Lemmings: Herding a Suicidal Crowd on a Two-Inch Screen

Some games seem physically impossible on the Game Boy, and Lemmings is one of them. It was built for a computer mouse and a big, detailed screen, and it asks you to manage dozens of tiny creatures at once. Then someone squeezed it onto a handheld with four buttons and a screen barely bigger than a matchbox. That it works at all is a small miracle. That it is genuinely good is a testament to the craft of porting.

The march of the lemmings

Lemmings began life in 1991, made by the Scottish studio DMA Design, and it was an instant sensation on home computers like the Amiga. The premise is beautifully cruel. A stream of little green-haired creatures pours into each level and starts walking, mindlessly, straight ahead. They will march off cliffs, into water and into traps without a flicker of self-preservation. Your job is to get a set number of them safely to the exit before time runs out.

Lemmings - Climbers, floaters, blockers, bashers: assign wisely.

You do this by handing out jobs. Turn one lemming into a blocker to stop the crowd, another into a basher to tunnel through a wall, a digger to burrow down, a builder to bridge a gap, a floater to survive a long fall. Each level is a logic puzzle dressed as a rescue mission, and the tension comes from the fact that the crowd never stops moving while you think. It is equal parts strategy and mild panic.

An unlikely handheld

The publisher Ocean, a British house that specialised in bringing big computer games to every machine going, took on the job of shrinking Lemmings down to the Game Boy. The problems were obvious. There was no mouse to point with, so a cursor had to be driven around the screen with the D-pad. The levels were far wider than the little display, so the view had to scroll. And a busy, colourful playfield full of individual creatures had to be redrawn in four shades of grey, small enough to fit yet clear enough to read.

Somehow it came together. Moving a cursor with a directional pad will never be as quick as a mouse, but the pacing was tuned so that you had time to think, select a lemming and assign its job before disaster struck. The tiny sprites stayed legible, the levels were carefully adapted, and the essential loop of watch, plan, intervene survived the shrink intact.

The art of the impossible port

The Game Boy is full of these against-the-odds conversions, games that seemed to belong to bigger, more powerful machines and were somehow talked onto the handheld anyway. The arcade blaster Space Invaders made the trip, and even the notorious laserdisc cartoon Dragon's Lair was attempted. Lemmings stands out among them because it did not just survive the journey, it remained properly playable, a real strategy game you could carry in a coat pocket.

The franchise went on to become one of the most ported games in history, appearing on seemingly every platform ever built. The Game Boy version rarely gets top billing among them, but it may be the most impressive, precisely because it had the least to work with. You can find Lemmings in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.