiga chipset was a dream to code for. Although I'm having some good fun at the moment with some armv8 assembly & Zig on the PinePhone.

• by mkl on 10/23/25, 9:37 AM

  Despite many hours playing Lemmings as a kid, I never managed to finish it. I did figure out the levels must have been made in something resembling Deluxe Paint though; glad to see that confirmed.