20 Questions With Al Lowe
By Ryan Fulton

The year was 1987, I had just come home from the mall, and I was psyched because I had just bought my own copy of a game that I had only heard about from the older guys in the computer lab. I booted up my almighty 286 (which had just replaced my 8088) and I was ready for action. Unleashing the 5.25 floppy diskette into the drive and typed "A:>larry". Little did I know that on that fateful day I was playing what would later become one of the greatest adventure sagas ever. Now 15 years later, I have the great honor of interviewing Larry's creator, Al Lowe.

Professional Questions

1) To ensure your age (and that you are really Al Lowe) The Mushroom has decided to give you this little verification test, all you have to do is answer 3 correctly.

1.) If Bo Derek were here, I'd ask her to:
a) Explain what happened to her movie career.
b) Give me some money to make Leisure Suit Larry 8.
c) Get off the computer and come to bed.
d) Do my laundry and clean my house while she's here.

C

2) Which was not a member of the Marx Brothers:
a) Groucho Marx
b) Harpo Marx
c) Gummo Marx
d) Onyer Marx

D

3) What is the plot of Leisure Suit Larry 4:
a) Larry becomes impotent and travels the world in search of himself
b) Larry sleeps with many beautiful women, and Passionate Patty is clueless.
c) Larry has nothing to do with the game.
d) Actually Larry 4 is about…. Oops the cyanide just kicked in!

D

Fill in the blank from this Leisure Suit Larry 1 quote: (When attempting to kick the door at the hotel) "Oh kick, kick, kick doesn't anybody ___knock________ anymore?"

(Not bad 3 out of 4. The last answer was nothing changes… if you play the game it leaves the blank in place! -Ryan)

(Ryan, you have too much free time. -Kev)

Now that we got that out of the way, on with the interview!

2) Are you planning on attending E3 this year, and if so is there anything you are interested in seeing (why do I feel a booth babes reference coming on)?

I will not attend E3 this year, unless something dramatic happens in the next few weeks. I am retired from game design and am currently working on no projects. Why attend?

3) Senator Liberman has been attacking the games industry; whenever the media mentions sex and violence in the industry they only show Doom and never Leisure Suit Larry. Does that offend you?

Not at all. I never considered the Larry games to be about sex that much, but rather about humor, built upon awkward situations (that often included sex).

5) Although we would constantly run into the drunk from Lefty's Bar in the various games, what we really want to know is, what happened to girl that was sitting at the end of the bar who slapped you (repeatedly) when you tried to make a pass at her?

I keep her here at my home, where she satisfies my every desire. Either that, or Larry married her and that's why he won't do another game.

6) What was the most important thing you learned about being the Chief Technical Officer of a dot-com company?

Never become the Chief Technical Officer of a dot-com company! Actually, it was a blast. I hired a great team of programmers, and they produced in a few months the best product in the world in our little specialized niche. We worked our butts off. Unfortunately, no one in the sales department did and with no sales, the company had no income. When it ran out of money, everything went away!

7) It would seem that over the years there are very few true adventure games following the initial Sierra style (e.g., Leisure Suit Larry, Gold Rush, King's Quest etc.) In the dawn of this gaming era, where do you see the future of adventure games?

I believe adventure games have been absorbed by the other game genres, who took the best adventure had to offer and folded that into their game play. While story lines still haven't caught up, they will before long and then there will be no reason to play an adventure game at all.

8) Have you played Escape From Monkey Island, the 3-D LucasArts release? If so, what are your thoughts on it? If not, was there any particular reason?

I loved it. But I've always been a sucker for that style of humor, as you must know from my games. No one was more disappointed than I that it did not sell well.

9) Considering the popularity of the Leisure Suit Larry series, and the fact that the games needed to be kept clean enough so that they wouldn't end up on the 3rd shelf of the smut section in some dingy sex shop, can you tell us about some of the scenes in the various games that needed to be touched up or were removed simply because they were too racy?

There never were any! That would be admitting to poor game design. I knew where the line was, and I kept my design just this side of it. There was never a battle of "remove that or else!" I wanted my games to ship on time and on budget and you can't do that if you don't have a clear vision of where you're going from the very beginning.

10) Despite the recent rejection of Larry Laffer from Sierra, do you still hold a slight bit of hope that he will one day return in his full polyester glory? (Even Sierra dumped Larry.)

I hold a very slight hope. I'm a pragmatist. When Sierra is ready to create a new Larry, I'm ready and waiting to do it! I can think of nothing I'd rather do.

Hey, I thought you were going to plug my web site, http://www.allowe.com/? Wouldn't this be a good place to tell everybody about all the humor I have posted there? Or my free daily email of jokes, which they can get just by sending a blank email to CyberJoke3000-subscribe@yahooGroups.com

On to the Next 10 Questions!