One of the most devious and original puzzle games, Lemmings first hit the Amiga in 1991-ish and spawned a half-a-dozen sequels.

Resiliently 2D, the game heralded as the world's first save-'em-up saw you guiding a set number of wonderfully animated little characters (the lems, eerily enough) across the platforms and pits to the screen's exit. All that stood in the way were solid barriers, like walls, and the fact that once you let the lems out of their starting box they carried on moving in the same direction until they either hit a wall and turned around or wandered off one of the game's platforms to a splattery death. Again.

You were armed with a limited number and type of special powers to issue to individual lems. Diggers, for example, could dig through walls and access new areas of the screen for the rest of the lems, while builders laid small bridges over otherwise death-bringing drops. Timing just when to convert a lem was crucial. Get it wrong and the whole level would need to be restarted - you were allowed a maximum number of lem fatalities, and inevitably one mistake led to exceeding it by a few. Or 80.

The mix of strategic and tactical planning with split-second timing was spot on and Lemmings was one of the most addictive games you could ever wish to waste your days on. Curiously, it was also one of the few games to generally cross over to a female audience (off the top of our heads, Tetris is the only other game with similarly widespread appeal).

In a Street Fighter sort of way there were loads of follow-ups (all practically identical to the original) before a true sequel. Inexplicably there were then even more same-as-the-first-one stragglers, before Lemmings 3D, which was a fearsomely no-quarter love-or-hate swansong.

You can see a glint of Lemmings in the ideas behind DMA's latest game, Silicon Valley on the N64.