Lemmings

Lemmings is one of the most ingenious game ideas in history, wrapped in the simplest premise imaginable: little lemmings pour out of a hatch, march stubbornly straight ahead and cheerfully plunge into any abyss. Your job is to get enough of them to the exit alive. The catch: the lemmings do nothing clever on their own. The cleverness is you.

Instead of steering the lemmings directly, you hand out skills. You make one a digger that tunnels downward, one a bridge builder that paves across a gap, one a climber or a blocker that holds the others back. From these few roles emerge puzzles of wonderful depth: each level is a machine you get running with the right skills at the right time in the right place.

The whole thing is a race against the clock and against your limited supply. Each level gives you only a set number of each skill and a quota of lemmings you must save. Misplace a digger and a whole batch can tumble into the depths. The speed can be adjusted so you can catch your breath in hectic moments.

You play entirely with the mouse: pick a skill from the bar and click the lemming that should perform it. Plus and minus control the pace. Anyone who knew the game from the early nineties is right back in it, and newcomers quickly see why it is one of the most ported games of all time.

This version runs as the original DOS title in a js-dos emulation right in your browser. Click Play, the emulator boots, and after the short DOS start sequence you land on the title screen. No download, no installation, no account - just the classic exactly as it looked in 1991.

Fullscreen mode blows the pixelly original up to the whole area when you want to lose yourself properly. Everything runs in your browser, nothing is installed and nothing is permanently stored. The Lemmings demo is freely distributable and the js-dos emulator is licensed under the GPL.