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An Interview With
Al Lowe
For the
better part of two decades, Al Lowe worked for Sierra Online. Over
that time span, he gave us two very memorable characters in Leisure
Suit Larry and Freddy
Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist, in addition to contributing to
other classic series such as King's Quest & Police Quest.
Recently, I
got the privilege of conducting an interivew with Al by phone, and
for 45 minutes or so, we talked about Larry, Freddy, the evolution
of sound in games, and whatever other semi-intelligent questions I
could string together. It was a blast, and it went a little
something like this:
VGN: Okay,
first of all just to clear the air, what is the status as far as you
possibly coming back to Sierra to work on the new Leisure Suit Larry
game?
AL: Well, the
status is that they never called me. They evidently had no interest
in what I had to offer them. You know, I don't know that much about
Larry. They must have found people who were better.
VGN: Well,
they're making a mistake in my opinion.
AL: Well, thank
you, but the proof will be in the game. If they create a great game
then that'll be one thing. If they don't, well, that'll be another.
We'll know soon enough.
VGN: Let's move
back in time here. Now you were with Sierra for - what, 16 years,
right?
AL:
That's right.
VGN: Obviously
technology changed a great deal over that time. What was it like
seeing your games evolve first hand?
AL: That's the
only way I could see it. (laughter) It was wonderful, because when
we started out, I had dreams that were impossible. But as I worked
there, over time, they became possible. Now, not everything that I
dreamed of back in the early 80s came to be. But much of it did. And
more soon will, I believe.
VGN: You also
composed music for games - what was it like moving from simple PC
speakers to dedicated sound cards like the Sound
Blasters?
AL: Well, the
PC industry owes a great deal to Sierra in that respect. We were the
first people to take advantage of MIDI, expecting people to pay $500
for a MIDI interface card, and $800-1000 for a synthesizer and hook
it up to a stereo, just so they could hear great music. And while we
were rather naive, we were just pushing ahead. We just wanted great
sound in our games.
Meanwhile,
(former Sierra Online CEO) Ken Williams was working hard trying to
convince (musical instrument manufacturer) Roland that they should
mass-produce a soundboard for computers that everybody would want to
buy. And he never did convince them - they thought that their market
was the musical instrument store, not the computer store. Their
customer was a musician, not a PC owner.
We wanted
them to make a MIDI interface synthesizer and digital audio
converter, a sound playback chip, all built on one board. If they
could get it down to just a few chips, they could sell it for $99.
That eventually happened - but it didn't happen through Roland; it
happened with SoundBlaster. SoundBlaster grabbed the market and took
off and ran with it, and the rest is history.
When I first
started writing music for games, you had to devote the entire CPU to
making sound. We actually sent a positive voltage to push the
speaker cone out, pause for so many milliseconds, and then send a
negative voltage to pull the cone back in. And then wait so many
milliseconds to push the cone back out. If you do that 440 times in
a second, the computer will play the note A. To play the note B, you
had to do it a little bit faster, and your wait loops had to be
shorter. That was literally the level that I started at, just
pushing & pulling the speaker cone out with voltage.
Moving to
the PCJr was such a thrill. It had 3 sound channels and a fourth
noise channel, so you could actually play a 3 note cord and also
have some noise that was supposed to be a cymbal. That was
really sensational. And the Commodore 64 came out with a
really nice synthesizer chip built in, too.
Slightly
over 10 years later, on Love For Sail (Larry 7), we recorded live
musicians in a studio and digitized their performance, stored it on
CD, copied it to your hard drive and played it back to you. You were
actually listening to a complete sample. This was all stuff that
Sierra had to create from scratch, this was before MP3s and all the
standard compression schemes were around. We had engineers who
figured out how we could compress .WAV files in half. That would be
sensational, and we got to that point. MP3s are condensed to what,
tenfold or more - we were happy to get down to half the size, and
then later, one-third the size. That was pretty cool, but then MP3
caught up and moved past it. But back then, there were no tools to
do that. Everything had to be built by hand.
VGN: Wow. That
could be the whole interview. That's a really fascinating topic; I
didn't realize it was that complicated to make just a little beep
back then.
AL: When we
first started with MIDI, there were no books published
about it. I knew about it because I was a musician and we were
trying to figure out what to do with music. And I said there's this
new association just formed of all the musical instrument
manufacturers. If you've ever seen pictures of performing bands in
the early 80s, the keyboard players had racks of maybe 3 or 4 or
even 6 keyboards because each made a different sound that the others
couldn't. Nowadays, you just have chips in small units. If you want
a different sounds, one keyboard will play any synth.
But back in
the mid 80s the instrument manufacturers all got together and said,
"Let's create one standard using an agreed-upon serial steam of
data". As I said, there were no books, or any information published
about it. So we went to the MIDI foundation and they sent us a copy
of specification #1, which said "this voltage is a plus, and this
voltage is a minus, and there's a gap in between them for so many
microseconds..." It was pretty much all the level of voltages
required to make it work.
VGN: That's
awesome. Let's talk for a second about censorship. I was pretty
young back when the first Larry came out. That was what,
1987?
AL:
Yeah.
VGN: So I was
about maybe 7 or 8.
AL: Ha ha! Oh
my...
VGN: Yeah, now
today of course when games like Grand Theft Auto and things of that
nature come out, you get parent groups complaining about it. What
was it like for you, back when Larry 1 was released?
AL: We didn't
receive a lot of notice at first, because the game didn't sell that
well. When the game first came out, it was the worst performing
title ever released by Sierra. And part of that was because there
had been no advertising or marketing really. So I kind of forgot
about it and moved on to programming another game (Police Quest 1).
And every month, Larry 1 doubled in sales, until after a year, it
finally got on the bestsellers list. Imagine that today: now a game
that doesn't sell is gone within a month.
But when
Larry was hot, and Police Quest came out with a hooker and other
edgy content, and Space Quest had a bar and drinking in it...
eventually the California legislature introduced "the Leisure Suit
Larry Bill" that stated no video game could be sold that featured
smoking, or drinking, or sex, or anything else of interest. So a
group of publishers testified before the sub-committee, and happily,
the bill died.
We had
almost no parental groups protesting, I think because we billed
Larry as an adult game. In fact, the boxes always were more adult
than my games themselves. As a parent, I believe that it's my job to
determine what my child is exposed to. Other parents should do
likewise. I'm opposed to censorship, but I'm for parental
responsibility.
VGN:
Well, it's interesting to hear that Larry wasn't a very
controversial figure back then. But what if you tried to introduce
him today in this market, what kind of reaction do you think he'd
get?
AL: Well, it's
hard to tell, because other games since have gone much farther than
I ever did. It's a completely different market now. I wouldn't be
comfortable designing a game that portrayed violence toward women or
some of the other things that you see in games today. On the other
hand, I enjoy Simpsons Hit n' Run because when you drive over
someone they say "Hey, that's gonna leave a mark" and other funny
remarks, because it's obviously cartoon violence and it's silly. I
can stand that. The hardcore bloodspewing and flying body parts?
That just doesn't appeal to me.
VGN:
That's definitely understandable. Now I'm a big, big, big
fan of Freddy Pharkas. I like Larry, but Freddy always just clicked
better for me. How exactly did he come to be?
AL: Uhh, I got
tongue-tied.
VGN: (laughing)
Really?
AL: Yeah, I
knew I wanted to do a Western and I was in a brainstorming session
with Roberta Williams and Josh Mandel. We were discussing what the
lead character should do for living. I started to say farmer and
also rancher and I got the two words mixed together and it sort of
came out as "farmercer", and then to make a joke out of my stupidity
I said, "Or he could be a pharmacist!" I immediately thought of
"frontier pharmacist", and said, "Hey, why not? That would be a
great premise for a game".
VGN:
Well, at any rate, it was a hilarious game.
AL:
Thank you.
VGN:
Now, let's pretend for a second that copyrights aren't
issue, you've got a completely unlimited budget, and all the time in
the world to make any game you want. Would you do another Larry
game, give Freddy a sequel, or would you something completely
different?
AL: That's a
good question. I've wondered that myself...I suppose I would do
something completely different. Although, it wouldn't be very far
away from Larry or Freddy, because that's who I truly am. And I
think in order to be successful, you have to put a little bit of
yourself in the product.
I think I
would do something new today, just because Larry's been sitting on
the shelf so long and I wouldn't want gamers to think the new game
is just more of the same. In today's marketplace, there's just no
interest for a true, straight adventure game. Yes, I would start
fresh, but it probably would end up being damn close to what I've
done anyway. You know, "the leaf doesn't fall too far from the
tree..."
VGN: Yeah, I
really do miss the old adventure games - I mean that was what I grew
up on, so I'm somewhat hopeful that eventually they'll make a
comeback. It always seems like things are getting recycled in the
video game industry anyway...
AL: I believe
strongly that story-based games will always be around. I mean, ever
since the early days of mankind, sitting around the campfire,
trading tales of the mastodon kill, storytellers have always been
appreciated. And it'll be that way again in games too. Maybe not as
straight adventure games, but in some form or another, I
believe.
VGN: Now, when
CD-ROMs became a viable medium, and your games began featuring voice
acting, what role did you have in casting the voice actors?
AL: On my
games, I had complete control. We had a company in Hollywood that
helped us cast voice actors; we'd audition them and chose who we
wanted. One of the hardest choices I ever made was the voice of
Larry.
VGN: I think
you did a good job there, I thought Jan Rabson was great as
Larry.
AL: Thank you.
I was happy with him over the years. I listened to the tape of all
the Larry candidates over and over. There were several great actors
in the running. But Jan had that screwed-up, out-of-it,
trying-to-be-hip-but-can't attitude in his voice that was just
perfect for Larry. He could be whiny, but not so whiny that you
wanted to kill him before the end of the game. You know, voices are
like cooking; too much of one spice and you can't take it. But Jan
got it just right.
And don't
forget Neil Ross, the narrator of the Larry games, plus he was the
narrator for Freddy Pharkas. Very few people realize he did both
because his voice sounds so different. Neil had that calming,
soothing, know-it-all, self-aware feeling to his tone. And both of
those guys (Jan & Neil) were "first take artists." They'd get it
right their first try. Usually, if I'd make a suggestion and we'd
try a different way, it just wasn't as good as their first read.
VGN: Yeah, the
line by Neil describing Larry's pornographic photo ID still kills
me.
AL: I don't
remember that one.
VGN: It was in
Larry 7, you'd buy the dirty pictures from that Xqwzts guy, and then
used the mucilage to stamp it onto a passport or something like
that.
AL: (laughing)
Oh that's right.
VGN: I can't
remember what I did this morning to save my life, but I can remember
just about every detail of playing your games 6 or 7 years ago. I
keep the important stuff.
AL:
You know, it's funny, I got an e-mail from someone saying
they were having trouble in Windows XP, so I installed Larry 7 and
it ran perfectly on my machine. But I played it a while and I
started laughing at my own jokes. I hadn't heard them in 6 or 7
years and I didn't remember what happened if you went here or did
that. I ended up playing for an hour and thinking, "Hey, this is a
pretty funny game."
VGN: Here's
something I've been wondering - who came up with the scratch and
sniff card idea for Larry 7?
AL: Uh, guilty.
I wanted to put something extra in the box. No one knows how much
fun we had doing the research. We had to find a manufacturer, we had
to figure out the smells -- it was hours of laughter going through
with the scratch & sniff people. You know, tough questions like,
"Is this farty enough?"
VGN: Mine
smells mostly like fish nowadays.
AL: I got the
idea because my wife gets these magazines with those damned perfume
ads, and they're SO strong. When they came into the house, I'd tear
them all out and throw them away. Those gave me the idea. I divided
the card up into 9 squares. They charged us so much per smell. I
can't remember exactly how it broke down in price, but I think it
added a lot to the game.
 I
also fought hard to get Sierra to print the entire
CD-ROM label for Larry 7, which they didn't want to
do at first because it saved them a penny a disk.
I said, you're missing the point: look at Larry. His
crotch is in the center of the disc, you know, shot
out and that's funny. Just pay the
extra penny and put that in there. But when you're
selling half a million, each penny becomes $50,000.
VGN:
Okay Al, I think that's about all I've got to ask -
anything to say to your fans before we wrap this up?
AL: Yes, I want
to tell them all to come see Al Lowe's Humor Site - which was recently named
one of PC Magazine's Top 100 Undiscovered Sites. And sign up for my
free daily joke e-mail, CyberJoke 3000™. Let me keep trying to make
you laugh, even if it's not in a computer game!
Thanks again
to Al Lowe for taking the time to do this interview. Be sure to
check out his site, he's got some hilarious sight gags and stories
on there, and it's a great way to kill time at work.
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