Leisure Suit Larry, three words synonymous with smutty jokes, sexual shenanigans and Larry Laffer, a videogame character who was never blessed with a strutting figure or particularly good looks. Yet, the balding anti-hero – as Al Lowe (creator of Larry and instigator behind all the games, except Magna Cum Laude) himself so aptly describes – had no shortage of optimism and desire for a good-looking young lass, regardless of whether she liked the looks of Larry or not. As the Leisure Suit Larry games went, Larry rarely found a woman that accepted his countenance with open arms. Consequently, the aging Larry, imbedded with enough youthful zestfulness to make a randy teenager look up from his pornography with surprise, often had to look for ways to decisively persuade the female(s) in question to like him and his err… features.

The Leisure Suit Larry games were jovial, light-hearted affairs and could be classified as the first game series to try to induce bouts of humor. In fact, Lowe’s undeniable wit is a large reason for the series’ continued popularity. I recently had a chance to speak to Lowe himself about the series and specifically the inspiration behind Larry.

Inside Gamer Online: What was your role on the Larry games?

Al Lowe: When I started the Larry games, I did nearly everything. In Larry 1, I did everything but the graphics and the game engine. But, as the games went along I had less and less responsibilities.‿ Al laughs at this point and then continues, “Soon I lost the job of composer and then programming and soon, I was “merely‿ the visionary, designer and director, writing the plots, puzzles and dialogue. In all the games, I was responsible for all the content.

IGO: Tell me about the 1998 saga in which you were sacked from Sierra.

AL: I wasn’t really sacked. They couldn’t fire me because I never was an employee. Actually, that’s not true: I was fired in on Black Friday in 1984 when Sierra went from 120 employees to 40. Ken Williams called us each in and said that he wanted us to work from home and…no longer be employees, but ‘outside contractors.’ When we discussed the number of games he wanted me to do and how much I’d get paid, I realized that I’d be making more money than my salary! When we finished, I asked him, ‘So have I just been fired?’ and he said, ‘Yep.’ I replied, ‘Okay, thanks!’ And for the next fifteen years I worked as an outside contractor. I was under contract to design and program the games and did all the design and writing but never got another salary from Sierra, no paycheck, no advances, nothing. The only money I got was a percentage of the sales of the game. If a game didn’t sell, I got no money.

And that’s why the debut of Larry 1 was so disturbing to me. At the time, it was the worst selling game in the history of the company! I figured I’d just wasted six months of my life. But once word of mouth got out, the game became one of the best-selling Sierra games of all time.

In 1998, the market changed. Adventure games stopped selling. Or rather, adventure gamers stopped buying,‿ he says in a definite tone. “The games became more expensive to produce while their sales went down. My leaving was a mutual decision because, remember: I only got paid from sales and I wasn’t sure I wanted to waste a year of my life in the vain hope that my adventure game would sell when no others were. In the end, I think it was a good decision. The adventure game market hasn’t really come back and right now is still a wounded shadow of its former self.

IGO: Do you think there ever will be a time when adventure games are popular or do you think the genre is dead and a rebirth is unlikely?

AL: If the genre is defined by the strict point-and-click games that we used to do, then yeah, it is gone. But what’s really happened is that it has been absorbed by other genres. Games once were straightforward in category, for example, this game on this shelf, that game on that shelf. But the lines have become blurred. Action games, for example, now have adventure-type puzzles, dialogue, and many of the features adventures once had. But the ‘find this object, mix it with that object, take it to that person who wants it,’ those puzzles have gone away for good. The other part of adventure gaming that deserved to go away was ‘pixel hunting.’ I tried not to do that in my games, but many games did. Wave the cursor around the screen watching for it to change its shape and then click. Also, many adventure game puzzles were truly illogical. Those, too, deserve to die. But two aspects that won’t die‿ – at this point I sit up with bated breath – “is storytelling and character development. People love good stories and successful action and role-playing games will learn to integrate story. And I think great characters will always be popular. The game that can mix all these together will be a hit.

IGO: Do you play any games nowadays?

AL: The games I do play are mostly racing games. The problem with being in the industry is that you can’t look at games the same way as you did before. Now instead of ‘play,’ it’s ‘market research!’‿ He laughs. “I look at a lot of games but play very few through to the end. I do love platforming games, like Mario. I remember when Sierra got a hold of a ‘Japanese family computer,’ which wasn’t a family computer at all, but rather, Nintendo’s first game machine. When we started playing Mario on that we were all blown away. I’ve been in love with platforming ever since. As the game genres merge, we’ll see story-based games in all of these fields.

IGO: Since you once obviously worked for Sierra, you would have had an excellent opportunity to play the likes of Jim Walls’ Police Quest line of games, as well as Roberta Williams’ Kings Quest line of games, and many others. Have you played any of these recently?

AL: I usually don’t go back to play older games. Sometimes people write me with questions about my own games and I’m totally at a loss. I can’t honestly remember what I wrote 15 years ago! But when I was actively designing, of course I played all the games. That was one of the best parts of the job! I’ve played all the Quests, King’s, Space, Police, etc. and all the Monkey Island games. Of course, my favorites are the comedies.
what was your favorite Larry game?

Al Lowe: My favorite Larry game had to be my final adventure game, Love For Sail! The final Larry game, Larry’s Casino, was a strange product born out of desperation from the lack of vision‿ – Al particularly emphasizes these words – “at Sierra after Ken Williams was bought out. The company was restaffed with guys with business management degrees, or accounting. They had no idea of where to go or what to do. Larry’s Casino was funded because they had a Hoyle game and told me just to ‘slap some Larry graphics on the Hoyle game and do it real quick.’ I tried to make the best of a bad situation and actually got some innovative ideas into the game, but that’s no way to design products.‿ – He sighs. – “But, back to the question: my favorite game was Love For Sail because by that time I felt I finally understood how to create an adventure game! Before that I was always unsure. With Love For Sail I think I got it right. There were many things about the design that I’m proud of; the voice-over acting was the best directing I had done; the live music, recorded by real musicians playing real instruments in a real studio; in all, I’m most proud of it.

Not that I’m ashamed of the earlier games I did. It’s just that, along the way, I got better at making and writing games. It also became easier for me as I went along. But games changed a lot during those years. When I started, everything was typed. When we moved to the point-and-click system with Larry 5, there was a huge change. Larry 5 was a short game, not because it was shorter than my previous ones, but because I didn’t realize just how much trouble people had typing in the right words. When all you had to do was point and click, suddenly we realized that we had to make the games longer and more involved. So much of the early games’ difficulty was due to worrying about vocabulary and getting the correct phrase and spelling.

IGO: I can’t conduct a Larry interview with the esteemed creator himself without asking whatever happened to Larry 4! There are many rumors on the web, one of which is that your dog ate the disks, or that it was left out to show the dramatic transition from text (in Larry 1, 2 and 3) to point-and-click.

AL: Oh, I’d love to claim that you are right; that’d we advanced so far that we needed to skip a game. But the actuality of the matter is less dramatic. When I finished Larry 3, I thought that would be the end of the series, so Larry 3 was wrapped up and a nice bow added. That left me little to no room for further sequels. Well, the sales department was adamant that the world needed another Larry game. And when they convinced me, I was in bad shape. What could I do? I had painted myself into a corner. I couldn’t figure out how to get him out of where he was in order to start another adventure.

One day, I met a Sierra co-worker in the hallway. She asked, ‘What are you working on, Larry 4?’ And I went for the cheap laugh and answered, ‘No, Larry 5! Of course, I’m working on Larry 4.’ But at that moment, I thought, ‘That’s it! I’ll just skip 4 and go straight to 5 so that I don’t need to get Larry out of his current situation! In hindsight, it was a good idea because it played with people’s minds. And when you do that, you get their attention. So the real truth is that I had painted myself in a corner with no way out, but through a lame joke, I escaped.

IGO: Tell me about the inspiration behind Larry Laffer (the series’ protagonist), Passionate Patti and the Leisure Suit Larry games as a whole.

AL: Larry was based on SoftPorn, the text-only game from 1980. It was written by a man named Chuck Benton who merely wanted to see if the Apple II could be used for database work. He wrote a little game to test his database theories. It wasn’t that great a game, but because of its risqué content it was a huge success. At a time when Apple had only sold 100,000 computers, SoftPorn sold 25,000 copies! And everyone I knew had an illegal copy! It must have had 100% market penetration.But when we attained the rights to the Disney characters, Disney didn’t want to be in the same catalogue as a game named SoftPorn, so we dropped it. Later,when we lost the rights to the Disney characters and I needed a new project, Ken remembered SoftPorn. I said I’d look at it and see if I could bring it up to date and add graphics. But it was so out of fashion and written so tritely, that I reported back to Ken that ‘this game was so out of it, it should be wearing a leisure suit.’ I said the only way I’d work on that game was if he’d let me make a joke out of it. And he did!

I think LSL1: Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was the earliest title to have a central character who was an anti-hero. He was the butt of the jokes, instead some guy out to save the world. It also was novel in that it took place in modern times, with average people.

The closest thing to a direct inspiration for Larry, if he had one, was a salesman who worked at Sierra named Gary. He would return from sales trips and want to tell everyone about all the woman he’d conquered in the motel bars. Of course, no one wanted to hear his stories, but he’d tell us anyway. Leisure Suit Larry sounded better than Leisure Suit Gary so that’s how Larry got his first name. Right before the game shipped, I realized he didn’t have a last name, so I grabbed Volume L of my encyclopedia and, on the first page I turned to, found ‘Arthur B. Laffer.’ I thought, ‘what better name for a funny character than Laffer?’ And that’s how he became Larry Laffer.

Patti, on the other hand, was more of a joke. I wanted someone to play off Larry, someone who would complement Larry’s character, someone worldly, experienced and wise. Passionate Patti was the result.

IGO: Initially, how many Larry games did you think you’d make?

AL: When I first started making games, I hoped that the first one would sell enough copies that Ken would want me to make another. That goal took a while to realize, but eventually Larry turned out to be a success. When I wrote the third game, I thought, ‘that’s it. I’ll wrap it up now.’ I had no idea that Larry would go on for so many years. Nor, that people would still be playing the games 15 years later! And I surely didn’t ever think those games would be played on machines like are common today! Remember: Larry 1 shipped on two 360KB floppies! Hell, your wristwatch has more RAM than that!

IGO: The early games had a quiz you had to take to verify you were really of age. Was this forced on you by law, or was it a joke on your part? Afterall, you can bypass the quiz with a simple cheat.

AL: The cheat was only there because I was too lazy to answer all those questions every single time I tested the game (which was thousands of time!). It was an attempt, albeit a weak one, to show that the game was unsuitable for children. No law. Not a joke, but a fun way to say, ‘Are you sure you really are ready for this?’

With this, our final question answered we end the interview and thanked Al for his time. He courteously thanks us in turn and says how proud and happy he is that people are still playing his games. Of course, the quality of the humour embedded in the Leisure Suit Larry games is such that it’s unsurprising people still enjoy Larry and his ever-scouting eye. We hope you enjoyed reading.