Christmas!
Dude.
What’re you doing here?
I thought you were only here on the first episode of December each year?
Christmas! [PLOP]
[inane chuckling]
What the crap is this?
Holiday Lemmings, I’ve already covered this!
Granted it was like nine years ago and there’s a lot more to say and more versions to cover
and I could do a whole lot better job—okay fine!
I’ll cover it.
-Christmas! -Sigh.
[LGR Christmas intro plays]
So yeah I covered both Lemmings and Holiday Lemmings for the
Amiga years ago, but at the insistence of the Christmas clone here we are again!
Holiday Lemmings, Christmas Lemmings, Xmas Lemmings, these releases are all known by
a variety of different titles on the Amiga, Macintosh, and PC.
We’ll be looking at the PC versions throughout this video because DOS.
Each Holiday Lemmings entry sticks to the same concept: it’s the classic real-time
puzzle platformer Lemmings, just with a festive makeover befitting the season.
The lemmings now sport a santa suit, the ground is covered in ice and snow, and the environments
are filled with icicles, snowmen, strings of colorful lights, flailing Santa things,
and Christmas puddings.
But it was not conceived as a full game initially.
The first of these was Christmas Lemmings, or Xmas Lemmings ‘91, distributed during
the holiday season of late 1991 as a promotional demo
for the upcoming Oh No! More Lemmings pack.
Since that wouldn’t be released till the following February, Christmas Lemmings was
handed out at UK trade shows as a holiday freebie teasing the next Lemmings game.
As such the original floppy disk can be tough to find, especially the IBM PC one.
But the disk was widely copied and shared back in the day so I just made my own disk.
It also came with a printable readme file, acting as a brief introduction to both the
gameplay of Lemmings and the holiday demonstration disk.
Though I’m not sure calling Lemmings a “game of adventure, romance, and salvation” is
the most accurate description for new players.
But anyway Xmas Lemmings ‘91 was a standalone experience, though one with only two unique
holiday levels: Merry Christmas Mr. Lemming and Christmas Bonus.
Along with two more levels from the upcoming Oh No! More Lemmings.
Despite the miniscule content the demo went over well enough that a follow-up was quickly
slapped together and released in magazine cover disk form in early 1992.
This time there were twice the holiday-themed levels making for a total of four, each of
them exclusive to this particular demo disk.
Once again it spread like wildfire among the Amiga, PC, and Mac gaming communities, hitting
bulletin board systems and being copied left and right among anyone with a disk drive.
Smelling the potential for profit, DMA Design and publisher Psygnosis put together a more
complete Christmas Lemmings experience, resulting in Holiday Lemmings in December of 1993.
This time it contained 32 unique maps split up into two difficulty levels, selling at
retail in the UK, parts of Europe, and North America at a price of about $15.
And once again, people spread the game far and wide online, despite it being paid commercial
software this time.
This was how I first discovered Holiday Lemmings back in the mid-90s on the AOL Games channel.
I had no idea it even had a retail presence until I rediscovered it on some abandonware
site over a decade later.
But yeah, piracy was never one to stop Psygnosis from making bank and pumping out Lemmings
sequels, with 1994 Holiday Lemmings hitting store shelves in December of ‘94.
This contained yet another 32 levels on top of the existing 32 from the ‘93 edition,
for a total of 64 unique maps.
While the ‘91 and ‘92 levels still remain exclusive to those, I’d easily recommend
Holiday Lemmings ‘94 if you had to pick just one, since it feels the closest to a
full-size Lemmings game.
Inside each of these little boxes we got here in the US there is an instruction booklet
and a 3.5” floppy disk, though there are some elusive CD-ROM versions that I’ve never found.
And yeah, the instructions are sparse but still perform the admirable task of informing
new players about the ins and outs of Lemmings gameplay.
Heh, there’s even a section begging you NOT to copy the disk, but of course this stopped
pretty much no one.
Since they all look and sound nearly identical, we’ll be playing the ‘94 edition from here onward.
And once again this provides 64 levels, divided into four groups of sixteen, with Frost and
Flurry being somewhat easier and Hail and Blizzard being downright stupid.
Fun and charming, but oh god, the pixel-perfect precision required.
Sigh!
It gets tough but if you’ve played Lemmings then you already knew that.
In fact, what’s fascinating about Holiday Lemmings ‘94 is that in terms of gameplay
it was actually a throwback by the time it came out.
By December of that year this was the fifth full Lemmings game, with Lemmings 2: The Tribes
coming out in 1993 and All New World of Lemmings launching in late 1994.
Yet Holiday Lemmings ‘94 sticks to the original Lemmings engine and gameplay, which a number
of fans preferred anyway, myself included.
So yeah, this ended up being a last hurrah for the original style of Lemmings before
the series moved onto various 3D incarnations, paintball spin-offs, and the Adventures of Lomax.
Yeah Lemmings went crazy for a bit.
But Holiday Lemmings?
Ah, it’s just pure Lemmings!
Raw and untouched, except for the Santa hats and snowy platforms of course.
And this MS-DOS version is precisely how I remember it, with twangy Adlib sound and music
and razor-sharp pixel art on a black background.
[Lemmings sound and music plays]
Much as I dig the Amiga versions of Lemmings and Christmas
Lemmings, with their superior colors, sound, music, inputs, etc etc.
Lemme just say that when it comes to reliving my childhood I don’t really care.
Back then it was all about DOS when it came to my computer gaming experience, and Holiday
Lemmings was one of those few DOS games I was still playing well into the days of Windows 95.
Sure there were Windows Lemmings releases, I had those too, but these Christmas editions
for DOS continue to stand out as something special.
The classic Adlib music, the cutesy FM synth sound effects, the particular way lemmings
explode into bright showers of pixels when you set off the armageddon option.
I dunno, I’ve played dozens of Lemmings versions and ports over the years and this
VGA version for DOS is still a personal favorite in terms of look and feel, with the Christmas
iterations appealing to me even more than the original games these days.
There’s something magical about those tiny lemming sprites with bobbing Santa hats and
their one green pixel of hair flopping around.
But yeah, as for the gameplay?
Ah, it’s Lemmings, it’s fine.
If you like Lemmings, you’ll like this.
If you don’t, well too bad because it’s just as brutal as the original.
Your goal is to guide up to 99 lemmings from the entrance to the exit of each level in
a set quantity of time.
To do this you have a selection of skills along the bottom of the screen, often a limited
number of them depending on the level.
Based on the popular urban legend of lemmings being suicidal -- thanks for that 1950s Walt Disney
each lemming will walk forward to their inevitable doom unless you intervene
by providing them a skill.
Climbers, floaters, blockers, builders, bashers, miners, and diggers all do their part to navigate
and manipulate the environment in order to achieve the task at hand.
And of course, you can also explode them as necessary, which I guess is also based on
another lemmings myth?
Yeah I had never heard that one till now, but I guess people also thought lemmings blew
up at one point if the Encyclopedia Britannica is any indication.
Anyway, saving these poor misunderstood rodents from themselves is the objective, and the
only thing making it tie into the season is a coat of holiday paint.
Not just Christmas either, you also get a Hanukkah menorah or two, along with some happy
new year’s well-wishes.
But that’s it, otherwise it’s the same game.
So while you could rightfully criticize it for being a quick cash-in, because I mean,
that’s what it was, it’s still a solid Lemmings game and an extra cheerful one at that.
I agree with the words of Amiga Format magazine writer Rob Mead, when he said “Let's not
be too Scroogy about this.
Even though Holiday Lemmings is obviously designed to make as much money for as little
effort as possible, it still manages to be funny, frustrating and incredibly addictive.
And anything which takes your mind off that awfully big
pile of Boxing Day washing-up has to be a good thing."
While I’ve never experienced a Boxing Day washing-up, it sounds dreadful, so I’ll
accept it for what I assume it is, much like Holiday Lemmings.
This game is a delight, even today, so much so that I actually finished it for the first
time while making this video.
It took looking up a few solutions on YouTube, but whatever, I’ll do what I have to in
order to stay merry, bright, and most importantly sane this month of December.
Seems like every year the season grows increasingly busy, chaotic, and generally absurd.
But when I play some good ol’ Xmas Lemmings, I’m brought right back to those times as
a kid playing DOS games in the corner of my living room.
Freezing outside the house, but toasty inside, nestled up in an office chair with a mug of
hot chocolate, the warm glow of a CRT, and some daggone Lemmings.
This is a happy place and I wouldn’t change anything about it.
If you liked this episode of LGR then thanks!
I have more holiday-themed goodies coming soon during the month of December, with all
sorts of games and tech each week of the year so stay tuned.
And as always thank you very much for watching!