I played this game for dozens of hours with my dad growing up and seeing and playing with these animations is one of those times when nostalgia is so overwhelming and unexpected that I feel physically dizzy. If the animation had the sounds of lemmings dying when they fell from too high[1] I might have been hospitalized. Good work.
There's a modern macOS port of Lemmings here I've been playing for a few weeks (and several other classic 68k Macintosh game ports): https://roytinker.com/68k-ports/
> And then here comes Erik Veland with a port of... well, all of them. The original game. The semi-sequel games. The three different holiday games. Preview support for the two full sequels. And six thousand fan levels.
> ... is one of those times when nostalgia is so overwhelming
1991, Psygnosis (of course), Commodore Amiga (double of course!): my little brother was 9 y/o at the time and we were teenagers and we'd play Lemmings like crazy on our Amiga.
My little brother couldn't speak english yes but he'd imitate the "oh, nooooo" sentence Lemmings you'd "suicide" would make.
More than three decades later my brother is still nicknamed "Lem" after "Lemmings" and that's how we call him. And about two decades ago, he gave his consulting company a name sounding like "Lemmings" (spelling slightly different). He's still "Lem" and he still has got that company.
One of the best features of the Amiga (and perhaps Atari ST?) was the two player version. A mouse in each of the joystick sockets, each player starts from opposing ends of the map in a splitscreen view, having to get to the other and obviously not interfering with the opposition's efforts. Ahem.
An evil game. Such fun. I wish they'd expanded on it more...
Haha yea I pulled the sprites from the original game, I was thinking the same, an umbrella or die, it’d be a good way to artificially increase web analytics, maybe a message bubble
I did something on my site recently like that where you can click a hexagon and it turns into a robot and starts SLAM mapping the page, navigating around text elements carefully.
Were you initially surprised by how easy it was to get exact block size of individual characters and not just entire dom elements? That’s the part I thought was going to be the most difficult.
I don't know if I'm remembering this correctly but there used to be a site called html5lemmings (or something similar) where you could play a few levels of the game. This was before modern web applications and things were still mostly server side rendered with minimal javascript. The demo was quite impressive. I don't know if it's still there. Couldn't find it with a quick search.
Cool! Have you also tried setting maximum display size in accessibility settings on android? I lost most of them at the stairs and the rest fell into the walls. Is that supposed to happen? None reached the bottom. That said, this is pretty cool.
Interesting experiments and differences between the browsers.
Using the test:
(async () => {
const sleep = (ms) => new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, ms));
for (let i = 0; i < 200; i++) {
__walker.add();
await sleep(10);
}
})();
From the JavaScript console, on both Chrome and Safari.
The animation is _way_ smoother on Chrome, but scrolling on that page becomes really painful.
Safari, on the other hand, uses a lot more CPU to do the animation, and the FP of that animation drops dramatically as you change the number of lemmings from 10 -> 50 -> 100 -> 200. However scrolling the page remains smooth the entire time.
I enjoy putting the lemming in the margin on the bottom of the viewport at the left or right side then scrolling down such that the lemming plummets. Then, scrolling up, I can make it bounce up as if it is on a trampoline. Very funny.
I vibe-ported xpenguins[1] to Web[2] recently, can be used as bookmarklet and let run on any website. No original Lemmings in that one however, only the knockoff penguins.
Okay, this reminds me of an game from a similar time period where there would be these two tanks firing at each other from across the screen, one at a time. Does anybody remember that and what it was called?
Cute. However, the fact that this is possible shows how ridiculously out of control CSS is. It is supposed to control appearance, and that does not entail being Turing complete.
I remember having Lemmings and messing with the animation sprites from the game--I don't recall if they were saved in a bmp format or if it required a tool to extract. I'd try to recolor their hair or change their outfits pixel by pixel, but there were a lot of animations and a lot of frames. I always wanted to use them to build a Tetris/Lemmings hybrid game (the two games with the best music), but never got around to it.
This sent me on a lemmings hunt and I found someone porting all of the lemmings games and community levels to Mac - https://github.com/ErikVeland/Lemmings
As the first paragraph says (“Drag one to carry it”) you can move them around to put them on/in the parts that you want to test their interactions with.
Other than respawning them as you scroll around, so one starts in an appropriate place as a test comes into view, and resetting them automatically, perhaps on a timer, there probably isn't a better way to properly show it off than that.
Right, I thought the same. Construct it such that a Lemming falling down from the top will have to clear every level to the bottom instead of just falling past all of them.
Cute, but it would look nicer if the walkers were... you know, actually walking? Ok, might be hard to do with CSS to be fair, I don't know enough about CSS animation to judge that.
EDIT: works in Chrome and Firefox, doesn't work in Edge (on Linux - yeah, I know almost nobody uses that) for some reason...
Could be, yeah, didn't look deep into it. Just speaking from my experience with the flashy websites doing impressive demos usually starting to lag fairly soon.
That kind of misses what made Lemmings fun though.
Without digging and building stairs and parachutes,
it is only Lemmings in name, not in spirit. Also,
exploding lemmings - this can probably be done via
CSS animations.
I played this game for dozens of hours with my dad growing up and seeing and playing with these animations is one of those times when nostalgia is so overwhelming and unexpected that I feel physically dizzy. If the animation had the sounds of lemmings dying when they fell from too high[1] I might have been hospitalized. Good work.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_RmG9WB4BE
There's a modern macOS port of Lemmings here I've been playing for a few weeks (and several other classic 68k Macintosh game ports): https://roytinker.com/68k-ports/
Or https://www.macsourceports.com/game/lemmings
I tried that, but it seems buggy and large (2.06 GB!) compared to the 68k-ports version (about 1.5 MB)
> And then here comes Erik Veland with a port of... well, all of them. The original game. The semi-sequel games. The three different holiday games. Preview support for the two full sequels. And six thousand fan levels.
The size probably comes from that.
> ... is one of those times when nostalgia is so overwhelming
1991, Psygnosis (of course), Commodore Amiga (double of course!): my little brother was 9 y/o at the time and we were teenagers and we'd play Lemmings like crazy on our Amiga.
My little brother couldn't speak english yes but he'd imitate the "oh, nooooo" sentence Lemmings you'd "suicide" would make.
More than three decades later my brother is still nicknamed "Lem" after "Lemmings" and that's how we call him. And about two decades ago, he gave his consulting company a name sounding like "Lemmings" (spelling slightly different). He's still "Lem" and he still has got that company.
Oh noooooooo!
One of the best features of the Amiga (and perhaps Atari ST?) was the two player version. A mouse in each of the joystick sockets, each player starts from opposing ends of the map in a splitscreen view, having to get to the other and obviously not interfering with the opposition's efforts. Ahem.
An evil game. Such fun. I wish they'd expanded on it more...
Haha yea I pulled the sprites from the original game, I was thinking the same, an umbrella or die, it’d be a good way to artificially increase web analytics, maybe a message bubble
I played this for dozens of hours with my dad yelling helpfully over my shoulder. I still have the floppy in storage, but with no drive to read it.
But you can play it here! https://archive.org/details/lemmings_original_ms-dos_201705
Agreed - but what is shown on the webpage here, is not really lemmings.
Duh
That’s pretty sweet.
I did something on my site recently like that where you can click a hexagon and it turns into a robot and starts SLAM mapping the page, navigating around text elements carefully.
Were you initially surprised by how easy it was to get exact block size of individual characters and not just entire dom elements? That’s the part I thought was going to be the most difficult.
https://ablakey.ca/
Nice! Your site is impressive and your achievements even more so.
the base plates lighting up showing history of where the robot travelled is a fun detail
I recently put lemmings into some clinic management software I've been working on as a software egg.
https://postimg.cc/gxvZHbgG
That's beautiful! I hope it doesn't measure and chart the patients ^-^
I don't know if I'm remembering this correctly but there used to be a site called html5lemmings (or something similar) where you could play a few levels of the game. This was before modern web applications and things were still mostly server side rendered with minimal javascript. The demo was quite impressive. I don't know if it's still there. Couldn't find it with a quick search.
dhtml lemmings
https://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/
That's the one! Thanks.
Haha so nice that this random request has an answer, love this forum for that. Sorry for offtopic.
Cute :) It has a couple of zoom bugs on mobile, something like
html { overflow-x: clip; touch-action: manipulation; }
should fix them!
You can make the lemmings jump on mobile by scrolling down and up as a fast movement. Like catapulting/pushing them up
Oh awesome thank you, I will add this in
Cool! Have you also tried setting maximum display size in accessibility settings on android? I lost most of them at the stairs and the rest fell into the walls. Is that supposed to happen? None reached the bottom. That said, this is pretty cool.
Interesting experiments and differences between the browsers.
Using the test: (async () => { const sleep = (ms) => new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, ms)); for (let i = 0; i < 200; i++) { __walker.add(); await sleep(10); } })();
From the JavaScript console, on both Chrome and Safari.
The animation is _way_ smoother on Chrome, but scrolling on that page becomes really painful.
Safari, on the other hand, uses a lot more CPU to do the animation, and the FP of that animation drops dramatically as you change the number of lemmings from 10 -> 50 -> 100 -> 200. However scrolling the page remains smooth the entire time.
Page response might be smoother in both if the script switched from `setInterval` to `requestAnimationFrame`.
I enjoy putting the lemming in the margin on the bottom of the viewport at the left or right side then scrolling down such that the lemming plummets. Then, scrolling up, I can make it bounce up as if it is on a trampoline. Very funny.
I vibe-ported xpenguins[1] to Web[2] recently, can be used as bookmarklet and let run on any website. No original Lemmings in that one however, only the knockoff penguins.
[1] http://xpenguins.seul.org/ and updated at https://github.com/Grumbel/xpenguins-ng
[2] https://xpenguins-web.github.io/
Haha that’s cool, need to hunt sheep.exe
Just a note for you: Nothing at all shows up for someone who has prefers reduced motion on.
when i opened this thread my first thought was that i want pingus characters, not lemmings.
it's also awesome that you took over maintenance of xpenguins since you are the original creator the characters.
way to go!
C64 demo "Rodents in the Attic" (2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbXIdK3o3NU
Explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ1atMUOUMU
Okay, this reminds me of an game from a similar time period where there would be these two tanks firing at each other from across the screen, one at a time. Does anybody remember that and what it was called?
That's also the tutorial for XNA/monogame from Riemer from way back in the day, if you're interested in making your own: https://github.com/simondarksidej/XNAGameStudio/wiki/Riemers...
There were a few, but my favorite was "tanks".
https://www.addictinggames.com/strategy/tanks
Scorched Earth
Bang! Bang!
https://archive.org/details/win3_BANGBANG
This is awesome thanks for sharing
Cute. However, the fact that this is possible shows how ridiculously out of control CSS is. It is supposed to control appearance, and that does not entail being Turing complete.
Most of code is still JS: https://github.com/MarkBlah/lemmings/blob/main/walker.js
I remember having Lemmings and messing with the animation sprites from the game--I don't recall if they were saved in a bmp format or if it required a tool to extract. I'd try to recolor their hair or change their outfits pixel by pixel, but there were a lot of animations and a lot of frames. I always wanted to use them to build a Tetris/Lemmings hybrid game (the two games with the best music), but never got around to it.
Bmp
Took me a moment to realise I could pick them up and place them, on things and in things.
Thank you for bringing this to life.
This sent me on a lemmings hunt and I found someone porting all of the lemmings games and community levels to Mac - https://github.com/ErikVeland/Lemmings
Awesome, brings back memories of playing lemmings on my Amiga in the early 90s
Nothing good comes from vib...
Ok, this is awesome.
Reminds me of a similar game I had as a kid (Dweebs 2: The New Breed).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82cqmq6quXI
Love it!
It is unfortunate that the scenery is positioned in such a way that lemmings end up falling by the side all the way to the bottom of the screen.
Perhaps it would look better if you removed the padding from <body> and added more pits to the scenery.
As the first paragraph says (“Drag one to carry it”) you can move them around to put them on/in the parts that you want to test their interactions with.
Other than respawning them as you scroll around, so one starts in an appropriate place as a test comes into view, and resetting them automatically, perhaps on a timer, there probably isn't a better way to properly show it off than that.
Right, I thought the same. Construct it such that a Lemming falling down from the top will have to clear every level to the bottom instead of just falling past all of them.
This is fantastic.
love it. I did build a html-in-canvas version (https://github.com/VorticonCmdr/lemmings) for fun and I love how creative other people get
A tribute to Psygnosis, just for fun
Psygnosis were the publisher, DMA Design were the developers (you might know them from their other big game: Grand Theft Auto)
Funny how they keep hopping on a toggling horizontal scrollbar there at the bottom.
Thank you for making this. It was really fun and a really pleasant start to my day.
Cute, but it would look nicer if the walkers were... you know, actually walking? Ok, might be hard to do with CSS to be fair, I don't know enough about CSS animation to judge that.
EDIT: works in Chrome and Firefox, doesn't work in Edge (on Linux - yeah, I know almost nobody uses that) for some reason...
They are...
On android they fall down along the side all the way to the bottom
Super funny idea ! But it does not follow the scroll down on Safari
I love that they can also walk on the text headings
mad impressive imo, spawned like 50+ ppl and still running smooth (although must say I have a monster rig).
And I overenjoyed throwing lil marios around
The tick rate isn’t high so should be able to have thousands
Could be, yeah, didn't look deep into it. Just speaking from my experience with the flashy websites doing impressive demos usually starting to lag fairly soon.
Really fun to play around with! Good job!
we should make the web more fun and interactive like this
Awesome. Loved the originals.
Seems like a good place to drag this one out: DHTML Lemmings from 2004(!) https://jezsoft.co.uk/online/lemm2/index.html
Lemmings JS + CSS Animation
So cute!
That kind of misses what made Lemmings fun though.
Without digging and building stairs and parachutes, it is only Lemmings in name, not in spirit. Also, exploding lemmings - this can probably be done via CSS animations.
Oh, this game brings back memories
this made my day
this is awesome
Now that's what I'm talking about.
Is there anyway to get the classic version of Lemmings (on Amiga/PC) playable on the Switch?
There's a homebrew port of DOS Lemmings to 3DS, with an LLM it might not be too hard to get working.
https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/Lemmings_for_3DS
https://github.com/esoteric-programmer/lemmings_3ds