Lemmings Licensing (via @LemmingsPorts). After being around since 1991, Sony is bringing us Lemmings spin-off merchandise:

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has embarked on a licensing programme for the popular game, with the appointment of four new licensees.

Back in the early nineties Lemmings was pretty popular. Non-games appearances were rare but not unknown. A cartoon strip was printed in games magazine Max Overload from Dark Horse comics for example. (This inspired me to pitch for a Hired Guns comic, without success.)

One-offs included a motorised radio-controlled Lemming riding a tricycle, which was used for publicity on the opening day of DMA’s games shop, the SoftWarehouse. (As part of the opening celebration, I wrote a story on the fly, in-store, though sadly I no longer have it.)

The only other official products I know of are the posters, stickers and badges created for publicity purposes at the original launch. Though I do have a Lemmings 2 T-Shirt and personalised mug.

Mooted products are bags, keychains, plushies and wallscrolls.

Personally I think a pair of Blockers as bookends would make for the perfect gift. Or a radio-controlled balloon with Lemmings dropping from it at the touch of a button. Or even an ant-farm with Lemmings placed in the tunnels.

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DMA Fuel that is. Scottish Games Network has the skinny on the return of Crackdown for the XBox One, including one of two shoutouts to DMA Design:

That’s one of the older logos. The other shoutout is so far unknown, but has been alluded to.

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I always thought I had a finite supply of stories to tell about my time at DMA Design. But an announcement from Realtime Worlds, which I only saw this morning, made me realise that even something which was only a few minutes long can still be relevant today. RTW have been working for the last five years on Project MyWorld, an ambitious online world which mixes social networking and gaming. No doubt the subtleties are more nuanced than that and most of us will note that five years is a long time in technology.

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I was in Star Trek: Intrepid - Transitions and Lamentations (2009) with Nick Cook who was in Star Trek: Phase II - Blood and Fire part Two with Denise Crosby (2009) who was in Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) with Robert Wagner who was in Wild Things (1998) with…. Kevin Bacon!

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Hello Slashdotters! (I think that’s traditional when your site gets a traffic spike, though in my case it’s probably minimal. It’s certainly the busiest few days my blog has ever seen! I’ve been registered for years, but hardly ever post. And then two +5 Interesting posts in 2 days.) So just to pick up the story, Lemmings – already one of the most widely ported games ever – has had another port, this time to the iPhone.

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It’s always amazing how persistant DMA Design has been in my life. Immediately after the museum exhibition opened, I was interviewed by James Christie from BBC Radio Scotland as one of the founders of DMA Design. You can read my thoughts on being a ‘founder’ elsewhere on the blog, though it’s certainly true that, in the fashion of Londo from Babylon 5, “I was there at the beginning…“

It was to be a half hour documentary, and it has just aired this morning. I’m always nervous when something is broadcast with a contribution from me in it. And, yes, it’s still amazing when I think about it, that I can casually write a sentence like the previous one. This one, however, was especially nerve-wracking for reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on. Would I sound OK? Did I make sense? Would my contribution even get used?

Fortunately the answer was yes, and now I’m left with a curious mix of nostalgia and excitement, even as I realise that only a small fraction of my interview was used and only those parts which fitted the ‘narrative’ that documentaries use. I’m sure it was the same for both Mike and Russel who were also part of it. But it means that there’s a huge amount of story that hasn’t been told, that doesn’t exist on Wikipedia or anywhere else aside from in our heads and the odd fragment on a website here and there. I close my eyes and I can see the old, old, office.

I recorded some important events in a journal I kept at DMA in 1996, but I so wish that I’d done the same for 1995, 1994, 1993… But of course at the time none of us had any idea that DMA would be important and very little was jotted down and nothing at all formally recorded. It makes the piecing together of DMA’s history an exercise in deductive work where I still have scraps of paper, or tickets to hint at the exact date something occurred.

And that’s what it was like in the days before blogs, twitter and 24/7 recording, when it was still possible for a mythology to arise.

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… you’ve literally become a museum exhibit. Seriously, this has just happened to me. I thought hitting 40 was a doozy, but it has nothing on this. Incidentally I’m using the word literally in the sense of actually being literal. Dundee’s McManus Galleries has just completed several years worth of refurbishment, opening last weekend. Part of the exhibit is some comparatively modern Dundee history, namely DMA Design. (Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto, worked for them, yadda yadda, you know the drill.)

I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but was informed by my family that my photo is part of it, and my name too! Now this is all very lovely and I’ve no problem with that, especially since it was mainly enabled by Mike Dailly who, like myself, was there from the start and has a ton of stuff hoarded from the early days. Early, as in late eighties onwards.

Being late on a Sunday, I ran down to the place since I am literally (in the sense of being literal) five minutes walk from the place, but unfortunately got there just as they were closing and told me to get out. My ego is not quite at the stage where I can legitimately say “don’t you know who you’re talking to”…

Oh well, so I got out and so far haven’t seen it yet.

All very lovely, as I say, but I can’t help feeling that an invite to the opening would have been nice…

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There’s plenty things been going on the last few months and they’re all continuing. I’ve finally got a mostly finished version of the Bit Patterns script currently at the being-scrutinised stage of development. I’m hopefully going to get some feedback in the next few weeks at which point I have to write some additional scenes, make good any places where it’s lacking (too many characters is an obvious one!) and give it a final polish. With any luck, we can get it into pre-production by the summer. Still very excited by this as it’ll be Intrepid’s first original movie.

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