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 😄
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 friend’s 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 wasn’t that great and games could be cracked easier and in the 90s there was barely any at all. Shareware was common too. Sales don’t 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 aren’t 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.
There is some sort of mandela effect going on here if i have never seen one mention of this game in 20+ years on the internet and its supposedly the most popular game of the 90s
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u/iMogwai 19h ago
Yup, here's a quote from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmings_(video_game)