Lemmings

Lemmings is divided into a number of levels, grouped into four difficulty categories. Each level begins with one or more trap doors opening from above, releasing a steady line of lemmings who all follow each other. Levels include a variety of obstacles that prevent lemmings from reaching the exit, such as large drops, booby traps and pools of lava.

The goal of each level is to guide at least a portion of the green-haired, blue-robed lemmings from the entrance to the exit by clearing or creating a safe passage through the landscape for the lemmings to use. Unless assigned a special task, a lemming will walk in one direction ignoring any other lemming in its way (except Blockers), falling off any edges and turning around if it hits an obstacle it cannot pass. A lemming can die in a number of ways: falling from too great a height, drowning or falling into lava, falling off the bottom edge of the screen, being caught in a trap or fire, or being assigned the Bomber skill for five seconds. Every level has a time limit; if the timer expires, all the lemmings explode (even non-Bombers), the level ends, and the player is evaluated on the number of lemmings rescued.

Mike Dailly, the first employee of DMA Design and one of the programmers for Lemmings, provided a detailed history of the development of the game titled "The Lemmings Story" in 2006. David Jones, founder of DMA Design, has also commented on the development and success of Lemmings.

The inspiration for gameplay came as a result of a simple animated character sprite in an 8×8 pixel box created by Dailly using Deluxe Paint as part of development for Walker, then envisioned as a sequel to Blood Money. Dailly was able to quickly produce an animated graphic showing his creations moving endlessly, with additional graphical improvements made by Gary Timmons and other members of the DMA Design team to help remove the stiffness in the animation. One member, Russell Kay, observed that "There's a game in that!", and later coined the term "lemmings" for these creations, according to Dailly. Allowing the creatures to move across the landscape was based on a Salamander weapon concept for Blood Money and demonstrated with the animations.

The original sales for Lemmings on the Amiga topped 55,000 copies on the first day of sales; in comparison, Menace sold 20,000 copies and Blood Money sold 40,000 copies cumulatively. With all ports included, Mike Dailly estimated that 15 million copies of Lemmings were sold between 1991 and 2006. In 2011, Luke Plunkett from Kotaku placed the figure at over 20 million, a figure which has been quoted as far back as 1997.

At the time of its first release, Lemmings received several high scores from gaming magazines, with only the level of graphics and sound receiving some small amount of criticism. , in his review of Lemmings for the PC, stated that "perhaps Psygnosis has tapped into the human instinct for survival in formulating this perfect blend of puzzle, strategy, and action." Amiga Computing stated that "Lemmings is absolutely brilliant. Psygnosis have managed to produce a game that is not only totally original, but also features the kind of addictive gameplay that will keep you coming back for more time and time again."

Lemmings inspired several further games in the franchise, including the Christmas Lemmings short games that were released between 1991 and 1994, and the 1991 expansion Oh No! More Lemmings. Stand-alone sequels were Lemmings 2: The Tribes (1993), All New World of Lemmings (1994), 3D Lemmings (1995) and Lemmings Revolution (2000). By mid-1995, Lemmings and its sequels had accumulated combined sales of more than 4 million units worldwide. Two spin-off games were also made, both in 1996; Lemmings Paintball and The Adventures of Lomax.

The intellectual property (IP) of Lemmings stayed with the initial publisher Psygnosis, who were acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment in 1993. Sony gained the IP for Lemmings from this acquisition; in 2006 a new game also titled Lemmings was released for PlayStation consoles. The next game in the franchise, Lemmings Touch, was developed by D3T and released in 2014 for PlayStation Vita. Sony eventually licensed the rights to Exient Entertainment, who published a mobile game Lemmings: The Puzzle Adventure in 2018. Exient produced a 30th anniversary documentary of the history of Lemmings, released in February 2022.