For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore Amiga, its Liverpool-based publisher Psygnosis brought it to no fewer than 23 other platforms, from natural habitats like MS-DOS and the Apple Macintosh to such refugees of the 8-bit era as the Sinclair Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, from cutting-edge multimedia appliances like the Philips CD-i and the 3DO to handheld gadgets like the Atari Lynx and the Sega Game Gear. In all of its incarnations, it outsold any other game ever to have passed through the hands of Psygnosis by a veritable order of magnitude.
The combination of simplicity, juiciness, addictiveness, and cuteness was truly a lethal one. Psygnosis had to set up an entire call center in the United States to deal with the avalanche of frustrated players begging for hints on this or that devious level. The little creatures made appearances in newspapers, glossy magazines, and mainstream news broadcasts all over the world, even as playing the annual holiday Lemmings mini-games that could be found stacked as stocking stuffers next to cashier stands threatened to become a new Christmas-morning tradition for families. Lemmings joined Tetris and SimCity as one of the computer games that the zeitgeist deemed acceptable for those who did not self-identify as gamers to indulge in. Like those two others, it was an early harbinger of the casual revolution in gaming that would begin to arrive in earnest a decade later.
But whereas Tetris and SimCity would be grandfathered into that revolution at the turn of the millennium — SimCity spawning The Sims, the 800-pound gorilla in the new space — Lemmings would have flamed out by then, being remembered, to whatever extent it was remembered at all, more as a kitschy fad than as an enduring entertainment staple. I quite like the early Lemmings games, for reasons that I’ve explained in detail in the past. Therefore I came to this article with a simple question: just how did the franchise manage to squander all of that early momentum so quickly and completely? And as usual, I found that the answer comes down less to the choosing of a single ill-advised fork in the road than to a series of smaller decisions that doubtless seemed like a good idea at the time, but were exposed as less than good in retrospect.
Lemmings 2: The Tribes, the big sequel to the original game — it was actually the third full-sized game in the series, coming after the less inspired Oh No! More Lemmings, which was largely filled with levels that had been rejected for its predecessor — was released in 1993 amidst huge anticipation and expectation. In many ways, it lived up to its advance press. In place of the suite of eight special abilities with which a player of the earlier games could invest her lemmings, it provided no fewer than 60 of them. The subtitle came from the fact that the lemmings were now divided into twelve tribes, each with their own abilities, appearance, and environments to traverse. The whole endeavor also boasted a new thread of narrative, about helping the twelve tribes escape from captivity. (The Biblical overtones were apparently intentional.)
As a player who had greatly enjoyed the first Lemmings, I found it to be a brilliant sequel. It was, however, every inch a sequel, being built strictly for the gratification of someone like me: someone who had a lot of experience with what had come before. This was not the best place to start your Lemmings journey, as the kids like to say today — not with all of the additional complexity, not with the disappearance of the gentle tutorial levels that eased you into the first game. Inspired as it was on its own terms, The Tribes‘s approach was questionable for a mass-market series of more or less casual games, which the customer should ideally be able to hop on and off of with the same aplomb as a subway rider. Then, too, the heavier weight of the game meant that it could be ported to only eight instead of 24 platforms. Lemmings 2 was a solid hit by all of the normal standards of the games industry, yet it failed to do much to further raise its franchise’s profile as a budding pop-culture staple. The original game, which was now available at a greatly reduced price, in all likelihood outsold it considerably even in the year of its release.
One of the problems, if we want to call it that, was a growing mismatch between the expectations of the market and the instincts and desires of DMA Design. The Scottish gang were gamer’s gamers of the old school, whose two creations before Lemmings had been the straightforward shoot-em-ups Menace and Blood Money. Lemmings had been something of an aberration for them; the cuteness had come about almost by accident, a case of mordant laddish humor ramming slightly askew. If DMA were to continue with the series, they wanted to make it more complicated, more difficult, more ambitious… in short, more hardcore. This was not a recipe for success in the space the first Lemmings had opened up for itself. After The Tribes failed to set the world on fire, DMA felt pressure from above to revert to the mean. This bred an atmosphere of resentment in Dundee that was hardly conducive to productive game development.
As was typical of such contracts at the time, the Lemmings intellectual property actually resided with the publisher rather than the developer. And the former was undergoing big changes. Just before the release of The Tribes, Psygnosis and its in-house studio — the same one responsible for most of the Lemmings ports — were acquired by the Japanese electronics giant Sony, which was looking for a Western partner to make games for its upcoming PlayStation console. This event, combined with the success of Lemmings, raised Psygnosis’s profile enormously, from a niche purveyor of graphically dazzling but often gameplay-deficient Amiga action games to a real force to be reckoned with on the modern entertainment landscape. The Children’s Television Workshop, the maker of Sesame Street, entered into talks with Psygnosis about a Lemmings television show.
It was a tempting prospect on the face of it, but it became problematic as soon as you started to dig into it. Television shows, whether aimed at adults or children, are built around memorable characters. DMA’s lemmings were not quite this. They were a generic mass, all of them identical, the very definition of a faceless horde. Each blobby little creature filled a space no more than ten pixels square on the screen. The lemmings were many things, but they were not Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog, much less Big Bird or Oscar the Grouch.
So, an edict went down from Psygnosis to DMA to find a way to give the lemmings more individualized personalities. For their next trick, DMA had been toying with a continuation of the story of The Tribes — or rather a whole set of continuations. The next four Lemmings games would each deal with the fate of three of the twelve tribes after they left the Ark the player had helped them reach last time around. The whole series would be called All New World of Lemmings. (In North America, it would take the name of The Lemmings Chronicles; unlike the vast majority of such re-christenings, this was actually a better name in my opinion.) To satisfy Psygnosis and the Children’s Television Workshop, DMA now promised to make the lemmings bigger, and to fill the menu and victory and failure screens with cute faces that looked different from one another and could play well on television.
If matters had transpired differently, All New World of Lemmings would have been the banner title of a new sub-series, with different subtitles for each of its entries. As it was, Psygnosis just dumped the would-be first entry of the sub-series out there on its own, sans subtitle, and abandoned the other nine tribes to their fate.
“I couldn’t think of any new way to take Lemmings at this point,” admits David Jones, the series’s mastermind from the beginning. Desperate for some sort of gameplay distinction from what had come before, DMA decided to combine the newly television-friendly presentation with yet more complications to the formula — complications that proved not to be much fun. You could no longer invest your lemmings with specific skills from a master pool of same just by clicking on them; now, you had to have them walk over loot boxes scattered around the levels, an incredibly fiddly and annoying mechanic. Meanwhile the increased size of the lemmings had unexpected knock-on effects. When the creatures were tiny, watching them die was funny even for people who reacted to the violence found in other videogames with horror and outrage. But when they became bigger, that changed; their deaths became grislier, possibly amusing for a teenage boy but less so for his mother. In addition to its gameplay issues, the tone of World of Lemmings was badly off in relation to the franchise’s established personality.
You have to walk your lemmings into crates like this one to give them special abilities now. Everything about the gameplay and aesthetics of World of Lemmings hits wrong, sometimes subtly so, sometimes blatantly. This was not promising television fodder.
Not long into development, a feeling took hold in Dundee that they were all just done with Lemmings, ready to come out from under the shadow of the casual monster they had accidentally created and return to making the games they wanted to make. As it happened, this was to be the last game of a six-game contract they had signed with Psygnosis back in the 1980s. Just get ‘er done became the watchword, so that they could take their Lemmings loot and do something more exciting with it. The new passion project around the office was a little something called Race ‘n’ Chase, which would evolve into a bigger something called Grand Theft Auto. “Lemmings 3 was a bit crap,” says DMA’s Mike Dailly, the artist who drew the very first eight-pixel-high versions of the creatures. It was done “more to end our commitment to Psygnosis than to actually do a good game.”
Unsurprisingly, then, it did not end up being a good game. Released in 1994, it made the concept that had seemed so fresh barely three years earlier feel trite and stale and kind of tasteless; even the soundtrack was annoying, the same two-bar fragment of circus music pounded into your head ad nauseam. DMA’s ennui oozed from its every slapdash pixel. This was a genuinely new thing under the sun: an outright bad Lemmings game. Evidently knowing it had a turkey on its hands, Psygnosis did virtually nothing to promote it, a huge contrast to the extensive outreach and advertising that had been done for The Tribes. It appeared on only two platforms, MS-DOS and the by now fast-fading Amiga. Those magazines that bothered to review it at all generally weren’t kind.
This first bad Lemmings game combined with a distracted Psygnosis, now busying itself making fresh games to order for the Sony PlayStation, to let all of the air out of the Lemmings balloon, practically all at once. The negotiation with the Children’s Television Workshop died on the vine. Lemmings was in acute danger of being exposed as a one-hit wonder, fodder for nostalgic “Where Are They Now?” retrospectives, rather than the enduring entertainment icon it had so recently seemed destined to become.
The following year the PlayStation dropped; it would go on to become the most successful single games console of the entire twentieth century, redefining the broader culture’s view of digital games forever with its edgy advertising and its deliberate courtship of the booming rave scene. Psygnosis was a big part of all that, through such early PlayStation hits as WipEout and Destruction Derby. Betwixt and between, it tried to get some more mileage out of Lemmings, efforts which came across rather like a child halfheartedly poking a dead dog with a stick. Having now parted ways with DMA Design, Psygnosis had to give its latest Lemmings projects to other developers with no previous connection to the franchise.
In 1995, we got Lemmings 3D from an outfit called Clockwork Games. The episodic approach of All New World of Lemmings was abandoned, in favor of the technological gimmick of the title. In a sense, the franchise became a pioneer one last time, albeit of a more dubious sort than before: Lemmings 3D was an early manifestation of an industry mania for stuffing 3D graphics into absolutely everything, whether they made sense there or not. “The fundamental core of the game of digging or building across the landscape to rescue the lemmings didn’t need an extra dimension,” says Gary Timmons of DMA Design, who could now only look on from afar as Psygnosis subjected their concept to ever more unfortunate contortions. Mike Dailly is blunter: “It was badly thought-out and just plain rubbish.” And truly, Lemmings 3D is agony to play; the newly mobile camera always seems to be pointing just where you don’t want it to be, forcing you to spend more time trying to get the viewing angle right than manipulating your lemmings. Nobody ever asked for this.
3D Lemmings Winterland marked the last gasp of the tradition of Christmas-themed Lemmings mini-games. The spirit was willing, but the 3D engine was lacking.
With the semi-traditionalist (but in 3D!) approach having failed, Psygnosis swung and missed in 1996 with Visual Science’s Lemmings Paintball — yes, really — and the in-house-developed The Adventures of Lomax. Here we can see the publisher still trying to do what the Children’s Television Workshop had once requested, turning the lemmings into characters to be moved in and out of different gameplay paradigms, something Nintendo had long done for its stable of trademarks with remarkable fluidity. But it was far too late in this case, and far too poorly done. The Adventures of Lomax gave a lemming a name of his own for the first and only time — for, of all types of game, a Super Mario Bros.-style platformer. The kindest thing to be said about it is that some of the art — pixel art again this time — is quite lovely, even as the gameplay is more or less acceptable in a workmanlike sort of way. But it never feels like it has much of anything to do with Lemmings.
After this, Psygnosis seemed to have decided to let the dead dog lie — until, that is, another, final Lemmings game popped up out of the blue almost four years later. It did not succeed in rescuing the franchise from oblivion; it came and went from the budget bins barely noticed by the gaming press. But it did succeed, against long odds indeed, in being a really, really good Lemmings game, by far the best since The Tribes. It’s hard to imagine any anti-climatic swansong acquitting itself much better.
Lemmings Revolution is not without a gimmick, but for once it’s a reasonably interesting one. Instead of stretching out from left to right, each of its 102 levels is wrapped around a giant pillar that you can rotate at will. The gimmick is not what I would call revolutionary in the non-physical sense, but it mixes the usual formula up in enjoyable ways when it’s at its best, and is never actively irritating even at its worst.
But more important to this game’s success than the gimmick are the cleverest, most inspired set of levels since The Tribes. The team who made it, who were housed at Psygnosis’s satellite studio in Leeds, brought a passionate whimsy to the project that the series had been sorely lacking in its last several installments. Co-designer Mat Thomas describes a creative atmosphere that resembles the one from back in the day at DMA Design, when the idea of Lemmings was still fresh and everyone was eager to get an oar in with a level or two.
The entire development team were delighted to work on such a famous series, and we took the challenge. We had a fabulous editor developed by a programmer called Ben Dixon. It was very easy to mock up and create levels. The key to level design with Lemmings is trying to think of ways to use the skills presented to the player in different ways. Inspiration came from each other, and other mediums such as the earlier Lemmings games and, dare I say it, films! Goonies — one of my levels — was inspired by the named film. I tried to put in many gadgets to give that feeling of technology driving the level. Our team created nearly 200 levels for Lemmings Revolution, which allowed us to pick the cream of the crop.
The “Goonies” level mentioned by Mat Thomas.
The finished game goes back to the roots in many ways. The suite of abilities with which you can equip your lemmings is the exact same collection as the original game: the familiar climbers, parachutists, bombers, and bridge builders, plus the three kinds of diggers. Seeing them again feels like meeting old friends.
Yet by no means is Lemmings Revolution a carbon copy of the first game in the series. In addition to the revolution mechanic itself, there are any number of new obstacles and affordances within the levels: switches, saws, lasers, instantaneous transporters, and, most ingeniously, gates that reverse the force of gravity to make your lemmings walk on the ceiling. All of this contribute to a slightly more mechanized feel this time around. There are now weasels to contend with as well; these consider a lemming to be a delightful snack, and must be either avoided or — more satisfyingly — done away with in one way or another. Another new wrinkle comes in the form of special lemmings who are impervious to either drowning in water or being scorched by acid, the better to handle the pools of same that are occasionally found in their way. Exits are now hot-air balloons that must be reached, and sometimes there are more than one of these, with each only able to accept a limited number of riders. The most important point is that all of the additions feel organic to the experience rather than tacked on by some focus group somewhere. Thankfully, no attempt is made to individualize the lemmings and turn them into fodder for television. We’re back to the juxtaposition of generic cuteness and morbidity that made the series stand out during its glory days.
For the first time since The Tribes, these lemmings look like they should.
All told, then, playing this Lemmings game is like going home again. Early training levels yield to more fiendish ones that will have you scratching your head by the middle stages, pulling your hair out by the last ones, as you have to make use of every single affordance at your disposal to succeed. As many of you know by now, I adore games that build up gradually in just this way to challenge their players. And I’m proud to say that my wife and I rose (gradually) to the challenge; we made it all the way to the end.
That Lemmings Revolution succeeds as well as it does in so many ways begins to seem still more remarkable when one considers the rest of its development history. After first agreeing to pay for this last kick at the can for the franchise, Sony abruptly pulled its funding just as it was nearing completion. Through some last-minute scrambling, Psygnosis’s management was able to place the game with the rival publisher Take Two Interactive and see it released for Microsoft Windows if not for the PlayStation.
Granted, some scars from the trauma were left behind. Several levels were bugged badly enough in the initial release to be impossible to complete, until Take Two came out with a patch. Even in the final version of the game, one level — the one called “Lock In” — can be completed only by exploiting a glitch in the game engine. It’s so at odds with the rest of the level designs, which are sometimes diabolical but always scrupulously fair, that I can’t believe this was intentional. I even fancy I can see how the level was supposed to be solved. At any rate, if you decide to play the game, I recommend that you save yourself a lot of frustration and just turn to a walkthrough when you get to this level.
One nice touch in Lemmings Revolution is the ability to choose to some extent what level you tackle next. The green dots represent solved levels, the yellow those you haven’t yet completed. Once you beat a level, you open up the two that are connected to it by arrows. It’s a little hard to see here because I’m boring and just tackle the levels in order, top to bottom and left to right. But if you’re less stubborn and methodical than me, you can take a break from a level that’s giving you trouble and work on another one for a while. Like so much else here, this is just really good, player-friendly game design.
It’s obvious that Lemmings Revolution didn’t have an overly lavish budget even before Sony pulled the plug on it. A thin glaze of story — something or other to do with those weasels who can sometimes be found lurking in the levels — is presented via an opening movie that probably absorbed about half the budget on its own. It’s never mentioned again afterward — not that it really matters. We are given only as many bells and whistles as are necessary to make the levels go and remind us that we’re playing a Lemmings game. The closing movie lasts all of seven seconds; the operative philosophy was apparently that it’s better to tempt the punters in the shops who might buy the game than it is to reward the already captured players who have put many hours of their life into it.
All of which is fine really. By the turn of the millennium, so-called “mid-priced releases” like this one — Lemmings Revolution sold for just $20 from its very first day on store shelves — were often more interesting and innovative than the expensive AAA opuses, whose publishers felt more of a need to protect their investment via micromanagement and risk aversion. Certainly the production values of this Lemmings game are no worse than those of the original. We never came to Lemmings to participate in epic stories; we come to face puzzles and to curse and stomp and almost throw our mice across the room, until a light bulb goes off somewhere in the old noggin and the fingers do what they’re supposed to and we solve that level. At which point it’s on to the next level, to repeat the procedure. We are strange creatures, we humans, aren’t we? Even stranger than lemmings, one might want to say.
Anyway, this humble game called Lemmings Revolution is one of my favorites of all the ones I’ve played from the year 2000 for these histories. I’m happy to give it a place in my personal Hall of Fame and to recommend it to all of you — especially any of you who might have enjoyed the more famous and popular Lemmings games, and thought the later ones had nothing comparable to offer. You were mostly right — but only mostly.
For better or for worse, there isn’t much else to say about the series after Lemmings Revolution came and went with so little fanfare (or, one has to suspect, sales). There have been occasional remakes over the past quarter-century, mostly for mobile platforms, but nothing that displays much in the way of design or commercial ambition. As late as 2010, the franchise was frequently mentioned as being “ripe for revival” for a new era where unabashedly simple and cartoony casual games were by some reckonings out-earning the hardcore ones. But for whatever reason, that revival was never seriously attempted, and the cultural window for the franchise is probably closed by now, what with most of us who were there when it was so huge having entered into our fifth or sixth decade of life by this point.
This is no tragedy. Lemmings came to the zeitgeist and then it went; such is the fate of most pop culture. Good game design, however, transcends trends and fads. If you’re a fan of puzzle games and you haven’t played these ones, know that Lemmings, Lemmings 2: The Tribes, and Lemmings Revolution, the three high points of the series, can still be very vexing and satisfying indeed. This is as true today as it was a quarter-century ago, as true as it will still be a quarter-century on. Even if everyone stopped making games tomorrow, we would still live in an era of unprecedented ludic riches.
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Sources: The books Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene and Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto by David Kushner. Retro Gamer 39; Computer Gaming World of September 2000.
Online sources include “The Making of Lemmings” by Rich Stanton for Read-Only Memory, “An Ode to the Owl: The Inside Story of Psygnosis” by Damien McFerran for Time Extension, a Lemmings Universe interview with Mat Thomas, and Damian Katz’s gamebook page.
Where to Get Them: Oddly, none of the vintage Lemmings games are currently available for purchase. You can find downloadable versions of the original Lemmings and Lemmings 2: The Tribes in my earlier articles associated with those games. As for Lemmings Revolution, the third of the three Lemmings games that are well worth revisiting today: you can find it on a certain well-known archiving site if you only search for it. After you install it, you will need to install a patch to make it run properly on modern versions of Windows (and Linux systems under WINE).
