"Cheeky Eloquence"

Gaming Mag Interview

by Tristan Ducluzeau

Note: Tristan's personal translation notes to me
are indented, smaller and inside parenthesis.

(This is actually an impossible title to translate. It works on a spoonerism. In French, « La verve sans gène » (cheeky eloquence) gives « La verge sans veine » (The unlucky penis), referring to Larry’s misadventures. I know it might sound silly in American but… but wait, it’s also quite silly in French… Oh well).

Intro

There’s quite a misunderstanding of the term “adventure game” in these days. Interviewing Al Lowe, professional joker with a rabelai-sian physique and father of the Leisure Suit Larry series, ‘Gaming’ aims at re-establishing the truth : point ‘n’ click is first and foremost a matter of tact.

(now, as for the puns in this one : in French, “aventure” can mean “adventure” or “affair”, the double-entendre being adventure game/affair game. As for “tact”, it’s actually “doigté” in french, which can also mean, well you, know, the things you do with your finger when in bed and…)

Text

Al Lowe’s advice to aspiring game-designers ? “Start twenty years ago !” And the man lets out a thunderous laugh, fondly remember-ing his first days as a beginner programmer. Until he gets serious again : “My advice is actually quite simple. If you decide to go for that, you have to be willing to put your time and heart in it.”
Speaking with Al Lowe is like attending a tightrope-walker act : this “funny, perfectionnist and organised man”, as Ken Williams puts it, easily switches from dead seriousness to broad jokes. Like a Benny Hill who would have decided to follow the way of the samu-raï.

(the tightrop walker act is a common expression in french, but I don’t know if it works in English. I’m still unsure about the Benny Hill phrase… Still I like Benny Hill… And Samouraï are rrrrrreally cool. So what can be cooler than a samouraï Benny Hill ? Errr… Allright I’ll take it off)

WAITING FOR LARRY

Born in 1946 in Gumbo, Missouri, Al Lowe starts his career as a music teacher and gets acquainted with the local DEC PDP-1170. Fascinated with programming, he convinces his wife, Margaret, to buy an Apple ][ and starts playing games with his son, notably some of the Hi-Res Adventure series by On-Line Systems (such as The Wizard and the Princess, 1982). Then comes the time of his first homemade games, self-published and sold, (in conventions for instance) until one day Al joins Sierra, by this time already one of the most important game companies in the US.

After some programming and game-design on children games (Troll’s Tale, 1982, Winnie The Pooh in the Hundred-Acre Woods, 1983 or The Black Cauldron, 1984), Lowe gets the opportunity to work on a remake of Softporn Adventure. “Because the name Softporn had the word "porn" in it, many people decided it was a porn product without playing it,” explains Williams. “By changing the name, we were able to reach both men and women. Women LOVE Larry.” Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987) introduces Larry Laffer, a little man suffering from (or blessed with) an exaggerated libido, who goes all over town and his partners’ curves with an expert hand. After a tedious start, word-of-mouth helped LSL1 reach fantastic sales and the title re-ceived the award of “Best Adventure/ Fantasy Role-Playing Game” by the Software Publishers Association in 1987.

(the “goes all over town and his partners’ bodies” are one and the same verb in french, “parcourir”, which can apply to a space or someone’s body. This is unfortunately lost in translation. The year 1946 for your birthdate is based on an interview given in August 1999 (you were 53 at the time). Hope I didn’t make a mistake on that one! By the way, I checked at http://www.vintage-sierra.com/childrens, and all the children titles mentionned are said to have been released one year after the date on your site. I stuck with your dates though)

THE SAGA ON THE SHOULDER

(rejected titles :
The size of the saga does matter
Enlarge your Larry
Do not judge a man by the size of his… saga)

(The saga on the shoulder reffers to a french saying, “having one’s penis on the shoulder”. It is here to comment on the many epi-sodes of the series, obviously)

Eventually, the Larry Series will include 7 episodes (more on which later), as well as a whacky office tools application (The Laffer Utili-ties, 1990), a casino game (Leisure Suit Larry’s Casino, 1998) and an eighth episode which unfortunately never saw the light of the day (Leisure Suit Larry 8 : Lust in Space). Initially planned as a tril-ogy, the series went straight from number 3 to number 5, due to the discontinued development of LSL4, which would eventually give birth to the Sierra Network, a network-based gaming space. Since then, the question “Where the hell is Larry 4?” has become famous in the videogaming world. As if the situation wasn’t com-plex enough, the 5th episode, Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does A Little Undercover Work (1991), would cleverly reffer to the phantom title, Leisure Suit Larry 4 : The Lost Floppies.

For all that, Lowe isn’t entirely satisfied with the 5th opus : “We went too far with the cinematics. Larry 5 was a bit straightforward and lacked a balanced gameplay. Doing so, we broke Sierra’s ‘7 seconds rule’, which implies that you should never leave the player inactive for more than 7 seconds.”

As a counterpoint to this design flaw, the last game of the series, Leisure Suit Larry 7 : Love for Sail! (1996) is considered the nadir of Lowe’s career : “Larry 7 had it all. Professional voice casting, real musicians and a soundtrack which had nothing to do with the MIDI quality of the 80’s. I had the opportunity to put everything I wanted in this game. In many aspects, it’s my best one.”

One strength of the Larry series is to be salacious without being pornographic. Oh, it’s not to say the games lack of lightly dressed creatures, and many of the topics here are undoubtedly mature (homosexuality, bondage, STD). But one would hardly call women the ‘weaker sex’ in the game, and most of the jokes poke fun at Larry, who, in the end, is the only fool here. So, can we say Larry is a feminist game ? “I guess you could say that”, replies Lowe.

GAMA SUTRA

(Hope I don’t get sued for that one (shivers))

When asked about what it takes to make a good adventure game, Al Lowe is quick to answer : ‘Characters, story, and a balanced gameplay. Most videogame characters have this monolithic as-pect. It’s as if they never evolved during the game. Also, the story must flow naturally, be one with the gameplay. There’s this thing I don’t really like in RPGs or FPSs : you have to go through twenty minutes of action to get a single minute of story development. Then it’s back to the action sequence for twenty minutes…”

And what about 3D adventure games, Al ? Even though you never had the opportunity to make one, surely you must have some ideas of game-design ? “Well, it’s all about cameras…” At which point, the interviewer expects a revolutionary system, maybe something to do with the cam and direction highlighting the key elements of the scenery. “No, no, I’m not talking about that. Two words : shoe cam. Just imagine…” Well, you sure got me on that one, Al.

Now, we all know Vivendi Universal is currently supporting the de-velopment of a new Larry game (Magna Cum Laude). Still, Al is unsure as for his participation in the project. When asked, he sud-denly goes terse. To him, “it’s quite an unusual decision. Why pick a team of developers, based 3000 Km away, with no experience whatsoever on the series, when its founding father, a man who has sold million copies, lives just ten minutes away ?” You can feel a bit of sadness in his voice. I leave Al Lowe to his beloved wife, Margaret, to his jazz band and his model railroading, his favourite hobby. At least, at 57 years old, the guy whom some people refer to as the “oldest game-designer in the industry” can be sure he left his mark in the history of the medium :
“To this day, whenever someone asks what company I built, I say "Sierra" and they say they've never heard of it. Then I say "we did Leisure-Suit Larry" and they remember the company.” That’s Ken Williams speaking, people.

(I’m not sure whether the quote was “off the record”. If so, rest assured I’ll remove it.)

Al Lowe is the webmaster of www.allowe.com, a true gold mine where game design documents and some his first games are available to the public. He also maintains the CyberJoke 3000, a mailing-list of jokes (“no spam, absolutely free”, he precises)

Encart : Leisure Suit Larry X : Boobs and booze on the bench

Not long after the release of the first Leisure Suit Larry, the Califor-nia state tried to pass a “Leisure Suit Larry Bill” prohibiting refer-ences to alcohol, sex or cigarettes in videogames. “It was circa 1988. Ken and some guys from the SPA protested vehemently against this insane law. Needless to say, it never passed : it was straightforward censorship.”

(Well, the X is for X rated, and I fought for half-an-hour with my dic-tionnary to try and find an alliteration “the Larry way” for this made-up name. I’m not a 100% proud of it, but it’s the best I came up with.)

Photo-Caption

“Other than the famous Leisure Suit Larry series, Al Lowe worked on Freddy Pharkas : Frontier Pharmacist (1993), the tale of a pharmacist forced to resume his gunslinging activity to save the day back in the days of the Wild West, and Torin’s Passage (1995), a beautiful adventure game which aimed at captivating both adults and kids and have them play together… just like he did with his son back in the old days.”