Play Lemmings Online in Your Browser – Classic Puzzle Game Remade for PICO-8

Lemmings is a classic puzzle game where you save a crowd of tiny creatures by giving them jobs before they walk off a cliff. This new version by Buzzard rebuilds all 100 levels of the NES original inside PICO-8, and you can play it right in your browser.

If you’ve never touched Lemmings before, here’s the deal. Little pink-faced creatures with green hair drop out of a hatch and start walking. They don’t stop. They don’t think. They’ll march straight into lava, off ledges, into water — whatever’s in front of them. Your job is to hand out tasks like digging, building, or blocking so enough of them reach the exit alive. Sounds easy. It isn’t.

What Makes This Version Special

This is a demake, which means someone took a bigger game and squeezed it into a tinier machine. In this case the machine is PICO-8, a fake retro console with brutal limits on graphics, sound, and code size. Fitting all 100 NES levels in there is honestly kind of ridiculous. But developer John Buise — the guy behind the Buzzard account — pulled it off, and the pixel art does more than you’d expect from something this small.

The look borrows from the Amiga and SNES versions, so it feels closer to the versions people actually remember. One player even said they mistook it for the Game Gear or Lynx release. That’s a compliment in retro circles.

The Music Slaps Too

Eric Billingsley handled the soundtrack, redoing the original NES tunes in PICO-8’s chip sound. It’s catchy in that way old game music gets stuck in your head for a week. The whole project also leans on two code libraries called CANVAS and PAKRAT made by MissMouse — without those, the developer says it wouldn’t exist at all.

How the Puzzles Work

Every level gives you a limited stack of tasks. Maybe five builders, two diggers, one blocker. Spend them wrong and you’re stuck watching your lemmings pile into a pit. The early “Fun” levels teach you the basics. Then “Tricky,” “Taxing,” and “Mayhem” show up and stop being polite. You can skip between difficulty tiers on the title screen with up and down, so you’re not locked into replaying stuff you’ve already beaten.

And here’s the thing — losing a few lemmings is fine. Most levels only ask you to save a percentage. Sometimes sacrificing one poor guy as a blocker is just the cost of doing business. It sounds dark. It kind of is.

Credits

This Pico-8 version of Lemmings was created by John Buise.
A huge thank you to Eric Billingsley for creating the fantastic soundtrack, faithfully recreating the original NES score in true Pico-8  fashion and truly making the whole project feel complete.
Special thanks to MissMouse for creating the amazing CANVAS and PAKRAT libraries. Without these tools, this project simply wouldn’t have been possible.

This Pico-8  demake is an unofficial, non-commercial fan project,
created purely as a tribute to the original game.

Original game by DMA Design (1991)
Pico-8 version by John Buise (2026)

Also Check out these other games I made using Pico-8
Duck Hunt , Walker and 8SH

Game Controls

• Move cursor: Arrow keys or Mouse
• Select and assign a task: X or Mouse Button
• Quick select a task: O + Left / Right

As always, remember to have fun!