Visitors wandering around the Scottish city of Dundee often discover its various public art installations, including statues of penguins, of comic-book icons and, more recently, of a particular set of video game characters.
This summer, the artist Alyson Conway unveiled her collection of bronze Lemmings, celebrating the city where the accident-prone characters were first designed. DMA Design — the company that also gave us the original Grand Theft Auto — released puzzle game Lemmings back in 1991, to immediate acclaim.
The characters have been a video game staple ever since, with more than 15 million copies of the original sold on 31 different platforms, as well as a host of sequels including, most recently, one for PlayStation Vita.
The lemmings statues are situated near the offices where DMA Design once worked. "My idea behind this location was that the lemmings had wandered out of their birthplace," said Conway in an interview with Scottish Games Network. "As part of the piece I wanted to incorporate the physical environment, so the low stone wall and pillars act like a 2D game level which the little lemmings are trying to traverse — a lookout is atop one pillar scouting the way across, while behind him a climber clambers up and below a builder is laying bricks."