In 1991 I was writing games and in those days you had to think a lot about how many moving objects there were on the screen and how many you could fit within the frame rate etc. So that gave games that 'arcade' feel where the player controls one spaceship (say) and it can have 8 bullets on the screen at one time and enemies attack in waves of six etc. I suppose at that point processors were moving beyond those limitations but games were still conceived in those sorts of terms.
When I first saw Lemmings I was just amazed as to how it ignored all of that. The player controls up to 100 characters. The gameplay was freeform, you could dig through whatever, build a ladder wherever. It was a real paradigm shift. You can set ten lemmings to explode. When they do, the framerate will drop to a very slow lag. But that doesn't matter, because its fun.
When I first saw Lemmings I was just amazed as to how it ignored all of that. The player controls up to 100 characters. The gameplay was freeform, you could dig through whatever, build a ladder wherever. It was a real paradigm shift. You can set ten lemmings to explode. When they do, the framerate will drop to a very slow lag. But that doesn't matter, because its fun.