Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 245: Lemmings (With Mike Dailly)

Episode Date: September 9, 2019

Jeremy Parish teams up with the Retronauts East crew to discuss PC classic puzzle-action game Lemmings before jumping into a one-on-one interview with one of the game's designers, Mike Dailly of DMA Designs.

This weekend Retronauts, hit the nuke button. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts, another episode. That's what this is. We're talking about video games, talking about a video game. And actually, this is another one of those episodes where we're going to let the person who made the game talk about the game. It's much more informative than us bozo is here, just speculating and guessing.

But we're going to do some of that too. You're going to get the best or worst of both worlds. That's the retronauts difference. I am Jeremy Parrish. And with me, this week, to talk about the video game, Lemmings, which will be explicated on by one Mike Daly who made the game, unlike us. Who are you guys who?

did not make the game. I definitely didn't make this game. I'm Ben Elchin just walking over the cliff like the rest of us. I'm Chris Sims, and Lemmings don't actually do that. It's true. And I'm Ben Edwards. And he has nothing pithy to say. I have nothing pithy to say. Oh, he's not so much of a limbing as a... I'm the commander. You're like the minor bird here. I'm in charge. I feel like if you're the commander, you're going to be the one saying things first instead of echoing them back. Yeah, See? Anyway, so, Libbings. I had to start my own podcast one of these days.

Yeah, you tried that, didn't you? Talk about the new button. I just died inside a little bit, man. I'm so sorry. People keep calling me. Stop it, people leaving voicemails in Chinese. No, seriously, I get so many voicemails in Chinese because I have a San Francisco area code. And, like, every few weeks, I get just like people, I think telling me to pay my taxes

or something. I don't know. Or like, come come pay your bail. I don't know. I'm in trouble in San Francisco is what I'm saying with the triad. But anyway, that's not relevant to this episode. So if you have a voicemail Lenning, how does that help you finish that? I don't know.

You ignore it for a week until you realize, oh, I got to listen to this. So, Limbing's was a computer game released in the early 90s by a company called Cognosis, which was the publisher for a developer called DMA Design, and they made cool stuff in Scotland and eventually became

Rockstar North, who now makes Grand Theft Auto. This game is very different than Grand Theft Auto. Why are you touching it on the, you're touching a discette and the, oh, no, don't do that. Bench has brought us the original discets. Benj has never handled a discrette before. It's terrible. All right. If you're a pro like me, you can touch it without any damage, such as this. All right. Anyway, so yes, Lemmings, I feel like this is going horribly off the roads. I've never actually looked at the Lemmings manual. So I brought the...

Now you know how to play. It's great. Yeah. Well, yeah, I guess it's so intuitive. You don't need the manual. So, Ben, tell us how do you play Limbings? What happens here? You play as the Grand Overlord looking at the screen. You play as God, basically.

Yeah. You're commanding a little bit of the game. Lemmings come out of a door, I think, right? A doorway portal facing downward. And they drop onto the landscape. You have to change their jobs, basically, to get them through the puzzle of the board to a goal. And they can dig or float down or explode or... You can build, like, steps.

Yeah, steps. They can, some can dig straight down. Some can dig diagonally. Some can, you know, build steps diagonally. Some can break through rock or something. And then you've got the blockers that are important that just, like, Oh, yeah, the blockers. Make one's bounce off and go the other way.

So you have to, your goal is, it's a stage-based puzzle game. Each stage you have to solve the challenges to get to the goal by reassigning jobs to these little lemmings so they can work together to get as many as you can to the goal without dying. Well, you have like a quota, don't you? You have to get a certain number of lenings to actually get in the goal, and then the rest are expendable. Although I guess you get bonus points if you get more than the quota. Yep. And that's, I brought the, my brother got this box game, uh, IBM three and a half inch disc in the 1991 around at the time of it was new.

And hey, it has a DMA design logo on the back. I didn't notice that for it. What does that look like? Well, it's a couple guys like a spaceman and a barbarian sort of looking at it. Is it David Johnson, Mike Dale? In a jelly, red jelly bean. Huh. Huh.

Wacky. It's like Grand Teft Auto. And so there's something timeless about this design that allowed it to be ported to something like 20 different systems. Yeah, it was, I mean, it's interesting because Limbing's is very much a game designed around a mouse-driven interface. Like, it's, you know, you're, you have up to a hundred little things on the screen and you have a panel of icons and you're constantly like switching icons and clicking on on characters and giving them. commands, but it showed up on all kinds of systems that did not use a mouse interface. Like the NES and Game Boy. It was originally on Amiga, right?

Oh, yeah, I think so. I believe it was. And there was actually a two-player mode that took advantage of the fact that you could plug two mice into an Amiga and have two people each controlling their own, like, Lemming Army at the same time. That's pretty rad. Which did not make it to most of the consoles because there would just be no way to do it. Yeah, I feel like Limbing's is a lot more difficult to play with.

a D-pad than it is with a joystick, but it still works. You know, the game has to be slightly modified for the change in formats. But the concept translates really well. And it really goes back to kind of the, you know, the PC-based puzzle games you saw in the early 80s. You know, it's very much about like, here's a lot of, you know, little factors you have to judge and keep in mind. And things can go horribly wrong and you'll have to start over a immediately. It's very unforgiving, but there's such a great personality to the game. Chris, I don't know. You're kind of, you've been kind of quiet. Have you, have you played much of Lemmings? I find Lemmings to be incredibly stressful. Not like in a fun way. Like it,

something about the problem solving that you have to employ in Lemmings is way beyond or were way different than what my skill set is. So I find it intensely stressful, which is probably the intent, but yeah, it freaks me out. Well, I think it's supposed to be like whimsical fun for a while and then the difficulty level ramps up. And, you know, people got really good of this game and the designers got really devious. And so they released a lot of expansions where it was just like, you know, experts only, you jump in and you're basically all your livings are being slaughtered from word go where that's that's not really the case like the game has a very kind of gentle difficulty curve where it teaches you like how do you use a blocker how do you use a digger etc etc so it

kind of rolls out new abilities gradually over time and escalates the complexity but i understand like i'm not a fan of of dealing with you know like multitasking in video games in real time like real time strategy games don't do a lot for me um so lemmings is it's not a real time strategy game, but it's kind of cut from the same cloth. Yeah, so like in terms of the skills that it requires, it's kind of, it's along the road to that. And actually, when I was looking at this, I read

somewhere that some of the guys that made Warcraft actually took some inspiration from Lemmings. And it's really the same, you know, stuff's happening in real time, and you have to be keeping track of what various units are doing all at once and be changing what they're doing on the fly and assign them in that respect. In that respect, it's

sort of the same. Having worked in management, that's too much like real life and I hate it. Like, that's the least favorite part of work for me is managing lots of different things all over the place. It's nice to be able to just, you know, drill down and focus on a few things at once or like one thing and just do it to the best of your ability. Limings doesn't allow you to do that. So you are basically a lemming in life. I am, I guess. Sure.

You just do a lot of different things. I don't think I have a nuke button. In your upcoming In your upcoming interview that we're about to hear in only a few moments, do you ask why the lemmings in this game look like that? He does talk about that, yes. Okay, good. Mr. Daley does explain it.

It was originally like some demo walk cycle he was doing. Yeah, I mean, the characters, he'll go into this in detail in the interview segment, but the character started out as, like, yeah, basically based on a demo. And the demo was very large characters, not designed for this game, but there were basically like these, like robots or something, and they could stomp around, and then there were these, like, little tiny people that would run around trying to escape from the robots and they just kind of took

the little people sprites that he created. And, you know, I think they're like six or eight pixels tall, but they're amazingly expressive considering how tiny they are. There's so much personality. That's a really big part of limiting success is that even though these characters are just a few pixels tall, like they still have, they do stuff.

Like they have little animations where their heads turn and their hair like waves up. behind them. And, you know, whenever you hit the nuke button, they all kind of hunker down and they put their hands over their heads and then they explode. So, yeah, there's just like a, it packs a lot of personality into these very tiny characters. And it's great because the characters are so small on screen. And the screens themselves are just like, you know, these huge kind of rock structures. I don't know. It's an impressive kind of feat. If you're wondering about why they're the colors they are.

I don't know. It's kind of like the Joker. Weird. They're sick and twisted. Because, you know, real Lemmings are, they're like... Brown? Yes, but they're like hedgehogs. Which are also not blue. Right. Lots of creative liberties taken with color

pallets in video games. I am personally looking forward to the Limnings video game where or the Limbing's movie adaptation where Jim Carrey plays the overlord and it's going to be great. you to look at these lemmings and picture them with human teeth?

Oh, God. Can I not? Is that okay? I am now, so all of you have to do. I don't think they have mouths. Now they don't. Well, maybe the teeth will just grow outside. They're just a nose with eyes, a big nose with a green head.

I think it's called a snout. Snout, yes. But I think that's another thing that was intriguing about this game is that you're saying the levels are just these like big static, like kind of naturalistic. Sort of. And then you get to like the hell levels where there's lots of fire blasting out. Then they get to really weird things. Yeah, there's some where there's columns and things. But like one of the cool

things is so you have all this terrain and it's just you know, it's just this big, it's not even necessarily, it doesn't really look like talsets, it just looks like this one big bitmap of this cool terrain, but then you can do stuff to it. So like this is an era where like destructible terrain was still like a really cool thing. And so you can, you know, you can dig through it and you can blow it up. And it's

just, it makes you think that there's all these different possibilities of like how you could tackle a given level, which sometimes there are. And I was like, I was, I don't know if the developer talks about this in the interview, but I was saying, you know, they were beta testing levels and they'd have this like things set up where you're supposed to do all this complicated stuff and then someone else looks at it and like, oh, but you can just dig through here instead and bypass all that. And that kind of like emergent behavior is like really interesting game, especially

back in this era when there wasn't a lot that was that complicated to allow you these kind of multiple options. Are there lemming speed runners, you think? Oh, I'm sure. Probably. I mean, there's got to beat it as fast as possible. There has to have been a living's play-thru at ADQ at some point. I'm sure.

I would be shocked if not. Chris, are you looking at that up right now? I am looking it up right now. I think. Oh, yeah. What's the world record? Yeah, what's the world record? 42 minutes, 45 seconds.

For the whole first game. For the MS. That's a lot of condensed stress, honestly. I am, speaking of stress, I mean, I'm the same with Chris, where it does get really stressful for me. play the first 10 levels or something and then it's like just too much to manage and overwhelming and I kind of want to stop

but there's other people who die yeah I mean well you have to make all those decisions quickly and figure out which one's which and then it's like have you ever this is a similar like have you ever turned on a video game started it and left it sitting there while your guy just gets beaten up and dies

like you walk away from it I can't stand that like if you you like start a game of like I don't know like altered beast or something and the guy's just sitting there and they just gets beaten up and killed does it ever happen to you? Like you turned it on

because you're about to test a joystick that you just built and design yourself. Okay, see, this is a pretty easy thing. Sure, sure, yeah. Pretty specific scenarios. But I'm just saying, like, I can't stand to step away and let that happen. Yeah, I don't usually turn the game

unless I'm going to play it, is the... In fact... I think this is all you. Yeah, it's a bigger thing in my life. This powerlessness, this control issues. Yeah, this is there. Is this where you turn into a villain binge? Yeah.

I do feel like Leving's, I feel like Levings presses the Tetris button in people's brains. But for me and for Bench, apparently, like there's a fine line between like the kind of fast movement and quick decision-making that is appealing versus the way more complicated stuff that you're dealing with in Leavings, which is cool. but it gets to a point where I can't. I feel like it's probably it's a number of decisions at once threshold.

It's like Tetris you're dealing with one piece, whereas with this or with an RTS, you can quickly get to a point where you're trying to manage like five different positions at once. Well, which is weird because I actually really like, I haven't played them in a while, but I, you know, I played Warcraft 3 like a year ago. And I enjoy RTS games.

It seems like the same kind of skill set to me. I think it's the same too. It might be, but I think there's something about like the simplicity of telling someone to go hit something as opposed to... But you can group them. Yeah, you can group and do

all go do this. Yeah. So, you know, our next topic is actually an RTS. So why don't we table this discussion on Limnings and let Mike Daly inform us you know, the inside story on creating Limnings? And we'll move along to the next episode,

which you guys at home will hear in about a month. So look forward to that. Thank you, folks, for talking about Limnings. And I don't know what happened at the beginning there. Sorry. Thank you. Hey, everyone. This is Jeremy Parrish, and this is another episode of Retronauts. And it's another special episode of Retronauts because I'm at Game Developers Conference. And just like last year, I'm talking to cool people. And first, the first cool person I have here is Mike Daley, who worked with DMA designs and helped design Limnings and some other games you may have heard of.

Yep. Hi. How you've gone? So, Mike, you're giving a presentation this year at GDC, correct? Yeah, I'm doing a classic game post-mortem on Lemings. Okay. So I definitely want to talk to you about. about Limmings, but I'd also like to, you know, kind of go a little further back than that and just talk about kind of your entry into game design and, you know, just the UK gaming scene in general. That's something that I've always had an outsider perspective on having grown up in America. So, you know, like, I definitely was familiar with Cygnosis games. I know that you worked on some of those. So I would see games like Limings and Altered Beat, or sorry, Shadow of the Beast. And like they had this kind of, I don't know, like an ineffable alien. quality to them. They didn't seem like, you know, the Nintendo games I was used to playing. So, so it's always been kind of a source of fascination to me. But again, like I said, I'm kind of an outsider. So I'm curious, like, how did you kind of get into game development?

And, you know, kind of what were your early sort of formative gaming experiences? I mean, the UK was vastly different from the US, because the US was pretty much console-based. The UK, we didn't really do much of consoles. It was all kind of home computers. we had a ZEX Spectrum, Conno 64, were the main ones. So I started probably when it was about 13. I managed to buy a friend ZX81, which is the precursor to the spectrum. I had that for a couple of years,

and then I got hold of a spectrum for about a year. My mom's work was wanting a database written, so I wrote them a database and managed to get a spectrum for a while. After that, I got a Condor Plus 4. I was still pretty much just on my own. learning myself but it was about that time I went to a computer club

they were springing up all over the place back then mostly to copy games as to be said but I did manage to meet Steve Hammond Russell Kay and Dave Jones there and we were all more interested in writing games and doing things with it rather than just playing games

so that was about 85 so from then the kind of four of us really just kind of hung out and made different games. None of them really got finished. They were all kind of half games which was kind of good fun. So we just go home from school and

just go on the computer and then make things. About 88 Dave really managed to finish a game first basically. He had his Amiga that he got his redundancy package from TimeX.

TimeX were the place that made the spectrum. So he'd been working there. He got a redundancy package then went to university but he bought an Amiga with it. So in 8 to 8 he managed to finish his first game which was Menace on the Amiga and then

he started writing his second one which was blood money but about the same time he also got contracts from Sygnosis to do ports of games so he offered me a port of ballistics which was an ST Amiga game to take on the Converse 64

and I kind of jumped at the chance to become a professional developer at that point Yeah, Ballistics was like a top-down sports game, right? It was like the ricochet with the marbles where you shoot the marbles at and trying to fire a puck into a goal. So it was a digital version of that, basically. So there was a two-player version where it was just you were firing balls at this thing to try and score.

And there was a one player one where you were just fighting gravity. And then there was stuff on the actual map that would explode, give you bonuses and all that kind of thing. So the game was okay. The port was all right. It had issues, but it was still, you know, it was my first game. So it was okay. So you ported that to the Amiga?

No, I ported that from the Amiga to the Commer 664. Oh, okay, okay, okay, right. So it was written on the ST, then port to the Amiga, and then I did the Converse 64 version, and Steve Hammond did all the graphics. Okay. This is maybe a little bit in the weeds, but why do you think the UK had such a, like, a fondness and just like a quick pickup for personal computers versus consoles, Whereas, you know, in the States, even though this was kind of like the birthplace of computers, people gravitated more toward consoles here.

I think it's that kind of British wanting to tinker thing. They were also incredibly cheap. I mean, you could get a Zerick Spectrum for £100. I'm not quite sure what that would be these days, but consoles. Like 130, 140, 150 maybe. So, I mean, consoles back then were still pretty expensive. And you had to buy the games. As I said, when we went to this computer club, you copied all the games.

So it was a really cheap way of getting into gaming. And then it didn't take long for a lot of folk to kind of go, you know, games are fun. I wonder how they do that. And they started tinkering because you've got keyboards. You can set and program it. So I think that's just the British, you know, wanting to play with things and technology and stuff. Right. Yeah, I definitely, you know, feel from reading things like retro gamer magazine and so forth that the legacy of British gaming history is very much like a couple of guys said.

said, oh, we can do this and made games that may not have gotten a lot of circulation. Yes, definitely. I mean, particularly, you look at some of the early spectrum games, they were all pretty wacky. Some of my favorites, things like manic miner and stuff, very much have the Monty Python-style humor. You know, just weird bodies and stuff moving about it. And it was all just kind of part of what you'd expected. So, yeah. So in your experience, you know, porting over ballistics, what, that was what it was called, right?

Ballistics, yes. Yeah, okay. It's early. I haven't had enough coffee yet. What did you kind of learn from the process of bringing that over to C-64? I mean, because I've been programming for quite a few years, I knew most of the things that I needed to know. It was really my first commercial multiplexer for doing sprites and stuff. There was a lot of, because it was ball to ball-ball collision, there was a lot of physics and maths in it, which I was.

wasn't good at at all. So I did learn some stuff to do with that. But really, most of the stuff you get from it is finishing something. It's always the hardest thing for anybody in games to do is actually finish your product and get it out. As much as any game has ever finished, really. Well, yeah, I mean, but you're shipping it.

Because you look at most people that tinker in the house and they'll play with various ideas and stuff, but it's not finishing something is the hardest thing to do. So after ballistics, what was your next project? I did a port of Dave's blood money. And that went to Congress 64 as well. I think that was probably a kind of

big C-64 game. That was great fun to do. It was what the 64 was brilliant at doing shoot-em-ups and stuff. And I had just, yeah, just great fun just taking the most of the machine effectively then. So these games take about six months each. So how long had you been working with C-64 by the time you started doing these conversions? probably two and a bit years, I would think. I think it was, maybe not even that much. Yeah, a couple of years probably. But I'd been working with the Comra Plus 4,

which was a kind of spiritual success of it, not nearly as good. They kind of messed up when they did the Plus 4. It was more of a business machine, but it still had 6502. So I'd been doing the kind of 6502 for a good four or five years at that point. Okay.

I know 6502 was a pretty common chip back then I think Nintendo used it for their NES So were you able to kind of branch out To other systems based on that experience? After the I did blood money They've got a contract to do Shadow the Beast on the PC engine

Or the TG16 as it was over there So I started doing that I think Dave really wanted to do it Because it was a console, it was our first console But he was a 68,000 guy So I got to do that That was a 65 CO2 So it was a modified 6502

It was ballistically quick Commodore 64 was 1 megahertz, the PC engine was 7.5. So, I mean, imagine now if you went to a machine, it was 7.5 times faster. It was just so fast. And then it had loads of hardware to play with as well. But that took a long time that game. They kept changing the design, and it just kind of dragged on. It went from just being a cartridge game to a full CD-ROM game.

It's one of the first CD-ROM games. So it took about two years that one, a long time, especially back then. So were you doing the conversion? of Shadow the Beast in tandem with the actual development of the source version? No, no. Shadow the Beast came out probably 89.90.

So it'd been out for a while. And there was various ports. We actually got the port to do the Commer 64 one as well. Another guy, Richard Twinfin, he did that. So, I mean, the full thing was finished. We did get the full source and stuff to it, but we never used it. It was a bit of a mess. So we just

looked at the game and copied it over, basically. Okay. Well, you said that the version that you were working on kept changing. So that was more on the publisher side, saying, oh, we want something different. Yeah, I mean, we did a stack of graphics for it, and they weren't particularly happy. So A Cynosis ended up, I think, getting Martin Chudley,

bizarre creations. He did all the graphics for it. And then they decided they wanted it to be a CD-ROM thing. So we ended up doing a movie player and all these intro sequences and stuff and having CD-ROM music on it as well, which is very nice, I have to say. That was really, really cool.

Yeah, I've played a Shadow the Beast on Amiga, but I don't think I've ever played the PC engine. PC Engine one's probably, I mean, it struggles with a parallax because it only has one play field. But it's probably the nicest version to play because the Amiga one just collision sucked. It was so difficult to play. But I kind of smoothed all that out when I was doing it,

so it was playable, effectively. So it's probably the nicest one to play. It is an infamously difficult game to play. I remember, you know, I'd go to computer, computers shops and I would see that game just like on demo on the systems because yeah like it was just like you know at the same time I was playing Nintendo in ES yeah and there was just no comparison I mean it was a it was a great sales tool but you know one point I sat down to play it it was just like I'm good at video games why why is this destroying me the collisions in

hitbox is just way off that was just cruel basically um so like I said I fixed a lot of that in the um version I did how much leeway were you given to kind of you know make make changes like that when you did conversions? I mean, the game had to be the same, but making things playable isn't something they really look out of it. Plays better, they don't care, basically. So as long as it feels nice and plays nice, then that's all they're wanting.

So they didn't really want that kind of impossible playability for it. So they were all fine with that. But the game itself is pretty identical, really. So in the So in So in moving over to the CD-ROM version, did you encounter any technical limitations or shortcomings? I know CD-ROM drives back in the day were pretty slow to move.

Yeah, I mean, we actually got a huge scuzzy drive in. Now, at about that time, scuzzy drives are hard disks in general, we're about 20 to 40 megs. So we got this huge drive that took up two bays. You know, you're talking like an encyclopedia, a couple encyclopedia thicknesses kind of thing. I mean the whole office came around to look at it because we'd never seen anything that big that must have been thousands and thousands of dollars worth of hardware too

Oh yeah easily And you know you're looking at going This can store a CD That was just unheard of back then 720 megs on this thing So it was just huge So mastering that It wasn't a file system like you expect today

It had special tools for writing into sectors and stuff So loading things was tricky And a bit slow But you know it was okay. We were used to loading from disk from a comma 64 days which was slow so we just kind of made the best of it

and it's fine. As I said the machine itself was so fast that the game didn't really have any issues it was really just a production part of it getting all the graphics and we had an animation player and stuff that got complicated. So what kind of experiences and lessons

did you take from that project into future games that you worked on? I mean, each game kind of contributes as you go forward, but there's very little you go, we'll have to do that from now on kind of thing. It's really just that kind of wealth of experience that you get going forward. I did end up writing a full dev kit for the PC engine.

The one we got was terrible. So I hacked the dev kit and wrote my own debuggers and stuff for it, so that was much easier. And I've done that occasionally since. Who distributed the Turbographics PC engine in the UK? N.E.C. did it? Well, we didn't get it in the U.K. Yeah, I was going to say it. No, it was only America and Japan under the PC engine.

And we dealt with imports, basically. Okay, so you were working specifically for the U.S. market. Yeah, it was the TG16 version that I was doing, and then it went to Japan as well. Interesting. So you were not only working with unfamiliar hardware, but also working for like a different kind of television spec. Yeah, yeah, it was the NTSC one, which was horrible. That was much nicer. I hear that. I do like 60 frames per second.

though. Yeah, well, you get that now with power as well, so that's funny. But, I mean, the 50 frames a second gives you quite a bit more process at times, so we can do quite a bit more and still keep it smooth, so it's fine. That's fine. It's interesting. There's always, like, you deal with kind of these old specs, and people have very strong feelings about them. Yeah, it was the color tint on the NTSC that was just horrible. We had proper color on it. That was what I really liked. That was just nicer. So did you have to compensate for the terrible color of NTSC as you were developing? Well, no, because on the TVs we had,

it literally had the dial for a color tint, so users did whatever they wanted on their TVs back then. So we just picked a color that looked nice and meant, okay, we'll do that, basically. And hope that the Americans... Yeah, basically. I mean, because all the art was done in Amiga, with deep paint, they would just color it there,

and then we'd tune the TV to what we knew it should look like, but we've no idea what the end users actually did with it. Okay, I mean, I don't know, like that kind of thing, the quirks of analog technology are always really fascinating. I spend a lot of time these days trying to get old consoles up and running and get them into high definition with upscalers and stuff like that.

There's just so much stuff I keep coming across that I had no idea like sink on green and sync on luminosity and that's right. It's such a headache. It's amazing that people were able to get anything done back then. Yeah, yeah. Well again I mean the panel one was easier because we ended up with a scarlet connector that had everything in it and it was just much easy. He just plugged in gold really.

NTSC with its B&C connectors and stuff was awful. We were slumming it over here in the skits. Yeah, you were. It's terrible. So did you do a lot more console development after that? I mostly know your work from PCs, but I feel like if you put together a dev kit for PC engine, you got some use out of that. Yeah. I mean, after the PC Engine one, we started doing the Limbing's 2.

So I did the SNS version of Limbing's 2, which was great fun. Couldn't use most of the hardware because Laming's, by its nature, you've got 100 in a row and you could only have like 16 sprites in a row on the SNAT. So I was still abusing the machine a bit. Yeah, that's, I definitely want to talk about that in terms of Limnings because it is such a distinctly PC oriented kind of game. It feels very much like a game that was designed just to be played on PC, especially you know, with a mouse.

Yeah, but it showed up on everything. Like every game boy had. Yeah, we were seriously impressed with the Game Boy port. That was... Was that done in house? No, no, no, we didn't do that one. We did Amiga and ST. The mega was the lead one, and then the ST and PC.

And we also did Atari Links, ZX Spectrum, and Philip CDI. Those are the ones we did in the house. Okay. So, yeah, let's talk about the genesis of Limnings. I will say my own experience with Limings, my family got a Windows 3.1 PC in, I think, 1991, 92. I was in high school and the one game that I bought for that system was Limnings. So I was never any good at it. But I spent a lot of time, you know, like trying to figure out the puzzles and getting frustrated and exploding everything and starting over and so

forth. But I've always, yeah, I've always been fascinated by just the overall style of that game, how you put so much personality into these tiny little guys who are like five pixels tall. It's really amazing. Yeah. I mean, they ended up being 10 pixels, I think, with a bunch of hair. But, The original idea was to try and fit them in eight by eight. So the initial kind of genesis of it was when Dave was doing blood money, he had this Walker character. Remember the Star Wars Walker with the two legs? So there was one of them in the game, and it was really nicely animated.

The guy doing the art, Tony Smith, made a beautiful job of it. So Dave wanted to do a game on its own with this Walker. So you were in the Walker shooting. And so he hired this artist. Scott Johnson to come in and do graphics for it. So Scott started doing a little character that you could shoot with the Walker but he did it about 16 by 16

pixels. Now the Walker, while he was really big, that would have still taking him up to just below the cockpit. Now, if you remember Star Wars, they were huge. You know, you would be just above the feet. So I thought you should really have something much smaller. So I went on

Deep paint and I'd kind of scribble the wee guy to try and get them as small as I could, but still have some kind of, you know, it's still a guy kind of thing. I'd originally seen a game called Beach Air 2 on the corner 64 that had really nice animations of this little guy. Now the little guy was actually quite

large when I look back at it, but the animation was beautiful on it and then also on the Atari ST, Oids, which literally had five pixel high guys. So I figured somewhere in between you'd get something. So I did this animation of a wee guy and he was walking up a hill and getting shot by a gun and all that kind of stuff. And I showed the guys

and they were all kind of falling about laughing because, I mean, it's the same reaction anybody else got when the first saw Lemmings was just all these guys dying. It was just great fun.

So we then kind of added more. Actually, knowing that the origin of the Laming character harkens back to someone being shot by a walker. It explains a lot, really. I mean, that kind of part really came from noise

because you had the little, tiny little guys that you could shoot, you can kind of strafe across the ground and shoot, and they all kind of burst into flames and kind of died. so I'd done the walking frame and then I'd done this kind of burning down frame and a big gun shaking them

so it kind of came from that but they were all just kind of lining up to be shot kind of thing so we all thought this was hysterically funny and then we started doing other animations of them dying because we kind of realized that they're so small that you could get

lots of frames of animations in these around the mega days memory was still tight but the sprites were quite large so burning frames of animation was quite expensive But these guys were so small, there were only four colors, so they were half the bit depth as well,

that we could really just burn animations on them. And we thought, well, you know, that Roadrunner kind of thing where, you know, we just whacked every which way kind of thing, that's kind of what you could do with these guys. So we made a few other things on this animation and had them all kind of going, getting splatted. And then Gary kind of fine-tuned my animation, which was very kind of rough and stiff,

into kind of what the actual liming was. and then shortly after that I mean this was only in the first month and a bit of having the office in 1989 so it was very soon after we opened the office and then Russell did a demo of all these guys walking over the hill

just continually second round he got the 100 lineings all getting drawn on a PC then it kind of fell by the wayside a bit as everybody else had other projects to do and Dave was trying to get the Walker game going but didn't quite manage it so he went from Walker to another game called gore, that was a hack and slash, that he ran out memory on because it needed, again,

it was a huge character, there's lots of animation, just burn memory. So you kind of put that to the side as well. And then you actually started on limings. So, I mean, it was, it took a long time to actually get it started, really. Yeah, I mean, what's the, what's the timeframe we're looking at here in terms of? So the initial animation I did would have been August 1989, and then Dave we'd have started it probably in 1990, kind of mid-190 kind of thing. I think it took about nine months to develop, nine months to a year.

So, I mean, it came out in February 91. So, you know, it had a bit of time to kind of get going and stuff. The actual development of it wasn't particularly long because there wasn't really that much to it in terms of the skills and getting stuff. It was really getting all the levels, tuning it, and making it just that kind of playable kind of thing that really took the time. It's interesting, though, that, you know, like this kind of loose idea,

sort of hovered in limbo for almost a year, and then everyone kind of came back to it. I mean, most ideas that happen will either happen from, well, for me anyway, from kind of just undirected, sit and playing with something. And then they'll kind of sit for a while, or they'll kind of throw down sticks and pick it up straight away, but it's not uncommon for these things to, because you'll be in the middle of something else.

So you go, oh, I'll have to remember to do something with that. I mean, we had a huge stack of things that we could have done stuff with. I had a few kilometers 64 ones that never saw the light of day that I would love to have done stuff with, but you were busy doing other things. It was really that Dave, the two games he'd working on just weren't quite working out the way you wanted,

that you thought, well, we'll give this a try. So how do you go from a little guy being shot by a Star Wars Walker to a puzzle game where you're controlling a hundred creatures and trying to rescue as many of them as possible? I mean, when we started, we kind of knew that you wanted to somehow kill these lemmings, because that was the fun bit of it.

It's just, you know, they're dying over the place. So it's not a big leap to go from, you want to see them dying all the time to, well, you should probably save them, you know, because it's, you want to put traps around the level and they just keep dying and you see it. So if you just left it, so on devices, they'll just all die.

in funny ways kind of thing. So just letting them fall out and trying to save as many as you can. It's a reasonably simple step. I mean, it's kind of, you know, like saying, here's the thing you want, but here's the thing you actually have to do. It's sort of like, you know, delaying gratification or something.

Yes, basically. Which is kind of why the nukin linings was so satisfying because you're supposed to do it. Ah, we'll just kill them anyway. It's fine. It was a great frustration reliever because some of those levels were, really hard, like very devious.

It's odd because, I mean, when we were doing the levels, by the time we got into really doing the levels, we were all experts. So you come up, there was three of us that really did most of the levels. Myself, Gary Timmons and Scott Johnson, we kind of did the bulk of them. They've got a couple in, and Steve tried to get something,

and never quite managed. But the three of us would make the hardest levels we possibly could to try and beat everybody else. But it would only take a few seconds for everybody to go, you just do this and click here and do that, and then you've got it's finished. Oh, okay. So we had, when we sat down to actually create levels for the game, Dave offered us 10 pounds per level that got in, which seemed generous at the time, but these days it's not really. So we basically came up with a stack of levels that we thought, like, these are, you know, good, hard levels.

But we realized pretty quickly that they're incredibly difficult. we had diagnosis testing them as well and they were getting pretty good at them but occasionally you'd get one where you know okay this one took three minutes

this one took five minutes and then there'd be scribbles all around that one going this one took an hour and a half kind of thing that was really satisfying obviously to get but the real key to lemmings

was that once we had these levels we took them and then we made simpler versions of a lot of them just by adding the odd scale in here or there to make it simpler because they were obviously tuned to be you had that

exact skill number to get out and it was really hard. But if you added another builder, another basher, then it just makes it that bit easier. So went through and made a whole load of simpler versions and then Gary went and then made basically tutorial levels to introduce it. You know, just dig right at the start where you could do nothing but

dig and you kind of get out and it's easy. It was probably one of the first games to really do a tutorial through. And then he sat and he basically did a difficulty curve of all of them ramping up. I think once you got to the end of taxing, it was just kind of a free-for-all to just kind of throw levels in. There was a big battle to see he would get the last level because that was supposed to be the

hardest one. So Scott managed to get that way. He's run the view on the mountain. So we're all fighting for that one, but never mind. Yeah, I liked the fact that there was a level select in there. So, you know, as you tried to work your way through linearly, you could be like, I'm getting pretty good at this, or you get stuck. And you could say, well, I wonder what it's like at the very end. Kind of like flipping to the last page of a book. But instead of like spoiling the story, it's basically just making you realize. how absolutely terrible you are at this video game, how little you understand about its mechanics.

Yeah, I mean, Leaming's 2 kind of improved that with the 12 tribes. It had a little bit either because each one had its own little difficulty level so you could kind of hop around a little bit better. But Lemmings won, you kind of had to play through because that's where the difficulty ramped. And we had folks, you know, we had six and seven-year-olds

playing it, getting up to a certain point and just enjoying clicking on things. We had older folk being able to play it as well. It was a very social game that folk would play with their parents. I think the best one I ever heard was Terry Pratchett, and he used to play it. And he actually said, not only did he delete it from his machine, but he formatted his hard drive to make sure he never got it again. And I love that. Was that out of frustration or addiction?

Both, I think. I heard that Pratchett was really into computer games. He worked on, or collected to the Discworld games. Yeah. I mean, he had one of his books had the Limings control panel in it apparently. clicking and selecting. Yeah, I've not read it, but I've heard it's in there. You know, I've read all of his Discworld books, so it probably didn't make the connection

that was like a reference to the name, but next time I read through his stuff, I'll have to get an eye over that. That's great. We talked about, you know, kind of the natural progression from you got to kill these guys to you got to save these guys. But the idea of having this sort of hands-off puzzle game where it's almost like a, you know, like a god sim, like populace or Sim city or something. Yeah, we were big populace fun. So it was fairly natural. I mean, we had two rooms in our office

that were kind of separated by a hall and we ran an all modem cable through and we played two player games so you couldn't see the other screen. So we were big fans of Populis and Suncar Racing. So coming from Populis, this kind of off-hands control thing was pretty natural.

While Populis controlled the landscape, we just assigned skills to individuals. But it was kind of similar in that regard. Yeah, I mean, Populus is very much about Like you said, the landscape, like changing the geography. And that is something you have to do with diggers. And we know when a limine, it pops and explodes. It carves a little chunk out of the stage.

So, I mean, it's pretty influenced by Populence, really, when you get into it. But at the same time, you know, you do have this kind of puzzle element where you have X number of limings. You have to save Y number of limings. And the challenge kind of evolves out of that. Yeah, definitely. And, I mean, when we were doing the levels, it was, like I say, it was just coming up with weird and wacky ways to basically try and make it as tough as possible

to get these out. Whether that be there's traps everywhere or you restrict the skills that you had or you kind of use some of the quirks in the actual engine itself that the player has to figure out. Things like being

able to rescue a blocker. You know, if you dig underneath them, he falls and you can rescue them. So there'll be some levels where you've got to get every lemming out, even though you're using a blocker and you've got to get them back and stuff. So it was just just, you know, abusing it. So the actual limbing skills, who worked on designing those?

And Dave and Gary kind of did those ones, basically. I think because of the nature of the way things walked, basically a lemmings collision is one pixel into the ground. So if you move to the next one and you can go up four pixels, down four pixels, anything more, you'll hop a little bit or fall. So that kind of limits what you can build. If you built a straight wall, they would just hit it in turn round. So you can't build a straight column.

So the bridge was kind of a nice natural slope for them to walk up. So that was fairly easy. And then things like the bashes and the miners and stuff, they're, you know, again, a relative progression on what the landscape's doing anyway. I think only the digger was the one that you could kind of really get stuck on because that was just a vertical plummet, basically. So you have to be careful. But they were all just kind of trying to enhance what the landscape was, really.

Were there skills that were kind of left on the cutting room Flora that you said, well, this doesn't work or this makes the game too easy or too hard? I can't remember any of them. I think the ones they came up with were just you know, the ones they figured we'd get in and we used them all. I think Limbing's 2 was totally different. There were skills that we had to go back and put in levels because they weren't used.

There was just way too many. Yeah, that's something I'd like to ask you about because I do feel like the concept of Limbing's and the execution of it is, I don't know if I'd call it perfect, but it just seems complete. Like it is a fully realized

concept that just you know it just works it's there yeah so obviously it was a big success and obviously sygnosis was like more please yeah so how do you how do you build on something that is you know functionally complete without just doing more of the same i mean i know there were expansions and everything but but like to actually build on that to expand to create something new based on this concept um the linings two stuff dave basically designed it most of that i think that there was a few things that were kind of a part that we needed. So more skills, I think we're always good.

The vertical levels, I think were great. And some of the tech that we did. So like you said before, it was really done for a PC or Amiga, so it was just loads of memory. But with all the consoles rising, SNS, Mega Drive,

they were starting to take over from home computers. So we changed the tech to be more friendly to them. I think out of those, the vertical levels and the tech were the things that really made a difference. And I did like having the different tribes so that you could hop when you got a bit frustrated. That was nice as well.

But I think the skills, they just went overboard on. You just didn't need that many skills. There were a few skill additions that were really nice. I like the ballooner. I like the super lemming. The archer was really nice, although the coden, it was awful. But it was really nice.

Some of the other ones like Magna Buter were fun, but kind of in there just, you know, for fun. The pole vaulter was silly and there was just a whole load of them that were just never used and they literally had to go back through levels and you just need to put these in so they're used somewhere so I think there was way too many skills added

it was obviously just they only had these ones we'll need to add loads more and they just went overboard on them basically so you mentioned earlier that you did the super ADES conversion of Limbing's too so what were the challenges that were specific and particular to the hardware that you encounter besides like Sprite line limitations

Because I know Super NES, you know, you talked about the speed of the turbo graphics, and the Super NES was like half that. Yeah. I mean, it was a 16-bit processor, so it was a 65816 that was in it, but it was three and a half megahertz. It did have some hardware, so you could have three play fields, and it did have a chunk of sprites, but you could only have 16 in the line, so you're really limited by it. So most of the stuff was done in software, basically anything where there could be a stack of lemings in a line. so you're talking blockers walkers dancers

probably fallers just because of the number of them I had to come up with a way of drawing them really quickly in software on a three and a half megagre processor and I wasn't quite able to get the full thing so I only had 80 lemmings rather than 100 and when it scrolled I had to pause

because I couldn't scroll and draw all the edges and do the whole game as well but that actually ended up helping this nest because you were on a controller. Right, yeah, I was going to say it. It seems like it would make the game a little more manageable. Yeah. So I did come up with a way of drawing into this four-color screen. I had two 16-color screens and a four-color screen,

and I stacked the characters in the four-color screen vertically, so I had strips, and I could just move a lemming up and down and draw on the strip. The 65816 also had a really cool feature where you could move what's called the zero-page area. The zero-page was a point on a 651. where everything was just that little bit quicker because it didn't have to read the high bite of the address. It was also always down at zero. So you had between

0 and 255 addressing. So it was a bite less so you got a cycle quicker. But you could move where that was in the SNES. So I moved that to the base of the graphics to just get an extra cycle out of each bit I got and then so I can draw it in. And then that screen was transferred up every kind of

game tick. So I had to jump through a lot of hoops on this nest to do it. I was able to use some of the sprites. Some of the skills would be normal sprites. All the traps were sprites, so things like water and stuff were sprites. Everything else was basically a bitmap screen kind of scrolling round. And then I'd put in a parallax background for just to make it look pretty, basically. So it was a really tricky kind of game to get on that machine, but the tech we changed for Lemmings 2 to go character-based rather than Bitmap-based made it much easier. It was still hard, but it was much easier.

So have you had any involvement with the Limbing's franchise beyond Limbing's 2? I did a bit of Lemmings 3 work. I did the installer and helped them out with the audio part of it because they were struggling a little bit. Aside from that, no, it was really just one and two I was kind of mainly involved in. What do you think of Liming's legacy? Like, what do you think its place in video game history is? I think it's a shame it's not really been taken forward because at the time it was definitely up with Mario and Sonic and stuff and it was that big and Sygnosis owned it

and then Sony bought it and they've not really done anything with it. You could certainly do more with the character than just what the original game was but they just seemed to turn out the same game over and over again which is a shame. Well, there were some weird attempts to do other things like the 3D lemmings I don't think worked that well. Yeah, I did like the Revolutions

one, that wasn't too bad, but it was still basically the same game. And there was the Lomax spinoff which was, at that point it kind of isn't Limbing's anymore? No, but I think the characters themselves, you could certainly do something with, but I think you need to keep them quite small. I think that's what most of the newer

games aren't doing. They're kind of losing that, kind of small and millions of them. That's really what you need. Right. I mean, I feel like it might be challenging with, you know, like a 4K TV to have liming that are, you know, six pixels tall. About 10 years or so ago, I had a reasonably powerful machine, so I decided to see what

modern graphics cards could do with it. The original lemmings game ran at 17 frames a second, so a frame every three frames. So using that, I was able to get a million lemmings on my PC, and that was 10 years ago. So, I mean, that was a lot of things. So, you know, put explosions in them and bounce them about and stuff. It was very cool. Right. And I think that's what you need.

I feel like it would take a long time to finish a million living level. Well, it depends if you're trying to kill them or not. You could flip it on its head and just go, yeah, they're just, they've breeded now and you've got to nuke them or something. Right, 100% kill levels? Yeah. Interesting. So there is potential for living in the future.

Oh, yeah. If someone, if Sony wants to pick it up and do something with it. All right. Well, Mike, thank you very much for your time. You're welcome. It was great meeting you. And yeah, what are you working on these days? I've just started my own kind of indie thing.

I used to work at YoU Games for about nine years, doing GameMaker. But I've recently left, so I'm a way to start doing my own little games. Okay. I'll see how it goes. Well, where can people find you in your work online? I mean, I'm on Twitter at MDF 200. You can kind of find there.

That's where I frequent most of the time at the moment. My games are still a bit off, so there's nothing really to shout about there yet. But Twitter's probably the easiest place to find me. Okay, great. Well, thanks again. Okay, about it. I'm going to be able to be able to be. Thank you.