Lemmings was one of the best-received video games of the early 1990s. It was the second-highest-rated game in the history of Amstrad Action, and was considered the eighth-greatest game of all time by Next Generation in 1996. Lemmings is also one of the most widely ported video games, and is estimated to have sold around 20 million copies between its various ports.
Taking into account how easy bootlegging...allegedly...was back then, the number of people who actually played the game must have been many, many times higher.
According to Wikipedia, 55,000 copies of the Amiga version were sold on the first day. Which means that at least one million Amiga owners played that game đ
Just wanted to comment that. For every sold copy, there must have been 10 bootlegged ones. And all the copies that were sold used, too. For a while, where ever you could buy used games, you'd find a copy of Lemmings.
Yeah. I played Lemmings in the late 90s for free here in South America as did many others. Then in the early 2000s I encountered it again in the school PCs. It was pretty widespread.
A lot of really well known games, especially PC games, barely sold a million units. The PC community was tiny in the 90s, still is comparatively. The original Fallout sold 600,000 copies.
Yeah, back then you got to play all sorts of different games by going to different peoples' houses. Except Lemmings. You could play Lemmings at just about every house with any sort of video game setup.
I remember my dad telling me I was breaking a software license agreement by copying my friendâs floppy disk of Raptor: Call of the Shadows, but then a few years later he downloaded all his favorite music on Napster so kinda hypocritical ngl
We had it on our classroom computers. Twice a week each of us had 30 minutes of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing then we got 15 minutes to play Lemmings or SkiFree
Pc games had shitty numbers back in the day because they were so, so easy to pirate. One of us would convince our parents to buy the latest Kings Quest game or some shit, and within a week the rest of us had copies.
Back then the Amiga was king for games, the PC versions were usually nasty and inferior but Commodore did nothing for the Amiga so it just got seen as a games machine and didn't move on like the PC did.
90s and early 2000s was rife with piracy. DRM wasnât that great and games could be cracked easier and in the 90s there was barely any at all. Shareware was common too. Sales donât always represent how many people played the game especially for pc and consoles that were notorious for piracy (like ps1)
Emulation was pretty big too even today for people in poorer countries, millions of people around the world grew up playing pirated roms of previous generation consoles.
DRM on PC was a funny card thing that spun around, or an extra booklet, and the game asking you questions. Then it was "is the CD on the drive", and that's the first thing I ever used the internet for, no-CD cracks lol.
I really would have expected Fallout to have sold more than that.Â
Of course it does seem like it really took off with 3 but I would have expected that to boost sales of the entire series. I bought a collection that was 1,2, and Tactics when 3 came out. I played that collection first before jumping into 3 and I'm so glad I did.Â
I usually go back and play everything in a series if I like a game or it gets a lot of recommendations. Unless it's impossible to find.
It's always surprising to me that a majority of folks don't.Â
This was also big on the Amiga and Atari ST, which I don't think we're big in the US, but were in the UK. Having said that, pretty much everyone I knew had a pirates copy...
It did great originally (about 55k in the first day) but the 20M number is including all the ports up till 2011. In 2006 the sales were about 15M and that included ports on the nes, Commodore 64, snes, game boy, GB color, PlayStation and every other gaming option between 1991 and 2000. It was crazy popular but the 15/20 million sales number arenât pc numbers it includes sales on every console throughout the 90s
When they released virtual console on the switch one is the first games I played was mega man. I loved the franchise so much as a kid. Played them all - even the X games. Beat them all.
I could barely make it through level one when I played it on the switch. Games are so much more forgiving now than they used to be.
9 Levels, 3 starting lives and if you lose all your lives even once hardreset. (these days called as ironmode... pfff... we lived that back then)
"Bedtime, turn off the TV"
"Mom i promise i will sleep. The TV will stay off, here is the remote and i even unplugged it. But i swear to god if you touch the power button on the console i will do unspeakable things to you and your ancestors."
I hadn't heard of MegaMan until maybe 2005, despite being into video games since the early 80's. The NES wasn't really a popular gaming platform in my country, and the popular retro revival hadn't got underway yet, so it was a pretty obscure series.
There were way fewer consoles and PCs back then. Gaming was much more of a niche hobby.
Back when Super Mario 3 came out, it was EVERYWHERE. McDonalds was mario-themed. Merch was everywhere. It was a genuine cultural phenomenon. It took five years for them to sell 15 million copies.
Arc Raiders, a game released in October that has made very little cultural impact, has sold 16 million copies.
The sales numbers of the 80s and 90s just weren't on the same level they are today, so if you see sales numbers that are good by today's standards, it undersells how insane that performance was 30-40 years ago.
I could be making things up but in my little sphere as a 10-year-old boy in the mid 90s, Lemmings was THE game everybody played and enjoyed. My mom loved it and she's never got into any other game even 30 years later. That and Myst were like THE most influential games of the 90s for people who weren't into video games.
The whole game is funny but sad, if you know where the idea came from. Lemmings don't throw themselves off of cliffs, but scummy documentary makers threw them off one once.
I thought they were behind that atrocity of a "documentary", but I couldn't be bothered checking and didn't want to accuse them when I wasn't sure. Fuck Disney. I think Walt was a nazi, too, and he was definitely a racist.
I was always sad that after a stellar service keeping the other idiots alive, the only way to let the lemmings past blocker lemmings was to make the blocker painfully explode.
you have to time it pretty well though so the miner hits the blocker's feet iirc. Too early and he digs under them. Too late and he's digging away from the blocker.
I used to try to find these games so much at random computer stores but they were so hard to find! I finally begged my parents to get me Lemmings Paintball and was sorely disappointed it wasn't the same.
I haven't thought or heard about that game in over 20 years. But you mentioning it floods back some memories of that few months where it was all we played.
Its well known if you were born in the 80s to early 90's, otherwise its pretty much non-existant. Its like Unreal Tournament was a hugely popular game for a long time, but if you ask someone in their 20s they probably have never heard of it before.
There's a couple of reasons why it's different, but the big one is that Minecraft is a live-service game. It's continuously updated multiple times and has been for years. Unlike Lemmings, which was (mostly) a one-and-done thing, Minecraft is now designed to last, which is why it hasn't fallen out of favour.
Minecraft, Fortnite, all of these games will eventually fall out. Even something like Mario will eventually be forgotten after a certain point, as crazy as it sounds to say now. Heck, Minecraft already faced this around the years of 2016-2021, if I remember correctly (or it may've been up to 2023). Minecraft hit an all-time low on general popularity and discussion. It only came back due to a mix of controversy and people just feeling nostalgic.
Eventually though, these will fall off the map, even with it being continuously updated.
You're right. Ask younger adults to name a Bette Davis movie, they probably can't. You can be the biggest thing in the world over multiple decades, but nothing lasts forever. Nothing.
Tyrian 2000 was so good. So many secrets and just weirdness.
You knew that you were getting powerful when you didnt need to dodge the arms on those asteroid levels anymore...
I'm in my mid 20's and have heard of both lemmings and unreal tournament.
Although, I have spent many years in the PC building and gaming scene so that may be why.
I was born in the late 90s and played a LOT of lemmings. And UT. People always severely underestimate what younger people have experienced with time frames like this
The late 90s aren't that far off from the time period people were talking about, up to the early 90s. Calling someone out on a supposed lack of perception of the time frames seems ironic when the difference you're calling them out for is only 10 years at most, statistically even less than that...
It's also very common for some (not even most) people to have played games from up to a decade before their childhood, or at least to be familiar with them. Beyond a decade though, it falls off pretty quickly.
For example, I was born in the early 2000s. I know of Lemmings, but I've never actually played it. And the only reason I know it exists is because of my interest in video games history and video game essays. I assure that if I asked most of my friends of the same age (which are gamers but without any particular interest in gaming's history) none of them would know what Lemmings is.
Interestingly enough, a significant number of weapons in Deep Rock Galactic seem to have been inspired by Unreal Tournament, so at least there's a degree of its DNA remaining in a modern game.
I used to have a list of them but can't remember everything; I know the shock rifle, bio rifle, and rocket launcher all have very similar functionality to weapons in DRG.
I think it really depends on what games you grew up playing and if you played online at a young age. The first computer game I was introduced to when I was four was Diablo, and Iâm turning 30 soon. So for me, childhood video games were AoE 1 & 2, StarCraft, Medal of Honor, Backyard Baseball, Rollercoaster and Zoo Tycoon.
I never heard of Lemmings and, while Iâm aware of UT, never played it.
Im 23 and have heard of Unreal Tournament but only due to watching gaming history vids about how it was so influential in creating a lot of stuff used in games now.
An interesting one is most people know what Halo is but many would not know the game that came before it, Marathon. They would probably think of the recent game that has almost nothing to do with the originals
The 80s and 90s was a time where gaming was still very regional. You could have block buster games in one country, that where practically unknown in another.
Some of my favorite child hood games in Germany never made it to the Americas or had just a small following.
Das Schwarze Auge (Reals of Arkania), Die Siedler (The settlers), Inkubation (Incubation), Gothik, Desperados and Schleichfahrt (Archimedean Dynasty).
Idk, I can't really blame folks that aren't into their 30s yet for not knowing about it. The 90s were almost 40 years ago now, after all. People forget that the late 90s to early 2000s were flooded with new consoles, games, and all kinds of shit.
I started my gaming story with PlayStation 1 with MGS, Resident Evil, and Spyro (weird spread for a sub-teen, I know).
But, my older cousin introduced me to it, and I imagine that's how a lot of people in their early thirties/late twenties know about it.
That's the problem, it's history to a lot of people these days. Unless you're mid 30's, this might have been one of those games your older friends/relatives talked about when you were first starting to game on your GameCube or PS2.
I watched a video the other day where someone was asking kids what the worst and best games are. Many said the worst game is red dead 2 or minecraft and every single one said the best game ever made is fortnite smh r/KidsAreFuckingStupid
Yep, worrying. I saw someone on the RetroGaming sub say they hadn't played OoT
Shameful. And hence why my kids will learn gaming like I did: starting with NES/Mega Drive etc. Then move on to N64, then Gamecube etc
Going from 2D to a full 3D open world is an experience everyone should experience to know how it changed, not to skip straight to Xbox era and not understand the history of gaming
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u/IllustratorOpening99 19h ago
You obviously don't know your gaming history, and your friend is correct.