Three Decades On, DMA Design's Lemmings Gets the Arcade Cabinet Treatment

Vintage computing enthusiast Neil Thomas has led another project to create a replica arcade cabinet for Retro Collective's Arcade Archive, a hands-on gaming museum in the UK, but this one's unusual indeed — given that the game, Lemmings, was never actually released into arcades.

"When the only known Lemmings arcade prototype arrived at The Cave, we knew we had to do two things," Thomas explains. "Firstly, we had to check it over and see if it worked — which, thankfully, it did, albeit with some graphical glitches. Secondly, we have to complete the job to give Lemmings a home — a period-correct arcade cabinet and artwork."

Released in 1991, DMA Design's Lemmings put the player in charge of the titular characters as they sought to cross two-dimensional platform levels filled with obstacles and traps. Lemmings could be given a range of jobs, from bridge-building to digging to "blocking" other Lemmings — and, if all else failed, could be made to detonate into tiny pixelated fragments to the sound of a sampled "oh, no!"

The game was a hit on home computers, but never made its way into the arcade. A recently-unearthed prototype, though, revealed that an arcade version was tested — and now, three decades on, it finally exists in playable form. "The head of Data East at the time was just a huge Lemmings fan," DMA Design co-founder Mike Dailly recalls. "He approached Psygnosis [Lemmings' publisher] about doing one."

The arcade board never left the prototype stage, but has served as the basis for a reproduction, which brings the green-haired creatures to the arcade for the first time. Richard Horne was given the job of building the plywood cabinet, which is inspired by period-appropriate releases from Data East, with custom vinyl artwork adorning the sides. A control panel, featuring trackballs for the game's mouse-based control system, is hooked into a Heber MultiPi JAMMA board inside the cabinet.

This isn't the first arcade cabinet the team has replicated: back in May Horne unveiled a 3D-printed replica of Computer Space, launched in 1971 by Atari co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney as a commercialized variant of the 1962 minicomputer game Spacewar!. While eye-catching, the game proved too complicated for a coin-op audience — but would serve to support Atari's breakthrough launch of Pong a year later.

The full build process is documented in the video embedded above, and on the RMC YouTube channel; the arcade cabinet itself is installed and playable at Retro Collective's Arcade Archive museum.