Shadow of the Beast

Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga was a fairly dull game, but it looked spectacular! Being a well known game on the Amiga, and have a lot of 16 colour graphics, it was an ideal candidate for being included.

Populous

Populous on the Amiga is one of the games that can be credited with helping to starting the multiplayer revolution. It's NULL-MODEM game play was one of the first networked games you could play.

The Complete History of
Lemmings
By
Mike Dailly

(Part 3)

The Special Levels

I was also the one responsible for creating all the "custom" levels for the game. We picked games that used the Amiga's dual-playfield system as they only used 16 colours, this ruled out games like Blood Money which was a full 32 colours. We did a test with a Menace level since we already had all the graphics to that, and once we saw how this looked, we went hunting for others. 

We were then lucky enough to get some graphics from Psygnosis and Reflections for Beast, Beast II and Awesome which then made up the rest of these levels. The special levels were very basic, as they couldn't have traps of any kind (due partly to the change in colour palette), which meant I had to try and make hard levels using only the skills and backgrounds only; never an easy thing to do.

The problem was now that we had all these really hard levels, but no easy ones. So, Gary then set about making simple ones; either by making easier versions of hard ones, or brand new levels. Levels like "Just Dig" (Lemmings level 1) were example of the new, simple levels. Designed to ease the player in,.these levels were so simple, that some under 5's managed to play the first few levels unaided.

'Just Dig' so simple, a 4 year old could do it.

This I believe is where many games fall down today, they don't spend the time making a good learning curve. Its also one of the reasons why I think the game did so well, everyone could do at least a few levels.

I've since met many people that were around 6 or 7 years old at the time, who have told me they used to play it. There have been very few games with such a cross section of players; Mario games are the only other ones I can think of since not even the Sonic games are played by such a wide cross section of ages.

The music and particularly the sound effects have to get a mention, so crucial to were they to the game. Both were created by Brian Johnson (Scott's younger brother), and the reason the tunes were, well - basic, was to avoid any copyright problems.

This was around the time when games first started to worry about such things, where as before they would have just happily ripped them off, but not now. This is why were were stuck with such timeless classics as "How much was that doggie in the window?" etc. However, I do seem to recall that Gary Timmons did the intro music, for some reason.

2 player Lemmings

The sound effects were superb however and deserve a special mention, since the game wouldn't have been the same without them. Scott's mum I believe was the first voice of the lemmings.

The other great thing with the original lemmings was the 2 player option. This came about because of games like Populous and Stunt Car Racer. These were the games we were playing in the office at the time, and they were the first to use Null-Modem cables for multi-player action.

We tried this as well, and I actually coded up a Null-Modem cable routine up, and even got a mouse moving around on Dave's machine, being controlled by me on mine. However, since the Amiga could have 2 mice plugged in, Dave decided to go with the split screen option instead.

This was a great addition, and one I've been very sorry not to see again since. The PC has problems controling more than once mouse, so it was dropped from that version, but the Atari ST version did managed to retain it.

Blood Money

Blood Money's use of 32 Colour graphics made it unsuitable for use in the special Lemmings levels.

2player mode

Gary created all 20 two player levels used in the game, these had different goals than the single player levels, so required a bit more thought.

2 player Status Bar

The bar down the middle of the level came about because Dave needed to hide some of the scrolling level, so put this hardware sprite over the top.