Litecoin was a scam from the start: "The first 10000 blocks of Litecoin were mined in a bit over 23 hours. 576 should've been mined in one day according to officially communicated blocktime of 2.5 minutes.
This emission is almost 18 times faster than scheduled and didn't change despite 4 difficulty adjustments (assuming the 2016 blocks figure is correct)." "AFAIK, Charlie Lee did not say
IIRC many alt-coins had fast-mines on initial launch. During the GPU era, the default difficulty of Bitcoin was way too low. Most people producing alts did not bother to bump it."