How do you feel about the recent actions of Sierra On-Line?

Sierra has gone through several years of turmoil, dating from one fateful morning when Walter Forbes, a Sierra board member and head of CUC, announced to Ken Williams that he intended to buyout the company by offering 50% more per share that the current stock price. Forbes did the same thing to Davidson, on the same day. Shortly thereafter he also picked up Berkeley Systems and Knowledge Adventure. Suddenly, CUC was the number one software publisher in the country. I hoped their superior marketing skills would mean Sierra’s products (which had always been better than its sales and marketing, in my opinion) would start selling more. Instead, the opposite happened. While Ken’s agreement forced him to stay on for two years, he was never again in charge and the vision that was the company vanished. Instead, people who knew little or nothing about computer games made all the high-level decisions. Instead of leading, their idea was to follow the latest trend. When CUC merged with HFS to form Cendant, things got worse. Hopefully, Cendant’s sale to Havas may breathe life back into the company again. But things will never be the same.

My feelings? I have severely mixed emotions. I’m sad that the games that pleased so many people were not deemed adequate risk to support any longer. I’m glad that "I was there when it really was something." I grieve for the loss of my friend, Larry Laffer, for, after spending all those years together, he is closer than many of my "real" acquaintances. I feel for the fans who loved Larry and the Larry games so much; I wish I had been able to provide a "last episode" to wrap things up properly. I miss working with the dozens of talented artists and engineers who brought my wacky ideas to life. I enjoy spending more time with my family.

Are there any secrets that you can tell us? Secrets that havenever been revealed about LSL7? We have heard in the past that there was a secret .wav of Peggy Uncensored and an .avi of "Larry doing The Juggs." Any words on that?

I think all the Easter Eggs have been revealed somewhere on the Internet. I’m sure everyone knows the "pin-ups" are in the "drivers" folder, named as if they are drivers, but are really just plain old bitmaps. And yes, there is an unbleeped Peggy somewhere on that CD, but I honestly don’t remember how to activate it! The Juggs scene comes in two flavors (as do many of the scenes) based on whether or not you found their Egg before starting your "encounter."

How did you first get started in the gaming industry? Any suggestions for fans that have plans in becoming game designers in the future?

I was born a poor black child…no, wait; that’s Steve Martin! My suggestion for budding game designers is to NOT do what I did; you’ll never get a job! My path was only possible back in the early days of software. I started programming in 1978, hacking away in my spare time on a DEC mini-computer owned by the school district where I was employed. (By the way, "hacking" was not a derogatory term back then; rather, it denoted experimenting, exploring, trying. "Cracking" was a bad thing. I’m really sorry we’ve lost that distinction.) No real programmer would use BASIC, so they gave me the manual and I wrote some little programs to help me do my job better. When the Apple came out, I was strongly attracted to it and just knew if I could afford one, I could figure out a way to make it pay for itself. I convinced my wife to let us spend over a month’s salary on a machine with 48K of memory, two 120K floppies, and a 9" green monitor! I started writing games because my son and I enjoyed playing them. Since we mostly played Sierra games, my stuff looked a lot like Roberta’s. When Ken & Roberta saw them, they loved them. I didn’t plan it that way, but it worked out well. I started designing for Sierra and 16 years later I had never changed companies. I’m sure that must be some sort of record in the software industry!

If you could change ANYTHING about your games, what would it be? Why?

Actually, since I had almost complete control over each game at the time it was produced, they are exactly the way I wanted them to be. Of course, if I were doing them today, each of them would be different, but at the time, using only the limited resources, hardware, storage, speed, sound cards, etc. they were the very best I could do.

If I were to do Larry 8, it would still be animated, but in a 3-D environment unlike any game I’ve seen so far. The tests we ran at Sierra before I left truly made you feel like you were in the middle of a Warner Brothers cartoon, able to move the camera at will, flying close to Larry and the babes, seeing things from any angle, able to move smoothly from one scene to the next without that annoying wait for the next area to load. It would be great.

Although this is not possible now, back in 1981 I had a vision that I believe will be realized someday: a game where players can scan in their own faces and customize a game character until it looks just like them. I believe that soon everyone will be able to star in their own movies.

If you could make any new games (besides more LSL) what would it be about?

This is so open-ended, I don’t know the answer. Whatever it would be, I’m sure it would be a little bawdy and a lot funny.

Would you ever make another Freddy Pharkas or Torin's Passage game if Sierra allowed you to?

Of course. Both of those games had a reputation as failures at Sierra, in spite of the fact that each sold well over 200,000 copies!

Torin was planned from the beginning to be a 5-part series; I had all five sketched out before we finished Torin’s Passage. That’s one of the reasons the ending is so nebulous; I was certain that Torin’s Challenge (that was the name of Part 2) would be produced and make sense of some of the loose ends.

Freddy would be so easy to sequelize. But we never planned a sequel for Freddy because it was part of a great idea that was never taken to fruition. The original plan was that I was going to spoof all the favorite movie genres! Freddy was the Western genre parody. Following it, I would do spy movies, action movies, war movies, love stories, etc.

What are your plans for the future?

Right now, I’m working on creating a humor web site and trying to learn CGI and Perl. I’m also producing a book that should be done soon, called "You Got Laughs!" It’s a collection of hundreds of examples of Internet humor. Check out www.allowe.com for more information.

Thank you Mr. Lowe for taking the time to answer these questions!