In the first part of this series, I talked about my introduction to video games, with the venerable BBC Micro. I have some truly fond memories of that machine, but as with life itself, gaming moves ever onwards.

The first games I played were all about me. I had been a stock trader, a spaceship pilot and a WW1 dog-fighter. Then along came a game that suddenly and unassumingly, put the lives of many in my hands. With the simplest flick of my mouse I could decide the fate of hundreds. The game was of course, Lemmings.

Now, lemmings, as we all know (incorrectly), are adorable little creatures prone to walking off cliff edges one after the other to their deaths. In the game of the same name, you were tasked with guiding these hapless marsupials from a start gate, though a series of ever-escalating danger filled levels, to an end point that appeared as a sort of temple gate. The more you saved from a grisly death, the more points you got.

The lemmings came flooding out of the start gate and started walking until they hit into a solid object, at which point they turned around and carried on marching. As you progressed, the chance for your lemmings to walk off a cliff, into a pit of fire, into a meat grinder, etc. increased dramatically. To help them on their way to the temple, you could get them to perform certain actions such as climbing, digging, tunnelling, building a bridge and so on.

There were two actions however that I found to be extremely perturbing to use. One, called a ‘blocker’, caused the selected lemming to stop where they were, blocking the path for other lemmings. Once assigned, a blocker could never be started again. The other action placed a 5 second timer above a lemming’s head, which counted down to 0 and resulted in the lemming exploding with enough force to take a small portion of terrain with them.

It was often imperative to the success of the level that you used both these actions. And both of them were completely traumatising, the latter particularly so. It didn’t help that the moment before they exploded, the doomed lemming looked right at you, clutched it’s face and shouted “OH NO!” as its brothers and sisters marched on past as if nothing had happened. Even at the age of 11, I felt that purposefully exploding them was fundamentally wrong. It raised an age-old question: Is it ok to sacrifice a few in order to save the many? There is no question that on most of the levels, in order to save the remaining troop, one or two lemmings had to be sacrificed.

My emotional attachment to those little lemmings was complete. I can still recall the blind panic of watching an ill-timed mouse click result in the horrific deaths of the entire troop. I can remember the dull pain of watching the last lemming march into the temple, leaving behind the few that had been immobilised so that it could live. I loved and hated the game for that.

Looking back now, it was an altogether ground breaking game. Not just in terms of game mechanics, but also by being a game that actually raised a serious moral dilemma. These days, game developers talk a lot about the emotional attachment they want players to develop for the in-game characters. Though there are some notable exceptions, so few manage to do this as wholly and convincingly as Lemmings did, way back in the dusty, pixilated 1990’s.

Around this time, my mate Oliver, who was tooled out with quite an extraordinary machine, invited me over one day after school. The device he had to show me was an Atari ST and I fell in love with it almost instantly.

Oliver had a lot of games, but I can only now recall two of them. One was a pirate themed game called Skull and Crossbones, and unfortunately his copy had some kind of fatal glitch that only allowed you to load the game and walk across the screen before the whole thing froze. Despite that, we would load it up, cross the screen, fight the skeleton and then restart once it crashed. To this day I don’t know why we liked it so much, since it was obviously totally buggered!

The other game was called SWIV and it introduced me to the notion of ‘multiplayer’.

SWIV had a top-down view of a battlefield, which scrolled from top to bottom of the screen. You and your friend (single player also existed for the friendless) controlled either a jeep or a helicopter. Using the arrow keys on a keyboard, you controlled up-down-left-right movement and also a fire button. As the screen scrolled down, you had to negotiate your way around the battlefield, shooting anything and everything that got it your way.

The jeep was a tricky beast to control as you had to contend with fixed directional movements, compared to the choppers floaty freedom. In this endeavour I was, as always, hopelessly out of my depth. Thankfully, my mate was like some kind of battle demon and he was able to skilfully take control of the jeep and save us both from my ineptitude.

When you destroyed enemies, some would drop special items to collect. These did things like upgrade your weapons, give limited invulnerability or blow up everything on the screen. Although the game could be completed in single player (by someone with reflexes like Spiderman), it was in playing with a friend where it truly shined. Being able to work though the game together made the winning that much sweeter. And it made the losing that much easier to bear also.

It was a great time for me and computer games. Many happy hours were spent with Oliver blowing up all that pixilated crap. And just like that, computer games had become social entertainment.

Next time, I fall further down the Atari ST rabbit hole.

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