Official UK Lemmings postage stamp

[Flopsy]

Just discovered today that a Lemmings postage stamp has been released by Royal Mail (the main UK postage service).



I went out and bought one immediately needless to say, I'm not really a stamp collector personally but I'm a sucker for anything that is rare and Lemmings related

Anyway, it was released as part of a special set of 8 commemorating older video games. It's interesting to see the games that made the cut alongside Lemmings



I bought this entire set along with the Lemmings stamp, featuring 4 Tomb Raider stamps, Wipeout, Worms and Micro Machines. The other ones aren't very familiar to me personally.

The set I bought also comes with small descriptions of what the games are, here's the Lemmings one. Sorry about the small text size



Anyway I got the stamps here if anyone else is interested
https://shop.royalmail.com/special-stamp-issues/video-games?iid=SC0120_VIDGI_DD_14

[NieSch]

That's a nice collectable! I see there's also a Sensible Soccer one. Also a favorite Amiga game of mine that I still play now and then. Thanks for the link.

[Pooty]

Here is a transcript of the accompanied description. Unfortunately, there is one clear and obvious error with said description. See if you can spot it.

Stamp Collection Game Description

Lemmings
1991 / Commodore Amiga / Mouse

The product of a Commodore Amiga Deluxe Paint animation experiment, Lemmings was created by DMA Design's Mike Dailly and David Jones. The action-puzzle game, which plays out over a number of increasingly difficult screens, requires the player to safely guide a group of lemmings to the clearly marked exit. Sounds simple? It is anything but. Each lemming continually walks in the direction it is facing, meaning that it will unwittingly stroll into any hazard in its path - of which there are many - from precipitous drops to pits of fire. To prevent that from happening, the player assigns different skills to the lemmings, such as a blocker that will make other lemmings turn around, climbers that will create steps over hazards or diggers that can burrow through the landscape. All must be used together to create a safe route for the lemmings to reach the exit, in order to move onto the next, more challenging level.


Guiding the lemmings to the clearly marked exit sounds simple. It is anything but.

• The lemmings will march to their doom unless the player steers them to safety.

As for the other games, the only one I haven't played is Elite (I should do, really), and the only one I didn't enjoy was Populous (but I do know that it is a good game). All the remaining ones are great in my view.

[namida]

I can see two errors:

Spoiler

"climbers that will create steps over hazards" - no, that's what a builder does
"in order to move onto the next, more challenging level" - no, sometimes the next level won't be harder, Lemmings was very good at giving breathers every now and then

[grams88]

That's a really good choice of games, I feel these games had something special that created many paths in the video games industry.  Peter Molyneux who had a big involvement with populous of which populous could be considered the first (God game) video game category. We all know Peter Molyneux has went onto other great projects and things.

You also see the very famous (Treasure Island Dizzy) games which I think was a big success for the Oliver Twins or brothers, can't remember if they were Twins as well, They worked for codemasters doing the (Treasure Island Dizzy) games. Codemasters had a lot of success with the micro machine games, we have probably at least played one of these in our lifetime. I think I remember one of the micro machines games was very similar to that of mashed which was a car combat type of game where you have to survive till the end.

Worms has been a top one and has led to many more games of similar, I think Andy Davidson was playing around with lemmings when he came up with the idea for worms. One game led to another one could say. 

I remember they used to talk about sensible soccer a lot of on the TV as it was probably quite a big one of the past. The original one I think was for the Amiga and Atari st around 1992. Hey atari st is up there again, my favorite of the old ones.

Funny thing was it picked the really good tomb raider games like tomb raider 1, tomb raider 3 (Adventures of Lara Ctoft), also tomb raider 5 (Chronicles) The original Tomb Raider done brilliant I would say paving the wave to more great success. Tomb Raider 2 didn't do as well as the first one as it felt like you were doing more fighting rather than solving puzzles which I feel tomb raider is all about. It got really good again when Tomb raider 3 came out. As for tomb raider 2013, now this is the very newest tomb raiders which are very different indeed but it has became quite a success I feel as well. At first you might think it does not feel too much like the old tomb raider games but I think makers of the game wanted to take this game a different route even to the point of adding mutiplayer modes, which involve different tasks. I think one was to do with placing traps and catching your opponent.

I don't really know much about the Elite game. I just done a bit of research on google and yes this game does come to mind. The person who was involved with this game was involved with the (Raspberry pie) which became a big hit with helping students to program and many more opportunities. We tried to help an older gentleman with the raspberry pie and it became hard because we didn't know too much about it ourselves.

(Good choice of games as they games created lots of opportunities)

[ccexplore]

To clarify, the stamps were focusing specifically on video games developed by companies within the UK, correct?  (And perhaps further restricted to just computer games and not also console games?  Not sure.)

Anyway, it was released as part of a special set of 8 commemorating older video games.

Wait, so is it one set of 8 stamps, or eight separate sets (so there are many more other stamps not shown here)?  I'm getting rather confused now. Especially as I also count 13 12 stamps in the set you bought and 9 games amongst those (if we collapse all the Tomb Raider ones as one game?).  In other words, are there more stamps for other games (or maybe for the same game/series), or are the 13 stamps you bought all the ones they are printing?  [edit: 12 not 13; I didn't realize the Tomb Raider one comes as 4 different stamps.  Hmm, but isn't it still 9 sets then not 8?]

If it's just these 13 12 stamps, I have to ask why Tomb Raider/Lara Croft is getting such disproportionate coverage compared to the other games?   Is it like ranked by number of copies sold or something?

[Flopsy]

Sorry I didn't point this out but the Tomb Raider stamps are completely separate to the other 8 stamps, it's a special Tomb Raider set of 4 which is entirely separate.

The reason I put that picture up is because it is one of the better pictures from the website which shows the 8 video game collection stamps rather clearly.

The set I bought does come with the Tomb Raider ones though

[ccexplore]

Ok, got it.  Actually I guess if I just clicked on that shopping link, then it's pretty clear exactly the various different sets of stamps they are selling.

In addition to the small descriptions, also check out the catchphrases for each game they put at the bottom:

https://shop.royalmail.com/media/catalog/product/cache/b2bdd122dfcfe8ba44a374d4f4a23551/a/p/ap470-3-video-games-presentation-pack-inner.jpg

[Pooty]

I can see two errors:

Spoiler

"climbers that will create steps over hazards" - no, that's what a builder does
"in order to move onto the next, more challenging level" - no, sometimes the next level won't be harder, Lemmings was very good at giving breathers every now and then

Yup, it was the first one I was referring to. The second one feels more like a buzz term rather than an actual mistake.

To clarify, the stamps were focusing specifically on video games developed by companies within the UK, correct?  (And perhaps further restricted to just computer games and not also console games?  Not sure.)

These are games developed by UK companies, yes. I don't think there's a restriction on console games as such, I think it's more likely that console game development was not as strong over here until the mid- to late-1990s, when games like Wipeout and Tomb Raider were being made.

There are also some games that could've be on here (such as Manic Miner, Grand Theft Auto, Little Big Planet, and games made by Rare / Ultimate Play The Game), but they may not have adequate permission to do so, or the games could attract unwanted controversy from the media (especially Grand Theft Auto).

[607]

You also see the very famous (Treasure Island Dizzy) games which I think was a big success for the Oliver Twins or brothers, can't remember if they were Twins as well,

It's actually the original Dizzy, which wasn't released on Atari ST, Amiga and pc, and not its first sequel Treasure Island Dizzy (which is the first Dizzy game outside of 8-bit platforms). And yeah, they are most certainly twins. In fact, in posed pictures, Philip Oliver always stood at the left and Andrew Oliver at the right, so that later their family (and themselves? ) could make sure who was who.

[grams88]

Thanks for the Info there 607

Those treasure island games sure look quite cool. I feel I would really enjoy playing them, might get round to it one day. I checked some photos of them and I can see that you easily get confused with who's who even the family could if they were to swap positions in the photos.

I'm not too sure if this is one of their youtube channel but it certainly has some information about the treasure island games. Good on the Oliver Twins.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrgVGc3hfr_b16zXDu9tqUg

[NieSch]

I bought one on Ebay. (The button is another nice little collectable I bought on Ebay earlier.)