The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings

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The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings

18
Sep

This article tells the last part of the story of Lemmings.

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 anticlimactic 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.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

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).

30 Comments
Posted by Jimmy Maher on September 18, 2026 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: lemmings, psygnosis, rockstar

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30 Responses to The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings

Andrew Pam

September 18, 2026 at 4:22 pm

“Swan son” – typo for “swan song” with a g. “igneous” – hilarious typo for “ingenious”. :)

Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2026 at 6:08 pm

:) Thanks!

Ajax

September 19, 2026 at 1:59 pm

“Igneous” was so good I thought it was deliberate, that the player was supposed to trick them into lava.

Mr. Crispy

September 18, 2026 at 5:28 pm

“Psygnosis was a big part of all that, through such early PlayStation hits as WipEout, Ridge Racer, and Destruction Derby.”
Ridge Racer is a Namco game.
Colony Wars is what I associate Psygnosis with on Playstation, though I never played it.

Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2026 at 6:11 pm

Thanks!

chazwhiz

September 18, 2026 at 5:59 pm

I find it really odd that not only is no one remaking them, no one’s really even cloning them. Like the gameplay concept itself doesn’t even show up that often even though it’s proven to be fun and popular. The only “big” game I can think of are some of the Mario vs Donkey Kong titles.

P-Tux7

September 19, 2026 at 12:29 am

It was popular enough to get several open-source clones, some with the original Lemmings and one, Pingus, inspired by Linux’s Tux mascot. For better or worse, Pingus is old news now, being made in 1998 and last updated in 2003, but it stuck out as one of the first great open-source games at the time – especially for those, unlike Doom or Quake, which were original creations instead of newly open-source commercial games – and would inspire the more-popular SuperTux, a game which had a big and stable 0.7 release this year. Ingo Ruhnke’s delightful painterly graphics in Pingus and the first several versions of SuperTux are still a treat, standing out from many shareware games of the era by eschewing pixel art or 3D-rendered graphics.

Veronica Connor

September 19, 2026 at 4:02 pm

There was a small wave of clones when the original came out. Very briefly, “puzzle game where you give jobs to otherwise identical characters” became a genre on the Amiga. The magic Lemmings formula really falls apart of you change any variable in it, though, so none of those other games were very good.
As for thus-far-unmentioned ports, there was also a modern community port of the original on the Apple IIgs done by Brutal Deluxe called (fittingly) LemminGS. It was a “they said it couldn’t be done” sort of thing, and it’s very impressive for the platform.

Kwanda Rosman

September 18, 2026 at 7:49 pm

Lemmings was my most played Sega Genesis game because of the two player mode.

Leo Vellés

September 18, 2026 at 8:40 pm

Jimmy, the first two links of the online sources are the same. I click on both and both took me to “The making of Lemmings”

Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2026 at 5:58 am

Woops! Fixed it. Thanks!

Sarah Walker

September 18, 2026 at 9:22 pm

“But whereas Tetris and SimCity would be grandfathered into that revolution at the turn of the millennium”
I was trying to think of why this didn’t happen to Lemmings, and can think of a few reasons. Apologies if this isn’t entirely coherent!
Sony’s ownership of the franchise obviously comes into play; they’ve got no reason to push Lemmings specifically in favour of numerous other franchises they own. The late 90s PSX re-release of the original game did quite well from memory, but came to nothing. I get the impression they were serious about the 2006 PSP title, but when sales of that were disappointing they gave up on it, and they’ve little reason to push it again.
I also think Lemmings has some fundamental differences to the likes of Tetris and SimCity (and to throw in another contemporary, Worms). The latter three can, effectively, be played forever – Tetris starts afresh on every new game, SimCity is (scenarios aside) an empty landscape to be filled as the player wishes, and Worms levels are procedural generated from scratch at the start of every match.
By contrast, Lemmings is based around hand designed levels, and has you specifically working towards a definite goal of completing the game. I suspect (and I definitely remember this being the case bitd) that most people who played the original Lemmings played the tutorial levels over and over, rather than actually working towards the end (kind of like casual Myst players never leaving the first island). Unlike the other games I mentioned, Lemmings is _hard_, even before you get into the Lemmings 2 additions. So I’m not entirely surprised casual players didn’t stick with the series, without a hook beyond “more Lemmings”.
Thinking about it, in some ways the GTA series almost went down a similar path. The original Grand Theft Auto was a major hit, but from memory most players just drove around the first city over and over and never actually attempted to complete the game. Neither of the initial followups had anything like the same impact; GTA London has a very Oh No! More Lemmings feel about it, being basically the first game but not as good, whereas GTA2 piled on the complexity and lost much of the wide appeal. In GTA’s case, GTA 3 (from memory largely not the work of the old DMA Design team) massively course corrected, stripping back most of the GTA2 complexity, adding the novelty of a massive 3D open world and a much stronger narrative. Makes you wonder what an alternate universe Lemmings 3 would have been…

P-Tux7

September 19, 2026 at 12:33 am

These puzzle-box game genres are kind of a tragedy, aren’t they? However, Lemmings does lend itself to more “level editor”-esque tools than Myst or other adventures, and it’s sad that it didn’t ever get one, unless you count the PSP version in 2006 or NeoLemmix’ unofficial editor.

Gregor Klajnšek

September 18, 2026 at 9:29 pm

Interestingly enough, when Lemmings 3D came out in 1995 people that enjoyed watching cute little things die in 2D on the screen got a different beast to enjoy… Worms. Sure, the concept is much simpler and is not a puzzle game, but it is fun as hell. I am wondering if it filled some kind of void …
Actually, how come you never covered Worms ? Was the game simply not that popular in US ? I think the game was huge in Europe. Or is it just that the game play is too simple and there was generally not enough story there ? One thing that is really interesting for me regarding Worms is how they took that basic familiar concept from the QBasic Gorillas , a game that everyone learning basic in the early 90s knew, and made it so much more fun.
Somehow though it seems that the Worms franchise had a very similar arc to Lemmings.

Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2026 at 6:08 am

There’s always a lot of competition for coverage, of course. That’s my ultimate answer to most questions of this nature.

dsparil

September 19, 2026 at 12:29 pm

Yeah, Worms wasn’t that popular in the US. PC Gamer did champion Worms 2 in particular, but general interest in the series really fell off after Armageddon. 3D being so-so didn’t help things either. From what I’ve read, those early games were successful in Europe by the standards of the time, but I wouldn’t say they were huge.

Veronica Connor

September 19, 2026 at 4:07 pm

Worms was a commercialization of a US game that had a cult following, though- Scorched Earth. I think when the audience for Worms saw it in Canada (at least in my experience), we all said “oh it’s just Scorched Earth” which we were all tired of by that point.

Kirinn

September 18, 2026 at 10:15 pm

Lemmings 2 was really enjoyable and I still listen to the music sometimes. Never could get past a few of the most fiendish levels though even with a single lemming.
I loved Lemmings 3D! It’s the only one I’ve actually played all the way through. And now there’s LOAP, an open engine remake. https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=5907.0

Another Alex

September 18, 2026 at 10:18 pm

I played Lemmings Paintball as a kid. It was by no means a classic, but I remember it being reasonably fun. It was kind of a…puzzle shooter? where you had to figure out your way around the map, how to get the jump on the red guys, and not get blasted yourself. Definitely not essential playing, but I don’t recall it being _bad_.
It also included the original Lemmings and Oh No! on the CD, which I played much more of than Paintball. I wonder how many folks bought the later games just for the bonus original.

DarkMage

September 19, 2026 at 4:58 am

Lemmings 3: “Those magazines that bothered to review it at all generally weren’t kind.”
Regarding Amiga reviews, nine are documented. However, of these, only two gave the game low scores: a not-that-low 70% in Amiga Format 68 (“nice touches to please fans of the original, but more of the same, really”) and a 50% in Amiga Power 46 (“If this is the direction in which the Lemmings series is going, it’s hard to see how it’s going to survive” (heh)). All other reviews, including those for the then-required AGA version, gave it 80+ scores and two- or even three-page reviews. Amiga Computing:
“Anyone who played the original game and liked it will love to get their hands on a copy of Psygnosis’ latest offering. It’s what you might call a conglomeration of old and new. The old being the original and incredibly addictive gaming concept, the new being the advances in graphics and sound. These two elements combined make for a rip-roaring action-packed 90-level puzzler that just gets better and better the more you play.”
Psygnosis had so much clout (and maybe leverage, with those huge ads all across every magazine) on the Amiga that a negative review for their games was hard to come by.

Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2026 at 6:13 am

I think by this point the Amiga was also reaching the stage of, “We’re glad that you’re still making games for our platform at all. We don’t want to end that by being nasty about them.” Beggars can’t be choosers, in other words.

P-Tux7

September 19, 2026 at 9:34 am

I feel like a lot of consoles and computers – not least of them the Amiga – get communities like this where they appreciate the sentiment of the game being for their platform more than the game itself. Is Zool really an 88% good game, or did those reviewers just wish they had an 88% good Sonic-esque game? I think it’s partly delusion that yes, it is that good, and also sort of pretending it’s good and buying it to not scare off developers, like Jimmy said, so they will hopefully get a legitimately good game in the future. Or perhaps just buying it to “support the Amiga” and “own Sega” (a fate which Sega would fall to, but one not caused by Zool!)
This whole “owning Sonic/Mario” thing as seen in Zool, Superfrog, etc. is kind of sad (even if I’m not sure Team 17 was actively trying to refute Mario or Sonic with Superfrog, a lot of Amiga fans treated it like that) because it was the first tremors of how having the privilege of large teams like Sega and Nintendo had could outrun “indie devs”, which is what most Amiga developers were. Amiga developers just didn’t have the time and manpower to keep iterating on the platforming physics and level design – they just had to throw something at the wall and release the game or have no revenue. It’s like GATTACA, you have to keep swimming without saving any energy for the trip back. Not only was it costly to redo the physics and levels, but getting such feedback would have required hiring testers – and when you test your own game, of course you’re proud if it. It was easy to create something that superficially looked like Mario or Sonic, but the secret sauce was something else entirely. (And, of course, in most of Psygnosis’ games, one of the few publishers who could have tested them better, it seems like they just didn’t care… Lemmings was only as good as it was because of DMA, right?)
I know this sounds cynical, but I think there’s always been this tension with the Amiga that a lot of its best games were the games you could only do on a computer, but people at the time were very jealous of the consoles’ success, so they asked the computer and the software makers to be something that they weren’t good at. And ironically, I think the good platformers (Robocod, Ruff N Tumble) never gave the Amiga zealots (the kind of people propping up Zool, you know?) what they wanted anyways – the popular love afforded to Sega, a killer app like Sonic where your mates would get an Amiga just to play [Game X]. No game could have – by the time of 1991 and 1992, the Amiga was pretty much past that point anyways.
Post-80s Amiga is kind of a tragedy, as we all know, but the most interesting aspect I find is seeing how it dawned on more and more people as the decade went on from 1990 to 1994. That zeitgeist going from “The Amiga is popular, right?” to “Hooray, this game will save the Amiga!” to “Dear God, please let this game save the Amiga.” It’s 5 AM and it’s hard to think after all this writing, but you can see a lot of the sinking-shipness in Jimmy’s historical writings – not least of all the literal Titanic, but also in the weak latter-day attempts to save the independence of Egypt or the attempts at the Crusades to give one last go at a Christian domination of the world.

Feldspar

September 19, 2026 at 1:01 pm

Yeah I’m not so familiar with the Amiga, but like you say I think it was a common thing for a lot of platforms. For sure there was a similar attitude in the Mac press in the 90s, where there was definitely a large bias towards games from “Mac-first” or “Mac-only” developers. Like the original Marathon games are good, but they definitely enjoyed an outsized positive reputation among the Mac community as being considered just leaps and bounds ahead of Doom, and a lot of it was pride about Bungie at the time being a Mac-first developer. Meanwhile on the PC side Marathon 2 is an obscure game among the litany of also-ran “Doom clones”…

Veronica Connor

September 19, 2026 at 4:10 pm

What P-Tux just wrote is probably the best summary of the Amiga zeitgeist that I’ve ever seen. That’s exactly what it felt like at each stage of denial and despair.

Philipp R.

September 19, 2026 at 6:12 am

Just a typo: “anti-climatic” > “anticlimactic”.

Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2026 at 6:14 am

Thanks!

Ahab

September 19, 2026 at 2:53 pm

I found Lemmings 3D to be a legitimately good puzzle game that justified its third dimension well, even if the controls weren’t very well thought out or intuitive. Most of the levels did things that just weren’t possible in 2D, and never felt samey or repetitive. I can remember the majority of L3D’s 80 levels despite playing it over 20 years ago; the boot camp intro with the diving platform, the Air Force One-inspired ziplining between planes, the level that looks like a computer desktop complete with a monitor displaying the game’s own framebuffer in realtime, connect the dots in space, that enormous ferris wheel, any so many others. There was even a level that intentionally made the strange camera controls part of the puzzle! The instant replay feature which lets you play back a failed attempt and take the controls over at will is also a good addition which got retroactively added to Lemmings 95 and Neolemmix. There aren’t many puzzle games that make you truly think in terms of 3D space, perhaps for good reason, but Lemmings 3D still feels unique because of it.

Sung

September 19, 2026 at 7:18 pm

One thing for sure – DMA Design, which eventually became Rockstar North, made the right move with moving away from Lemmings to GTA. Their influence on gaming is just massive. Incredible that the same studio made both series.

Matthias Sohr

September 19, 2026 at 7:27 pm

> By the turn of the millennium, so-called “mid-priced releases” like this one — Lemmings Revolution sold for just $20 from its very first day on store shelves — were often more interesting and innovative than the expensive AAA opuses, whose publishers felt more of a need to protect their investment via micromanagement and risk aversion.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I for one certainly spend a lot more money on low and medium priced titles than on the big ones, especially since the proverbial levees broke on the 50€/$ high end price point.

Sarah Walker

September 19, 2026 at 9:34 pm

It’s interesting to note that like with Rollercoaster Tycoon, this was a $20 game from new. Was that common in the US at this point? Those low prices weren’t a thing for new games everywhere; in the UK, both were full price at £29.99 (about $50 at the time).

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The original Lemmings game, developed by DMA Design, achieved widespread success by combining simplicity, cuteness, and addictiveness, positioning it as an early precursor to the casual gaming revolution. Its popularity allowed the publisher, Psygnosis, to distribute the game across numerous platforms, establishing the franchise as a major commercial success. However, the author examines why this momentum quickly faded, attributing the decline less to a single poor decision and more to a series of accrued, ultimately flawed, choices made throughout the franchise's development.

The sequel, Lemmings 2: The Tribes, introduced greater complexity, featuring twelve distinct tribes, each with unique abilities and environments, along with a narrative about escaping captivity. While this installment was well-received in terms of anticipation, the author felt it failed to further elevate the franchise’s profile as a pop culture staple. This difficulty arose from a mismatch between the market expectations and the instincts of the developers, who favored a harder, more ambitious approach, which the series did not successfully pursue. Furthermore, external changes, such as Psygnosis’s acquisition by Sony, shifted the focus, and attempts to adapt the cute, faceless lemmings for television proved problematic, as the creatures lacked the distinct personalities necessary for memorable characters.

Subsequent attempts to revitalize the series introduced further inconsistencies. The development team experimented with expanding the concept, resulting in All New World of Lemmings, which sought to give the lemmings individualized faces for television. This effort introduced new gameplay complications, such as requiring lemmings to walk over loot boxes for abilities, which complicated the established aesthetic and tone. Later installments, such as Lemmings 3D, focused heavily on incorporating 3D graphics, which the author found undermined the game’s fundamental core, as the spatial mechanics often felt cumbersome and counterintuitive. Other attempts, like Visual Science’s Lemmings Paintball and The Adventures of Lomax, further illustrated a lack of cohesion, sometimes feeling disconnected from the established Lemmings identity.

The final iteration, Lemmings Revolution, proved to be a successful culmination by focusing on mechanical innovation rather than superficial additions. The game’s success stemmed from its unique gimmick—a rotating pillar system for level navigation—which skillfully mixed established formulas in engaging ways without becoming irritating. The team responsible for this game infused the project with a creative atmosphere reminiscent of the original design period. The level design emphasized using player skills in novel ways, incorporating elements like switches, lasers, and gravity-reversing gates organically, thus enhancing the puzzle experience rather than simply layering on obstacles.

Even in the final release, some technical flaws persisted, most notably a level that required exploiting a glitch for completion, balancing the design’s overall fairness. Despite some technical setbacks during production, the commercial success of Lemmings Revolution, selling for a low price, demonstrated that innovative, focused puzzle games could still find a strong market niche, often surpassing expensive, risk-averse AAA titles. Ultimately, the series’ fate reflects the broader trajectory of pop culture trends, suggesting that good game design, focused on satisfying challenges, can transcend fleeting fads.