Why YSK
One Of Lemmy’s creators mentioned it as part of the inspiration for the name, so it’s a nice dive to play the game.
Per Wikipedia
In a 2020 post, Lemmy’s co-creator Dessalines wrote about the origin of the name Lemmy. “It was nameless for a long time, but I wanted to keep with the fediverse tradition of naming projects after animals. I was playing that old-school game Lemmings, and Lemmy (from Motorhead) had passed away that week, and we held a few polls for names, and I went with that.”
Of note is that Disney won an Academy Award for their 1958 nature “documentary” which included a scene about lemmings. This scene showed lemmings jumping off of a cliff into a river, while the narration said the lemmings were committing mass suicide.
The entire scene was staged. Lemmings do not exhibit the mass suicide behaviour Disney was “documenting.”
I work in doc filmmaking professionally and we sometimes site Lemmings when we question the moral accuracy of something we’re working on aka “don’t pull a Lemming”. It’s a famous example of what not to do for us.
Sidenote this game was huge in my childhood we used to play it on my dad’s work computer haha.
I dread to think how many hours I lost to this game. PC was obviously the best experience back then because you absolutely need a mouse. Playing on a gameboy was not so good.
Because of that early shockumentary, the idea of lemmings jumping off the ledge is now permanently lodged into the hive mind of humanity. So much so, that there are several games about it. The ramifications will probably continue to ripple through society in the coming decades.
The Academy has a track record of changing what qualifies as a “documentary” when something usually wins.