Lemmings

The player controls no one directly here. The lemmings come out of a hatch, walk forward, turn around at a wall, fall down, and if there is a pit below, they fall into it. There is only one way to intervene: pick a skill from the panel and assign it to one particular creature in the walking column. There are eight skills, each issued for a level in a limited number, and each round turns into a problem of allocation.

Some of the skills change the level itself. The digger going down, the basher going sideways and the miner cutting a diagonal tunnel remove pieces from the picture that collisions are computed against, while the builder does the opposite and adds a staircase of steps. So the level is rebuilt around the walking crowd, and one wrong assignment ruins the terrain for good. Only a set share of those who came out has to be saved, and some of the lemmings are expendable from the start: a blocker placed across the path usually stays there until the end, and the only way to remove it is to blow it up. Control is reduced to the mouse and a panel of icons, with no keyboard shortcuts, and in that form the game was ported to a large number of very different machines.