The Digital Antiquarian - 18 Sep 2026

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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).

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Original: https://www.filfre.net/2026/09/the-lamentable-later-life-of-lemmings/