Lifetime Achievement Award: Al Lowe

Kirk: Okay, enough with the thinking. Back to Benny Hill. The Larry games, although bawdy, never actually became anything smuttier than Benny Hill who was just kind of good-natured fun.

Al: Well, part of that was because Benny Hill was limited by his medium.

Kirk: Television, or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, depending upon the decade.

Al: In my case, I think that we probably could have gone farther, but I didn't feel comfortable doing that. We went to the limit where I felt we should go, and I was never censored by Sierra until right at the very end. I mean, we had a few problems with Larry 7. We had a Wal-Mart fight. I don't know if you're familiar with Wal-Mart and their efforts to clean up the music business.

Kirk: Yeah. Well, I see all the CDs upon which the First Amendment has replaced the album cover, so...

Al: Yeah, and Wal-Mart is a 900-pound gorilla of retail. If they're not interested in the game, then it's going to be hard to sell it. They're like Radio Shack was in the early 80s; they're 25% of the market. But they are very conservative...in foolish, silly ways. We had statues in Larry 7 that were naked, you know, but they were sculptures! They were art, not people or anything. And Wal-Mart said they couldn't sell our game if we had those unclothed statues in there, so we made a version for them. I think we tied gauze over them. [Laughs]

Kirk: [Laughs]

Al: The artists were laughing when they did it. They said, "Okay, well, if they can to it to Michaelangelo, they can do it to us." But some things were weird. They wanted a text dump of the game. We sent them a text file and they sent back this huge list of changes. I had probably a hundred jokes in the game for Bill Clinton to tell. You know, the animatronic Mr. Clinton? Well, one of those jokes was the one about the two dogs at the veterinarian's office. The one said to the other, "Why are you here?" And the other said, "Oh, I'm being neutered." And the first said, "Oh, that's terrible. What'd you do?" And he said, "I got in my owner's brand new Porsche and crapped on his leather seats." "Oh, that's terrible." "Why are you in?" "Oh, my mistress likes to vacuum in the nude. The other day she was cleaning underneath the sofa and I jumped on her back and mounted her." "So, are you gonna be neutered to?" The other said, "No, I'm just getting my nails trimmed!"

Kirk: [Laughs]

Al: And Wal-Mart made us take that joke out! They said they couldn't sell a game that contained beastiality! Isn't that insane? It's a joke!!

Kirk: Well, how do you explain Wal-Mart?

Al: I guess my point is that the only censorship we ever received was because of Wal-Mart, not because of Sierra or Ken Williams.

Kirk: Yeah, and it was probably at a time when society was leaning that way. Of course, now we've swung in the other direction. How do you feel about the level of sex and violence in video games today? Is there anything you think is pushing it too far beyond where Larry was?

Al: I'd say I grew tired of the violence in the games, and I've stopped playing those games. In fact, I've stopped playing many games now. I don't play nearly as many games as I once did, frankly because I find them boring. A lot of the sim games and the strategy games always feel like...as a programmer, I can see the algorithms churning in the background, you know? You would make these decisions, and they weren't based on logic or reality or anything, but because that's how the programmer had weighted it; that this particular character needed to have this many points in this area in order to succeed. With those kind of things, it's like I can see the wheels turning in the background, and that's no fun to me. And it does irk me, I'll have to admit, that Wal-Mart will sell games with unlimited violence, you know, but that they wouldn't sell a game that had a silly joke in it.

Kirk: Or a naked statue.

Al: Or a naked statue, and yet you could literally walk across the aisle and pick up Doom or Quake or any of those games and far worse. And the other irony is that you could then walk across to the next aisle and buy a paperback book that had sex scenes galore!

Kirk: The books with a half-naked Fabio on the cover.

Al: Graphic, you know? But because it was text in a book. That was okay. I don't know. I think they often take the easy way out, and if people can see something, I guess it's easier to censor it.

Kirk: Yeah, it's easy to pick up a game box and see what kind of content it contains, as opposed to a book where you have to pick it up and at least read the jacket. And most people, I don't think, want to be bothered with that much effort.

Al: You know, to be honest with you, I think the people at Wal-Mart don't bother reading the books. Or else they just believe if you read it it's okay, but if you see it, then it's not. There's no other excuse for it. But then, look at the video-tapes they sell! They sell video-tapes that have R rated content, and Larry, I don't think, never was really R.

Kirk: Well, perhaps some of the Easter eggs.

Al: [Laughs] Oh, well yeah...ya got me there!

Continue to Part 5, unless you don't want to know who inspired Leisure Suit Larry and whatever happened part 4.