Assuming not everyone is a misanthrope like my poor wretched grumpy self and that people still sort of like Santa, well, happy holidays everyone! May your goats live life to its fullest! May your PS3s come in cheap and your Wiis in abundance! May you all live long and prosper. May you game healthily away. Uhm… yes, best wishes everyone etc. Happy? Good.

Now that you got your fare share of holiday wishes and since you’re all wearing your silly (probably red) festive little hats and ButtonSmasher is all about games, let’s talk Christmas games, shall we? Of course we shall.

Christmas games you see are divided in three categories. First of all we have them properly Xmas themed offerings like Christmas Nights, Daze Before Christmas or even Christmas Carnage. Then there are the games released/bought during the holidays or those strongly associated with them in the most personal of ways and, finally, there are the Christmas Lemmings games. Or to be precise the two Xmas Lemmings and the two Christmas/Holiday Lemmings games, all from the period before Sony got involved with Psygnosis and long before the pretty excellent PSP and PS2 Lemmings were first imagined. Not a real category, I know, but I love the little buggers.


The first Xmas Lemmings gig was a free four level demo (only two of the levels were Christmas themed) released by Psygnosis back in 1991 for the Amiga, PC and Mac and was aptly titled Xmas Lemmings 1991. The game played exactly like the original, as was actually the case with every festive Lemmings game that followed it, with the main difference being the cute Santa dressed Lemmings and the snow covered levels. Xmas Lemmings 1992 was another 4 level demo that followed one year later, only this time each of the four levels was filled with festive little touches and Lemmings in red outfits.

The 1993 demo, this time dubbed Christmas/Holiday Lemmings 1993 -depending where you played it, featured only 3 levels and was followed by a full commercial game sporting an adequate 32 levels, 16 of which had a difficult rating of “Flurry” and 16 of “Blitz”. 1994, the last year that got its festive Lemmings offering, was the luckiest one too, getting an up-to-standards 4 level demo and a 64 level commercial version offering 2 new difficulty settings (”Frost”, “Hail”) and the complete ‘93 game.

And, ignoring some hideous 3D rodents, this was the end of ‘em Christmas Lemmings. Sad isn’t it? Oh, well… Merry Christmas!

Posted on December 25th, 2007 by konstantinos