Mike's Room

Mikes room was the most impressive with many monitors and PC's, so Dave prefered to get his picture taken there whenever people came up to visit. However, Mike would usually hide under the desk until they had all gone, leaving Steve to fill in and look busy.

Lemmings scroll

Mike never quite forgave Dave for not putting his name in the credits, even though he had come up with the insperation behind it and had several levels in the game itself.

Lemmings CDTV

Because CDTV lemmings shipped on a CD, Dave had to work hard to use the operating system to do all the file I/O, which ment playing nice with the machine, rather than taking it over completly. However, this also allowed him to do a hard disk installable version as well.

The Complete History of
DMA Design
By
Mike Dailly

Chapter 4
1991
(Lemmings)

Part 1

Shadow of the Beast TG16

At the start of the year, Dave was at a lose end, and he set about tidying up the code, while Brian and Russell finished up their versions.

Mike was still plodding on with Beast on the PC Engine, and was getting thorughly disenchanted with the whole affair. The development kit was awful, and irritated him so much, that he set about writing his own version. This meant many late nights taking apart the official Software Development Kit (or SDK), to see what made it tick.

It took a quite a few weeks, but once he was done, Mike had made massive leaps in the quality of the tool-chain, and while Brian also helped out with some code he had used in DMA Debug, Mike was pretty much on his own.

Lemmings finally got released on the 14^th of February 1991,
and the world DMA knew - ended forever.

Lemmings Title Screen

On launch day, Psygnosis would phone almost every hour telling Dave the latest sales figures. 10,000! 20,000! 30,000! 35,000! 45,000! In the end, the game would ship over 55,000 copies of the Amiga version in the first day alone.

To put this into some sort of perspective, Dave's first game Menace sold a whopping 20,000 copies, while Blood Money sold double that at 40,000. This was the full life of the product, and not first day sales!

It has since been estimated that the sales of the original Lemmings, after all the conversions had been done would have topped 15,000,000 copies worldwide. Very few games, even in today's mass market climate, sell anywhere near this amount.

The press and public went nuts over the little guys, and DMA were in a state of shock. Everyone read reviews in amazement, and then walked around in a daze. There were even a couple of magazines rating the game at 100% which was unheard of, and since then only a select number of games have ever achieve this score.

Lemmings Intro

Psygnosis was now keen to get them onto another new Lemmings game to cash in as soon as possible on the wave of Lemmingitis.

So, before DMA started on "Oh No! More Lemmings", they needed some more staff. Dave advertised for artists, and got quite a few responses. One attracted a bit of attention in particular, a CV from "Stacey Jamieson a girl!

In these days, there were very few girls in the industry, and DMA were keen to give her a chance, so after arranging an interview, Dave awaited her arrival. On the day of the interview, Dave was busy with the CDTV version of Lemmings, and so when Stacey arrived, Mike got the door.

Beast Castle Tileset

While Mike wrote the technical toolset, he still relied on the graphical tools provided by NEC for editing maps.

Amiga CDTV

The CDTV was designed to be an Amiga Hi-Fi unit, which people would buy instead of a standard CD player, however it was way too expensive, and flopped - big time.