Lifetime Achievement Award: Al Lowe

Kirk: Okay, now the whole purpose of the Larry games was to get Larry laid. By the end of Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love for Sail, he actually had been laid more often than most people who played his games.

Al: [Laughs]

Kirk: Did Larry ever actually help you get laid?

Al: Oh, no. Quite the opposite.

Kirk: [Laughs]

Al: Actually, I always could tell when a woman had only seen the Larry packaging or whether she had played the game all the way through.

Kirk: Yeah, your picture was usually on the box somewhere.

Al: Well, not only that, but every woman upset about the "male chauvinist pig" aspect of the game was someone who hadn't played the game.

Kirk: As is usual.

Al: And every woman who had played the game realized that, if anything, it was a female chauvinist game...because the women always came out on top.

Kirk: So to speak.

Al: The babes were always smarter and better looking and brighter and superior in every aspect to this jerk of a guy. It's funny how women gamers were my biggest supporters. The ones who had played it, loved it. I like to think that part of it was they'd all dated somebody like Larry. [Laughs]

Kirk: [Laughs] I know my fiancee just finished playing...she got an iMac and I gave her ]Larry 7 and she greatly enjoyed that; got through it much faster than I did, in fact.

Al: Wow, good for her. I was very pleased with Larry 7's design in several ways because I really felt like I had finally figured out how to do these games. I mean, it sounds silly for somebody with 25 games under his belt, but on each game, I was learning; I was trying to figure what I should be doing and how to do it better, and figuring out what would make it more enjoyable. And I was happy with [Larry] 7 in a lot of ways. There were many aspects of it that, as a designer, I felt were more sophisticated and more satisfying. I don't know if it came off that way to the player, but things like the PA announcer, you know, who you think at first is just making these silly, stupid announcements. But, later on in the game, you realize that the PA announcements are really helping you, giving you guidance. And the fact that everything Larry had to do, he could not possibly do. He had to figure out a way to cheat at every one of them. And for people to make that mental leap of going, "Well, I can't win. There's no way of...whoa, wait a minute. I have to cheat!" You know? And when that realization comes, there's a nice, "Ah-hah, I get it," moment where you realize the designer's intent.

Kirk: Let's see. Where there any obvious influences you used for the humor--for the style of humor you used throughout the series?

Al: Well, you know, I guess every comedian and comedy I've ever seen and laughed at, I suppose. I think I'm like most other writers; you know, I steal everything that's not nailed down.

Kirk: Right.

Al: So, I guess I make a conscious effort not to lift verbatim. I try to take it and make fun of it or improve it or make it funnier or sillier or something. But I think there's a lot of...oh, gosh, there's a lot of Benny Hill in the games. I didn't realize that when I started, but I just kind of fell into a Benny Hill groove because he, too, was in a medium that wouldn't allow any real sex. He kept it right on the border, pushed it as far as he could push it.

Kirk: Well, that's why we all watched. As much as we liked watching Benny smack Jacky Wright on the head, ultimately, it was Hill's Angels and the women in garter belts that kept us...well, me coming back.

Al: And that's where I was comfortable. I didn't want to do pornography. I never really had any interest in that. I was trying to make people laugh, and I thought the way to do that was to humiliate this poor little character. I did a lot of that; my sense of humor isn't sophisticated enough to do Noel Coward or drawing room comedy.

Kirk: [Laughs]

Al: That's not me. That's not the kind of person I am.

Kirk: I don't know if that audience was really playing computer games at that point anyway.

Al: True. It worked out, didn't it?

Kirk: Yeah.

Al: You know, there's another thing about games of the 80s. I mentioned this in one of the articles posted on my site. I think adventure games were the right kind of game for the kind of person who was playing, particularly the PC people. I really believe that if you could run DOS and figure out all the stupid, crazy stuff like extended memory and how to put drivers in high memory and memory management that you had to do if you were going to be successful with a PC back in the 80s, then you just had to be a puzzle solver.

Kirk: Right.

Al: And remember command lines, where you type in commands? Adventure games really played right into the strong suit of those engineer types who were good at that. I remember vividly back in the late 80s, Ken and I had a conversation; "Won't it be great when everybody has a computer and can play our games?" We figured that when computers were in 50% of homes, that was probably as far as it was gonna go. The other half probably didn't need one or care. Although now it looks like we were underestimating. But what we didn't take into consideration was that when 50% of people have computers, they're gonna want to watch FOX! They're not gonna be interested in PBS and thinking games, you know?

Kirk: Right.

Al: They're not gonna be into brain teasers and mental challenges even if it is burlesque and broad humor. They're not gonna be committed to solving puzzles. They're gonna want mindless shoot-em-ups. So, while we were close on our estimates of potential market, we were way off on the type of game that would suit the masses, I guess. Adventure games were skimming the cream of the audience fifteen years ago--ten years ago, even--because to use a computer successfully, you had to have a high IQ, you had to have perseverance, you had to have real puzzle solving skills. And those skills are perfectly suited for adventure games. That's not the case now with grandmothers and teenagers and normal--and I mean that in a nice way--normal people who don't have to use their problem solving skills very often.

Continue to Part 4, where Al recounts his battles with 900-pound gorillas.