Twenty years of Lemmings

It seems to be a good time for anniversaries. This week it was the 25th anniversary of Microsoft's stock market flotation, for instance.

But a little less than five years later, another interesting milestone was reached: twenty years ago on February 14, 1991, the game Lemmings was released by the Dundee-based software company DMA Design.

It's easy to forget now, but the all-conquering behemoth that is Rockstar, creator of the Grand Theft Auto series, began its life as the Amiga software house DMA Design in Scotland's fourth city.

On February 14 this year the company's founders David Jones, Russell Kay, Steve Hammond and Mike Dailly returned to 134b Nethergate, Dundee to unveil a plaque commemorating the site of DMA's first office.

The picture to the left was taken by Steve Hammond, by whose kind permission we reproduce it, and whose blog has some fascinating thoughts on DMA and Lemmings (and more):

The most common PC graphics standard at the time was CGA, which had a fixed - and limited - colour palette; white, green, blue and black. Lemmings had to make use of these colours and that is the reason why Lemmings have green hair.

He also points out that he's only sort-of a 'founder' of DMA:

I'd been thinking in terms of business, for which I'd played no part. But in terms of the four of us, including Dave Jones and Russell Kaye, sitting in the computer club canteen in 1984 discussing how cool it would be to makes games.... well, perhaps.

Which gives a good idea about how British computer games companies were started in those days.

In programming, the initials DMA stood then for what they do now: direct memory access. The founders took their name from one of the Amiga's programming manuals.

In a tie-up with the larger publishing house Psygnosis, DMA put out some classics, such as Menace and Blood Money (see the video below for the latter game's superb title sequence and soundtrack).

However, the breakthrough was the side-scrolling puzzle game Lemmings, which went on to sell over 20 million copies on 30 formats.

Gary Timmons, the game's co-designer and animator, said: "Initially I just wanted to get the original team together again to mark the 20th anniversary of the launch. However, as the game is so significant to the computer games industry in Dundee, the idea snowballed into a wider set of events including talks, an exhibition of Lemmings items and a commemorative ceremony to mark the location of DMA Design's first offices."

It was organised with the University of Abertay Dundee and the city's McManus gallery. Interestingly, Abertay's press release pointed out that in the same week a new report on Scotland's games industry gave "compelling arguments for tax relief" for developers. The former Labour government had proposed such a tax break, but the coalition government cancelled it.

Lemmings is still available on some Sony consoles, but you can download the original PC version, along with its sequels, from Abandonia.