GoKawiilFor 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.
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