This is one of my favorite games of all time. I used to have it for the SNES growing up and I almost beat the entire thing over the course of many months. The toughest levels are absolutely insane.
Has there ever been a newer game with this same dynamic? For a while I wanted to make a clone, I think it would work well on a console like the Switch.
They, as in Psygnosis, completely milked the Lemmings IP over the years. The 3d episodes were pretty bad and that was the end of it if I recall correctly.
Lemmings Revolution was particularly silly as it's basically the 2D game but superimposed onto a 3D cylinder. Luckily games have moved away in recent years from the "everything must be 3D just because" era of the late 90s.
Classic Lemmings had both co-op and competitive multiplayer.
Co-op is clear, as you described.
Competitive: you each have your own lemmings: blue-green vs. green-blue. You have your own start point and end point on the same map. You can only control your own lemmings. Your goal-point will accept any lemming. Hilarious chaos ensues.
Broderbund's Lode Runner (on the Apple II... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzimJopP5rE), Lemmings, and the more recent Tower Defense games on iOS all have that special level-by-level, puzzle, automation game mechanic.
On Steam you can find a game called "Zombie Night Terror" which is basically Lemmings with a horror/zombie theme. I enjoyed it and was excited to play Lemmings style game
On Amiga the game slowed down significantly when you had many moving lemmings on screen so these pixel perfect collisions were probably quite expensive cycle wise.
Lemmings is one of the only games I know where (on my Amiga1000) I can plug in two mice and play two-players each with a mouse-cursor. The two-player competitive-gods dynamic is actually super thrilling and creative and I’d love to see it done again. I expect the mainline desktop OS/UI stack doesn’t know how to handle it!
You can totally set up multiple mouse(s) on Linux, and graphics cards too, and even use one machine with multiple keyboard/mouse/monitor rigs to give everyone their own X session .. assuming you've got the metal for it.
That's a different use case: one cursor controlled by multiple mice, or multiple completely independent sessions. This is two cursors in a single session - the only case I've seen is this, and even that seems messy: https://pluralinput.com/
A complex 3D environment that is difficult for a camera to look around in but easy for a room scale VR player to observe. And then various analog controls built into the environment that you manipulate to help guide the miniature Lemmings to safety, sometimes requiring you to use both hands independently to manipulate different sets of obstacles in the right order.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 95.9 ms ] threadhttp://web.archive.org/web/20180520203125/readonlymemory.vg/...
Edit: It's back now, but I was getting a 5xx error a minute ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527519
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9684830
while this has had smaller and older ones (2010 and 2009):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729348
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876436
Has there ever been a newer game with this same dynamic? For a while I wanted to make a clone, I think it would work well on a console like the Switch.
Back in the amiga days I loved a somewhat similar one called humans. It does seem weird that such a successful game hasn't spawned more clones though.
Co-op is clear, as you described.
Competitive: you each have your own lemmings: blue-green vs. green-blue. You have your own start point and end point on the same map. You can only control your own lemmings. Your goal-point will accept any lemming. Hilarious chaos ensues.
https://fs-uae.net/docs/mouse
Another Amiga game we played a lot which required 2 mice was The Settlers.
(I designed a few levels for the single-player mode which may or may not still be in the standard level pack, but didn't do much else with it.)
I recently reverse engineered the walker to get something simple but fun to animate, in the console no less:
https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl/blob/master/devlog/cons...
A complex 3D environment that is difficult for a camera to look around in but easy for a room scale VR player to observe. And then various analog controls built into the environment that you manipulate to help guide the miniature Lemmings to safety, sometimes requiring you to use both hands independently to manipulate different sets of obstacles in the right order.
Jabba the Hutt?