Which Lemmings was your first?

[Mr Esc]

I'm curious to know, what version or versions of Lemmings would be the first one you played? Betting as time has gone by there maybe people who might have started with Neolemmix or something similar

I think the first time I played Lemmings would be the DOS version at my Uncle's house when I was young. But not being very good with the mouse back then it wasn't exactly much of my gameplay.

The first I had a serious attempt at would be the Atari ST one (and then Oh No More Lemmings as my Dad found it cheap from somewhere), probably not the best version but I will always have a soft spot for it, especially the music. Started a fresh playthrough of this one just last night hence my question.

The Mega Drive one was the other main one I got to play, seeing in a magazine it had all these new levels in I was excited to play them. Only reached them via level codes at the time but it counts I guess.

So, which Lemmings would be your first?

[Proxima]

Started with the black & white Mac version back in 1991. As I was a child at the time, it was a couple of years before I reached Pea Soup (Mayhem 14) and found that the level is nearly impossible on that version since the "peas" are invisible. I didn't think of trial-and-erroring through it because the idea of invisible terrain never really occurred to me... fortunately, with technology moving on, my dad passed down to me his Mac LCIII soon after. I was able to progress, but The Steel Mines of Kessel (Mayhem 26) is much harder than intended on the Mac version, and I didn't solve it for another ten years.

My friends and school computers mostly had the Acorn Archimedes version, so that was the other version I became familiar with. I didn't understand that different versions had different levels until years later when I joined the forum that was a precursor to this one.

[Swerdis]

Lemmings 1 on the Amiga. It was a cracked version with a "Trainer" - which meant I had unlimited skills in each level and was actually pretty pointless. I soon ignored that and played seriously, but wasn't able to complete the game as a teenager. The next was ONML which I bought with my brother and we were so enthusiastic that a department-store detective stopped us and thought we had stolen it (which proved to be wrong of cause). I couldn't finish ONML as well though I made much better progress compared to Lemmings 1 in the beginning. Interestingly I found (and still find) the Crazy-rank harder than Wild and even Wicked. When Lemmings 2 The Tribes was released on the Amiga I bought that game, too. The only golden fragment of the talisman I was able to achieve was the one for the Shadow tribe. Later parts of the Lemmings series didn't interest me which is true for Lemmings 3 as well (which was also released on the Amiga). I didn't play the game anymore for more than two decades until I discovered NeoLemmix some years ago. Lemmings Plus 1 was the first pack I played - the first of many so far. There's only one I aborted while two still wait for completion (by only one level each).

[WillLem]

I'm proud and grateful to be able to say that my parents bought us an Amiga 500+ back in 1991 (when I was just 7 years old). We had the Cartoon Classics pack with Lemmings, Captain Planet and the Planeteers and The Simpsons: Bart Vs. The Space Mutants bundled with it (as well as Deluxe Paint III, which was bundled with all A500s, I believe - this is the very program upon which the Lemmings graphics were originally created!)

My and my brother and sister spent many a happy hour playing our Amiga - it didn't occur to me until years later that we were the original "PC gamers", whilst everyone else seemed to have Nintendo or SEGA consoles!

And, one game which of course I loved playing was Lemmings, with the "tank" mouse (a very uncomfortable but nonetheless iconic contraption which regularly needed to be de-fluffed so that the trackball would operate properly!):



I made it through all of the Fun levels and most of Tricky, but didn't get too far through Taxing and never completed even level 1 of Mayhem as a youngster - it wasn't until well into my late teens that I acquired a copy of Windows 95 Lemmings and finally beat the entire game.

I've since gone on to complete Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings on the Amiga emulator, using a much more comfortable modern gaming mouse and - on one particular playthrough - a GameCube controller! I'm also the first person to upload a speedrun of the entire first Lemmings game on the Amiga - albeit recorded a rank at a time, not all in one go. Paiy has already beat my times for Fun and Tricky, and I'm sure they'll get around to beating my Taxing and Mayhem times - eventually

It was nice to set the first official record, though!

Interested to hear others' experiences with the official Lemmings games, as well. These are the stories that brought us all to this very Forum!

[namida]

Technically I owned the DOS version first, but this was on a PC with no mouse and I couldn't figure out the keyboard controls. So I first was able to actually play the game on Sega Master System. I progressed much faster in DOS once I was able to play that, until I hit the major roadblock of Mayhem 29. I caught up on SMS, where Mayhem 29 is a completely different (and much much easier) level, and ultimately completed that version first.

[jkapp76]

I had the dos versions first. But I really got into it with the win95 version. I never really played the dos versions until after win95.

I never played any other versions. Except some amiga emulation here and there.

[kaywhyn]

Dos Lemmings was also my first. Interesting story: One day, at some family thing we went to, there was a desktop computer that had the game Lemmings on it. Luckily, my dad happened to have a floppy disk on him, so he copied over the files of the game to it and that's how I first got the game. Later on, my dad bought the CD version that bundles both Lemmings and ONML, which is pretty much the Dos version except it has a few pixels added to the fall distance before splatting, therefore making levels like the 4 WAFD levels completely trivial in that they will survive the fall off the platform, meaning you don't have to do anything in order to beat them if you have the increased fall distance! However, I didn't know this at first. I just happened to let a lemming fall off the platform and was shocked to see the lemming survive instead of splatting. At the same time, I wonder if I first realized this difference in Mayhem 1 before discovering this triviality in the WAFD levels. If you have the increased fall distance, the drop is not splat height at the start of Mayhem 1, therefore you don't need to spend any builders to make a safe landing zone.

Also in regards to ONML, I believe I first discovered the game at one of my relatives' house, before officially owning it due to my dad having bought the CD that bundles L1 and ONML.

Interestingly I found (and still find) the Crazy-rank harder than Wild and even Wicked.

Yea, the jump in difficulty from Tame to Crazy is huge, much larger than the jump from Fun to Tricky of L1. Essentially, Crazy is already like Taxing difficulty. After that, the difficulty doesn't really increase all that much with the Wild and Wicked ranks, before increasing significantly again for the Havoc rank.

I remember Wild 13 stumping me pretty badly and I gave up on the game for a while, but interestingly enough I didn't have any problems with the level when I came back to it. I think I was simply confused as to why I kept losing, only to realize to my horror how very strict the time limit is when I saw it.

Havoc 10 was another, though I remember the solution came to me one morning while lying awake in bed. I tried it out and was happy to see that what I thought in my mind does indeed work. You can imagine the elementary kid in me feeling so smart as a result Needless to say, I actually discovered this compression through traps on this level first over any other official level, meaning I never realized the intended way to do Compression Method 1, only because I had always solved it by going out to the right over the top, either with or without bashing through steel as well. On the CD version, the drop is actually safe, therefore it's not necessary to bash through steel to reduce the height of the fall. However, there is an inconsistency that can happen in that sometimes the basher will splat while the rest survive. Then again, maybe it's not too inconsistent. I think it will only happen if he happens to make a stroke that causes him to move over empty air, therefore causing him to fall instead of transitioning to a walker first because he bashed in such a way that he stops before going over the edge.   

When Lemmings 2 The Tribes was released on the Amiga I bought that game, too. The only golden fragment of the talisman I was able to achieve was the one for the Shadow tribe. Later parts of the Lemmings series didn't interest me which is true for Lemmings 3 as well (which was also released on the Amiga).

Lemmings 2 is an ok game. Not too good but it's not too bad either. IIRC, there are still some really frustrating levels in each of the 12 tribes, especially those that require the fan. The most recent game I played that isn't L1 or ONML is L3D, which was last summer. I thought the controls would be too frustrating for me, but it's actually a decent game. It got more criticism than it should had IMO. This being said, I do look forward to playing through namida's LP3D pack at some point

I didn't play the game anymore for more than two decades until I discovered NeoLemmix some years ago. Lemmings Plus 1 was the first pack I played - the first of many so far. There's only one I aborted while two still wait for completion (by only one level each).

Ah, if I'm not mistaken, one from Sublems and actually 2 more from Deceit's Lemmings, though the final level after the one you're stuck on for the latter is ridiculously easy: Infinite amount of every skill and you have 1 hour (60 minutes for the time limit) to beat it. It only takes a long time because there's 1000 lemmings, but the solution only takes about 4-5 minutes to do. Finally, you're only required to save up to half (500), but given you have infinite of every skill it's still very easy to save everyone.

[GigaLem]

The first one I've played was the DOS version, I didn't get past tricky but I do remember beating Fun. A Beast of a Level was always my favorite from Fun.
At the time, I never knew the game had sound and music and I didn't realize it had music until I saw Essentafour's playthrough of the SNES version. Which is likely why I have no attachment to the DOS Soundtrack.

The first version I've beat at least one of the two on this version was the PS1 version, and I haven't played through much of the Oh No! Side of that version because I was burnt out. I found the PS1 version to be very frustrating to play for many reasons.

I didn't complete other versions of the game until very recently, like the SNES and Genesis versions as well as the Amiga version of Oh No more Lemmings

[Strato Incendus]

My first contact with Lemmings was X-Mas-Lemmings on Mac (the demo version that only featured four levels). Then came regular Lemmings on Mac; we had access to the DOS version, too, but my father always considered the Mac version superior (among others, because you could select skills in pause mode).

Then we got my father's old Atari from the attic. Aside from games like Giana Sisters, Elite, Ballerburg etc., it also ran Lemmings and Lemmings 2: The Tribes (which we initially confused for "Oh No! More Lemmings" back then). Lemmings for Atari also featured a cheat mode, where you could automatically progress to the next level. Since we had always gotten stuck on certain levels in Tricky or Taxing ("From the boundary line", "I have a cunning plan", "Postcard from Lemmingland", around that mark), this allowed me for the first time to at least look at all the levels in the original game. The only other option would have been to find the access code somewhere online, but of course, the internet was still in its infancy back then.

The Mac version also featured the level "Going their separate ways" instead of "All the 6s" (like Atari and Windows). We always found "Going their separate ways" more difficult. I used to think "Going their separate ways" was removed from the Windows version, due to the fact that you can't select skills in pause mode making the level harder in Windows. But most likely, it was the other way round? Meaning, that "All the 6s" was removed for "satanic imagery", and "Going their separate ways" introduced in the Mac version instead?

After the Atari phase, I'm not sure if we first picked up Lemmings 3D from a flea market, or if we had already discovered the actual Oh No! More Lemmings by that point in the meantime. As far as I recall, I played Oh No! More Lemmings on Mac again, though I never got as far into it as into original Lemmings (mainly due to the puzzles being much harder, such as Dolly dimple stumping many players out of nowhere after the pretty much trivial Tame rank).

Around that time, we also picked up one of the Holiday Lemmings CDs (the one with the Flurry and Blizzard ranks), so we finally got to enjoy a little more of the X-Mas sprites than just those first four levels that had first introduced me to the game.

With the memory of Lemmings 3D in mind, I got excited when I heard about another 3D Lemmings game being out there. In fact, what they meant by that was just Lemmings Revolution — which of course has 3D graphics, but the gameplay mode went back to that of the original 2D levels (technically with some levels featuring the wraparound gimmick).

Last in line was Lemmings Paintball, which was fun and different for a while, but is probably the game we played the least.

Lemmings 3 (An All New World of Lemmings) I never knew existed until I joined the forums.

[Mr Esc]

I guess, at least so far, that most had their first version played on a computer with a mouse,  easily best way for a new player to get into it I think . I did prefer a joypad for a time when was on the Mega Drive as I found it easier to control though. Bet these days that would be rare for a kid to need practice with a mouse.

Started with the black & white Mac version back in 1991. As I was a child at the time, it was a couple of years before I reached Pea Soup (Mayhem 14) and found that the level is nearly impossible on that version since the "peas" are invisible. I didn't think of trial-and-erroring through it because the idea of invisible terrain never really occurred to me... fortunately, with technology moving on, my dad passed down to me his Mac LCIII soon after. I was able to progress, but The Steel Mines of Kessel (Mayhem 26) is much harder than intended on the Mac version, and I didn't solve it for another ten years.

My friends and school computers mostly had the Acorn Archimedes version, so that was the other version I became familiar with. I didn't understand that different versions had different levels until years later when I joined the forum that was a precursor to this one.

Invisible peas? Oh wow, quite an oversight... Could've been missed in testing? Only fix I can think of is to have square peas,would look weird but it'd have been solvable. I thought only the Mega Drive one would have different levels because they're smaller. Till I had a look around other versions on emulators I never realised how many unique levels there were, it's quite surprising how many are only on specific ports of the game.

I'm proud and grateful to be able to say that my parents bought us an Amiga 500+ back in 1991 (when I was just 7 years old). We had the Cartoon Classics pack with Lemmings, Captain Planet and the Planeteers and The Simpsons: Bart Vs. The Space Mutants bundled with it (as well as Deluxe Paint III, which was bundled with all A500s, I believe - this is the very program upon which the Lemmings graphics were originally created!)

My and my brother and sister spent many a happy hour playing our Amiga - it didn't occur to me until years later that we were the original "PC gamers", whilst everyone else seemed to have Nintendo or SEGA consoles!

And, one game which of course I loved playing was Lemmings, with the "tank" mouse (a very uncomfortable but nonetheless iconic contraption which regularly needed to be de-fluffed so that the trackball would operate properly!):

I guess looking back it was similar for me for a while. Other kids would have Mega Drive/Snes, then there's me who mainly was on Atari ST, don't think I knew anyone else who had one, or an Amiga. Trying to debate whether that mouse is better or worse than the Amiga one. Either way much prefer a modern mouse to one of these gray blocks from back in the day.



Ever since my big Lemmings phase when I was younger which kind of petered out after the PS1 version of Lemmings 3d, I have been in and out of Lemmings games, did tend to dot around from versions so alot of my memories of when I first did X levels is a bit fuzzy sadly. I also loved playing ONML, and Lemmings 2 - the latter when I was bored was great fun to mess around on the Practice mode, my brother loved doing that too.

But aside from stumbles when I was learning the game still, think my first major hurdle was "If only they could fly", the Tricky version of "We All Fall Down", and I am sure I solved "Steel Works" before I could the 1st level of Taxing - the time limit on it is quite stressful.. Will have to play some of the other games again, ever since i discovered custom levels I think more of my time has been on those than the original games.

[chaos_defrost]

DOS here, packaged with ONML. Kid me, probably like 9 or 10, played until the levels I got stuck on (Taxing 13, Mayhem 9, Tricky/Fun beaten) then stopped, then restarted some time later and cleared both games. Then got into level development around 13-14 and; Oops oh no! more of my Lemmings!

[LemSteven]

I started with the DOS version of Lemmings/ONML, around the 1994 time frame.  I was only about 8-9 years old at the time, so I initially wasn't very good at solving tough puzzles on my own, so my dad was the one who solved most of the levels at first.  After he solved them and gave me an idea of how to do them, I would then play them myself.  However, there were a few notable exceptions to this:

1: My dad struggled on Taxing 11 (The Ascending Pillar Scenario) for several days, unable to pull off the execution of the digger pit on such a small landing platform.  One day while he was at work, I managed to pull it off myself, saving him a TON of aggravation.  I then beat the next level on my own, as well.  My streak ended at two, though, because Upsidedown World was a stumper that I would have never solved on my own back in those days.

2: My dad got stumped on Mayhem 7 (Poles Apart), as he couldn't figure out how to clear 7 pillars with just 4 bashers, and there weren't enough builders to go over the top.  I tried it myself, and managed to save exactly one lemming.  My dad was shocked that I managed to even get one lemming home, until I mentioned that the one lemming I saved was the climber, and that's when the light bulb lit up in his head: Climber + Digger = Pole eliminated.

3: When we got to Mayhem 11 (We All Fall Down), my dad didn't even attempt it.  He said that one was mine -- I was always better at quick reflexes and pixel-precise execution than he was!

[CrystalCore]

I played the MS-DOS version of the original Lemmings. 

[Lemming-1]

I was lucky enough to have seen the very first lemmings game come out.
I worked in a,computer shop, so had access to many top titles coming through

[Tunik5448]

Now this might surprise some people, but my first Lemmings experience was actually HTML Lemmings. Basically how the story goes is that I was playing Smash Karts on Crazy Games which is kind of like Cool Math Games to anyone who knows. If you don't, it's like this big website with all these HTML games and all that. Anyways, so I got off Smash Karts some time later and started scrolling around the website semi-mindlessly. And by some coincidence, I found the HTML version of Lemmings. I was all like, "Hey, cool game from the 90's. What's it like?" and I started playing it. Then it got addicting, and more addicting. At that point, I started looking up more info about Lemmings, played HTML Lemmings more, and found out that Lemmings is a fun game. So that's how I became a Lemmings fan. The music's also groovy too, so yea.