Thursday, March 27, 2025

Lemmings

Sometime back in the 90s, my friend rented Lemmings for the Super Nintendo, and we played it a bunch. It's a fairly simple puzzle thing, but it has these endearing creatures that you're supposed to save, and its music is just legendary. (You'll have to trust me on this. It's all chiptunes, but so many of them have an incredibly epic feel, and they have remained firmly stuck in my head in the decades since I played it.) Before I went home, I memorized my password to the tune of one of the game's music pieces. (LGSSCZL)

To give you an example of how I feel about the music: there is exactly one piece of piano music that I can play with both hands without having to practice and scrutinize written music, and it's an arrangement of the Lemmings tune with the Pachelbel's Canon chord thing in the background. I worked it out from memory one summer at my grandma's house. (I later wrote sheet music using Noteflight. A PDF is here.)

I don't love everything about the game. For one thing, you can't save all the lemmings. In fact, you have to blow some of them up. (It's just pixels flying, so it's not gross or anything, but it's not exactly a good plot point.) And some of the hazards that can take them out are a bit disturbing. And the game can get hard, in the tedious way. I mean, it's also challenging to use your various skills to make the lemmings a path to the exit. But even when you know exactly what to do, it's easy to make one little mistake that messes you up.

There are versions of the game for the PC and pretty much everything else that was out at the time. And there's a modern fan-remake called NeoLemmix, which adds quality-of-life improvements to fix that stuff. But I do care about intellectual rights. So, like 30 years after I played the game, I bought it on eBay and continued where I left off. It was just a few levels away from the end of the easiest difficulty level ("Fun"), so I have finally beaten the game!

If I keep playing, I'll probably use the NeoLemmix version. But either way, the music is on my internal playlist forever.