The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings

The early 1990s saw Lemmings everywhere. The game came from DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, and originally appeared on the Commodore Amiga in 1991. Liverpool-based publisher Psygnosis then brought it out on no fewer than 23 platforms, spanning MS-DOS and the Apple Macintosh, the Sinclair Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, the Philips CD-i and the 3DO, the Atari Lynx and the Sega Game Gear. It outsold any other game Psygnosis had ever handled by a wide margin.

The formula of simplicity, juiciness, addictiveness, and cuteness proved deadly effective. Psygnosis put a call center in the United States in place to handle players too vexed to finish the trickier levels, who kept asking for help. Lemmings showed up in newspapers, in glossy magazines, and on mainstream news broadcasts around the world. Playing the holiday mini-games next to cash registers threatened to become a Christmas-morning tradition for families. It joined Tetris and SimCity as a game the zeitgeist deemed acceptable for non-gamers to indulge in.

Then it faded.

The Squandered Momentum

There is no single poor choice to blame for Lemmings losing its momentum so fast. The answer instead comes from a chain of minor decisions that seemed wise at the time, but later proved less so.

Lemmings 2: The Tribes, the big sequel to the original, was released in 1993 amid huge anticipation and expectation. It delivered on its advance press in many ways. Instead of the original’s suite of eight special abilities, it offered 60 of them. The subtitle came from the lemmings being divided into twelve tribes, each with their own abilities, appearance, and environments to traverse. The game also boasted a new thread of narrative about helping the tribes escape from captivity. The Biblical overtones were apparently intentional.

A player who greatly enjoyed the original Lemmings found its sequel brilliant, yet it demanded prior experience rather than welcoming new players in. The tutorial levels that eased players into the first game were absent. The extra complexity limited the sequel to eight platforms instead of 24, down from the original’s reach. Lemmings 2 was a solid hit by any standard, but it failed to raise the franchise’s profile as a budding pop-culture staple. The original, now available at a greatly reduced price, likely outsold it considerably even in the year of its release.

The Developer’s Ambition

The company’s older games before Lemmings were the simple shooting titles Menace and Blood Money, aimed at the market’s expectations and the instincts and desires of DMA Design. The Scottish gang were gamer’ they had built their reputation on. Lemmings had been an accident for them; the cuteness of the small creatures had come about almost by chance, a case of mordant laddish humor nudging the design slightly askew. Should DMA continue the series, they wanted to make it more complicated, more difficult, more ambitious — in short, more hardcore.

The first Lemmings never found a recipe for success in the space they had opened up for themselves. After The Tribes failed to set the world on fire, DMA felt pressure from above to revert to the mean. This bred resentment in Dundee, an atmosphere that was hardly conducive to productive game development.

The Publisher’s Change

Sony purchased Psygnosis and its in-house studio just before The Tribes came out, and that studio had handled most of the Lemmings ports. The Lemmings intellectual property was actually owned by the publisher rather than the developer, and Psygnosis was in the midst of significant changes. Sony was searching for a Western partner to produce games for its forthcoming PlayStation console.

The purchase altered how DMA and the publisher interacted. DMA pushed to raise the difficulty of the game; Sony wished for a big success for its new console. These two objectives did not match up.

The Weight of Complexity

The Tribes followed the original game and won favor with its older audience, yet it did not make for the ideal first Lemmings adventure. Its added complexity trimmed the number of platforms and increased the game’s weight. The sequel was constructed with the seasoned player in mind, not the newcomer to the series.

“Not the best place to start your Lemmings journey.”

That is the point the source makes about the sequel’s design.

The Pop-Culture Gap

Lemmings is one of the computer games that joined Tetris and SimCity in the zeitgeist’s list of titles acceptable for people who did not self-identify as gamers to play. Like those two others, it was an early harbinger of the casual revolution in gaming that would begin to arrive a decade later. Tetris and SimCity went on to spawn The Sims; 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.

The casual revolution arrived a decade after Lemmings joined it.

What Went Wrong

Lemmings’s fall did not come from one ill-advised turn taken alone, but from a string of smaller choices that appeared to be good ideas at the time.

1. The Tribes added 60 special abilities instead of eight, which made the game harder for new players and limited its ports.
2. DMA wanted the game to be more hardcore, which pleased old players but scared away casual ones.
3. The acquisition of Psygnosis by Sony bred resentment in Dundee.
4. The resentment created an atmosphere that was hardly conducive to productive game development.
5. The original’s reduced price likely outsold the sequel in the year of its release.

On their own, every choice appeared sensible. In combination, they turned Lemmings into a game that proved too difficult for new players and too complicated for multiple platforms.

Lemmings ruled their platforms, generated a call center, and turned into a Christmas-morning ritual for families. The game faded from memory, remembered as a charming fad rather than an enduring staple.

Source material: “The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings,” filfre.net.

casual games · DMA Design · gaming history · Lemmings · Psygnosis · Sony