The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings
The excerpt frames Lemmings as an early-1990s phenomenon that seemed destined for perennial franchise status. DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland developed the original game, released in 1991, and Liverpool-based publisher Psygnosis ported it from its first home on the Commodore Amiga to at least 23 other platforms. Those ranged from MS-DOS and the Apple Macintosh to 8-bit-era systems like the Sinclair Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, multimedia devices like the Philips CD-i and 3DO, and handhelds like the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear. Across its incarnations, Lemmings outsold every other Psygnosis game by an order of magnitude. Its combination of simplicity, juiciness, addictiveness, and cuteness proved lethal: Psygnosis had to set up a US call center to handle frustrated players begging for hints, and the creatures appeared in newspapers, glossy magazines, and mainstream news broadcasts worldwide. Annual holiday Lemmings mini-games sold as stocking stuffers next to cashier stands threatened to become a Christmas-morning family tradition.
Lemmings joined Tetris and SimCity as one of the computer games the zeitgeist deemed acceptable for people who did not identify as gamers, and like those titles it was an early harbinger of the casual-gaming revolution that arrived in earnest a decade later. But whereas Tetris and SimCity were grandfathered into that revolution around the turn of the millennium, with SimCity spawning The Sims, Lemmings had flamed out by then. It was remembered, if at all, more as a kitschy fad than as an enduring entertainment staple. The author, who likes the early Lemmings games, asks how the franchise squandered that momentum so quickly and completely. The answer, as usual, comes down less to a single ill-advised fork in the road than to a series of smaller decisions that seemed good at the time but looked less good in retrospect.
Lemmings 2: The Tribes, the big sequel to the original game, was actually the third full-sized entry in the series. It followed the less inspired Oh No! More Lemmings, which was largely filled with levels rejected for its predecessor. The Tribes was released in 1993 amid huge anticipation and expectation, and in many ways it lived up to its advance press. The excerpt then begins to describe how it replaced the suite of eight special abilities with which a player of the earlier game could assign roles to the lemmings, but cuts off mid-sentence before completing that point.