Information had been a little bit vague on this game. It was uncertain for a while if this were meant as a joke, or in fact was a real Lemmings conversion attempt.
All there was, was a simple attempt at copying the main game’s introduction sequence. C64 musician Lars Hutzelmann (The Blue Ninja) got in touch however to say that this was indeed intended as a proper conversion, which André Bürger (Smash designs developer who did games such as Turrican 3 and Crush) was doing to try and get the gig with Psygnosis back in the day.
André had asked Lars to produce some tunes, which Lars did (although not covers from the original Amiga music). Lars never saw any code, but was told that there was a working prototype in existence with sufficient Lemmings running on the screen. The project was cancelled when another team was found to be working on the conversion officially for Psygnosis.
In August 2020, we found a preview segment showing the development (sadly with no in game screenshot) in Zzap Italia! This has since been found and recovered by Marcin “Tenchi” Świętoniewski, who contacted GTW64 in September 2022. The preview has the extra picture, but also credits for the development afterwards.
Marcin recalled seeing the intro on a pirated Lemmings tape that had a mish mash of around 21 random stages out of order. It started with the original game intro, then ended with the V1 preview that we can see here.
Whilst Marcin was trying to locate all the previews of Lemmings to add to his collection, he wasn’t able to find the AEG one and then stumbled across our page here. After two days of searching and checking almost a thousand files, he eventually found it! So its with great thanks to Marcin for his incredible searching work that this complete version can be added to the archives!
Marcin later updated our download for us to include the music tune releases from Lars. Hopefully in the future we’ll learn more soon from André about the development and if perhaps the prototype with the lemmings walking around still exists.
Thanks to contributor Vaz, we learn a bit about the demo in the Zzap Italia snippet:
“Psygnosis themselves are working on the C64 conversion, and that, as it looks, means quality. The material in our hands (which for now consists in a demo not working yet) doesn’t allow us to write a judgement, not even a brief one, about this conversion, but I think that since Lemmings is not a difficult game, technically speaking at least, there won’t be any problems to have it working on Commodore’s little one. A release date has not been planned yet, but I think it’ll be out on december”
Contributions: Lars Hutzelmann, Marcin "Tenchi" Świętoniewski, Vaz
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_Lemmings (zip)
- Music_Lemmings (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 10/12/23 – Added short article translation thanks to Vaz.
- 23/02/23 – Added music demos to download thanks to Marcin “Tenchi” Świętoniewski
- 15/10/22 – More complete preview added thanks to Marcin “Tenchi” Świętoniewski
- 25/08/20 – Addition of new screen and page from Zzap Italia.
- 13/04/20 – Confirmation details about conversion.
Btw Zzap! Italia’s scan reads “Psygnosis themselves are working on the C64 conversion, and that, as it looks, means quality. The material in our hands (which for now consists in a demo not working yet) doesn’t allow us to write a judgement, not even a brief one, about this conversion, but I think that since Lemmings is not a difficult game, technically speaking at least, there won’t be any problems to have it working on Commodore’s little one. A release date has not been planned yet, but I think it’ll be out on december”
Thank you Vaz! I’ll update the page quickly with credit to you :)
As far as I remember Andre Bürger asked me some time before that demo came out to compose some music for his lemmings conversion. I composed two tunes for it that weren’t covers of the original Amiga music but pimped up versions of traditional songs: oh susanna and jingle bells.
I never saw any code of the actual game but he told me he had a working prototype with sufficient Lemmings running on screen. When he found out that another team was working on a conversion of the game as well and much closer to an official port the project was cancelled.
Thanks Lars! So this is Andre’s demo that he did originally?
The demo on the site seems to be missing a second file/part. Would be great if Andre still had something.