Lifetime Achievement Award: Al Lowe

Kirk: What type of games are you playing today? What are your favorite games?

Al: Well, I've always had a soft spot for the Monkey Island games and the LucasArts games in general. Obviously, they're very close to what I do and therefore were obviously right.

Kirk: [Laughs]

Al: I think those are really fun games.

Kirk: Yeah. They're helping to keep the adventure game alive.

Al: I enjoy those. I still do flight sims. I play golf games. Let's see...but I don't like a lot of shoot-em-ups and stuff. I was never very good at twitch games, and that's part of the reason. And the RPGs and stuff...I always felt like I was missing something. And finally, I said to a friend at Sierra who was a big RPG guy, "You gotta show me this game because I just don't get it. I play it and I do different things and it seems like all I do is just talk to people and trade stuff and/or kill people. There must be more to the game than this." And he said, "No."

Kirk: [Laughs]

Al: "Oh, oh, that's it! Okay, well then I guess I do get it" You know, games are built for the mass market; 15- to 25-year-old males. But then, I'm not a 15- to 25-year-old male anymore, either.

Kirk: Well, neither was Larry. Speaking of whom, was there a direct inspiration for the character himself or was he kind of an amalgamation of a bunch of people or just something you stumbled across one day in a drunken stupor?

Al: Well, Larry grew out of a need for me to have someone to make fun of.

Kirk: Okay.

Al: I needed somebody to be the butt of the jokes; that's how the character came up. I thought it would be funnier to have him be lame and out of touch and allow the game to make fun of him. So, that was part of it. Another part of it was that there was a guy who worked for Sierra's sales department who reminds me a whole lot of Larry, and, in fact, at one point Larry had his name, and -

Kirk: [Laughs] Am I allowed to ask what that name was?

Al: Yes, you're certainly allowed to ask.

Kirk: Are you allowed to answer what that name was?

Al: [Laughs] Hell, no! But right before the game shipped, he quit the company! So somebody called me up and said, "We've gotta give this guy a new last name. You better do a search and replace." So, I thought, jeez, with a title so alliterative, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, that his last name should start with an L, too. Well, I grabbed my encyclopedia--the L volume--and flipped it open, and on the first page was a picture of Arthur B. Laffer, the inventor of the Laffer Curve. Remember Reaganomics? The Trickle-Down Theory of economics?

Kirk: Barely.

Al: Well, yeah, he was popular in the...what...early 80s, I guess. Anyway, he had his picture in the encyclopedia, and when I saw his last name I thought, "What better name for a comic character than Laffer?" And, so, that's how Larry actually got his last name.

Kirk: Okay, you gave us six original adventures with Mr. Laffer, I believe, did you ever get -

Al: I thought the last one was Larry 7.

Kirk: [Laughs] Well, yeah, that's confusing, isn't it? I wonder how that happened (wink, wink).

Al: Well, I thought it was going to be a trilogy.

Kirk: Yeah.

Al: And when I finished the third game, I kind of wrapped it all up and put a big bow on it. I brought the story line full circle and had Larry and Patti fall out of the game -

Kirk: Yep.

Al: - and into the back lot at Sierra, you know [Laughs], which was my Mel Brooks Blazing Saddles homage -

Kirk: Right.

Al: - because I loved that idea that the Blazing Saddles story line would fall out of a Western set and into a fight scene with the Busby Berkeley dancers.

Kirk: Yep.

Al: So, I ended Larry 3 with Larry taking a job with Ken Williams and programming his life's story. He says, "It all starts outside a bar named Lefty's..." which, of course, was the opening scene in Larry 1.

Kirk: Yep.

Al: And, so, I thought it was all done and I went on and did other things and worked on other projects. Pretty soon, the sales force came back and said, "When's the next Larry game coming out?" And I said, "Well, there's not going to be a Larry 4. I'm done. This is it. It's over. I'll do some other stuff now." And I did Freddy Pharkas.

Kirk: Yes.

Al: And the sales people kept coming back to me to say, "You're crazy. The people are clamoring for another game." And so, I was really torn when we decided that would be my next project. I was stuck because I had painted myself into such a corner. I couldn't get out of it. So, one day I stumbled upon a person that I hadn't seen for a while and she said, "What are you working on now, Larry 4?" And I flippantly replied, "No, no, Larry 5, of course," just as a joke. And suddenly, I thought, "You know, maybe that's the way out of this dilemma!" And so, that's how the missing episode took place. And I didn't realize it at the time, but it turned out to be a hell of a marketing gimmick, too, because it really bought people's mind share. They would say, "Larry 5? Wait a second, I don't think I played Larry 4 yet." And suddenly, you hooked their brain and they got involved mentally. It really did a lot for Larry 5 sales. And, it got me out of a bad jam.

Kirk: Do you still have people asking you if they can get their hands on a copy of Larry 4?

Al: [Laughs] Of course. All the time.

Continue to Part 6, where Al fondly formalizes Freddy Pharkas and I fervently find fault with the fulsome Phantasmagoria.