Oldweb: DHTML Lemmings

The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

DHTML means “Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language.” The term is little-used now; it later got renamed AJAX, and now is pretty much just how websites are made if they have any interactive aspects. It was originally presented as an alternative to Flash applets, which were threatening to crowd out actual web pages at that time.

Lemmings, of course, is Psygnosis’ classic puzzle game where you grant members of a horde of suicidal rodent people specific skills to guide them to an exit while losing as few of them as possible to the hazards of their ridiculously dangerous world.

Back in 2004, DHTML Lemmings was a brilliant example of how much could be done with Javascript. Original Lemmings was released in 1991; we’re now further away from DHTML Lemming’s release than the original game was when it was published.

Its first home went away, although the server and even its page still exist. It says that the Lemmings page was taken down (and implies they did it to dodge legal liability), but promises something called The Pumpkins to replace it. It never did, but the promise survives. The game itself has been preserved, relocated as-was to a subpage of the site of Elizium, a dark rock band from the Netherlands.

Only the first ten levels of each difficulty, about one quarter of the original Amiga game, are presented. And this version has not survived the years unaltered: the distinctive sound effects and music appear to be missing. Still though, what’s here is playable, and fun. Enjoy, if you have the inclination and deliberation. And check out those requirements: IE 5.5 or better, or recent Firefox or Opera. And a 500 Mhz processor, wow!

DHTML Lemmings