When AL Lowe started making games for the Apple II he did so as an enthusiast, creating educational games that he could enjoy with his son. His titles were very much built from the same mould as the early Sierra graphic adventure games he’d played, and they quickly became a success. Along with his wife he would sell them at conventions and via mail order to educators and other enthusiasts. Eventually he went to the Applefest computer convention in 1982 where he was able to brush shoulders with the biggest players in software publishing at the time, including the likes of Sierra and Broderbund.

Al Lowe - a gaming comedy pioneer.

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987)

“ We decided to make it a comedy because there really weren’t any comedies out at the time...

The first memorable reference to other Sierra titles.

Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) (1988)

“ We did the best we could, but a lot of it was just guessing. If you did something that we didn’t know how to handle, we just killed you!

The graphics had improved significantly since the original mind you.

A painstaking joke to execute, but certainly memorable.

Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals (1989)

“ I was a big fan of the movie Blazing Saddles and that was my homage to that film’s ending… I put you on “the sets” of Space Quest, Police Quest, and King’s Quest.

"That girl certainly seems tired of going down on that tongue!"

Leisure Suit Larry IV (Unreleased)

Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work (1991)

We're definitely hitting the '90s now.

Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! (1993)

“ My rule at Sierra was simple. Don’t believe anything will work until Roberta ships a game with it!

Meanwhile, Larry himself had a very cartoonish look.

Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail! (1996)

“ We actually did a video shoot with some actresses but it was so excruciatingly painful that everyone who saw the footage agreed, Larry should stick with animation.

Definitely not a case of elephantiasis.

“Every publisher in the business told us ‘You don’t want to be a publisher. You want to be a designer. Let us sell these games for you so you can design more games.’” Al tells me. “At the time Sierra was the biggest publisher, did the most advertising and had the biggest sales. So it seemed obvious that we should do a deal with them. So we did. Plus, they were the closest to where we lived.”From there Al got a job at Sierra where he helped create a new educational line of adventure games for Disney, as well as work as a programmer on the early King’s Quest adventures. So how did he go from coding Winnie the Pooh (1983) to being the man behind Leisure Suit Larry ? Well, it just kind of happened. One day Sierra president Ken Williams asked Al if he wanted to do a graphical remake of an old adult-oriented text adventure that the company had considerable success with years earlier. Al asked to play the game before he agreed.The game in question, Softporn Adventure, was no comedy either. It was about a bachelor in Las Vegas trying to seduce women. After playing the game, Al Lowe immediately felt that the premise was dated, so much so that he told Ken Williams “that game is so out of date it should be wearing a leisure suit.” He also felt that the only way it could work was as a comedy. Ken agreed and the rest, as they say, is history. Leisure Suit Larry went on to become one of Sierra’s longest running adventure game franchises and one that would deal in sex and comedy in equal measure.After spending the year immersed in classic adventure games – and recently covering Leisure Suit Larry – I was itching to ask Al about the series, game design and working at Sierra back in the day. Here are some of the highlights of our conversation, title by title.The first Larry game was all about wondering if I could make people laugh. And about trying to remake a title that was an early success for Sierra. Softporn Adventure had no graphics in it at all so we thought that bringing it up to date and putting it in our “modern graphics” interpreter (with its resolution of 160 by 200 pixels!) we could get by using its original design.We decided to make it a comedy because there really weren’t any comedies out at the time and we thought that we should do something that wasn’t already in the marketplace. Which of course is the opposite of how publishers think these days! Now you have to prove that whatever you’re doing has already sold well and been successful before you will get funding. Back then it was the opposite, especially at Sierra. It was more like “hit the ball where they ain’t.”It was a niche that was wide open at that time. It’s funny that both Scott Murphy (co-creator of Space Quest) and I had worked together in the past (Disney’s The Black Cauldron), and then we both did comedies at the same time. I can’t remember if Ken ever told me that Scott was working on a funny space game. It was like “just go do your thing.” So Mark Crowe ended up doing all the graphics for Leisure Suit Larry while working full time with Scott on Space Quest. He did all the graphics during evenings and weekends and finished in about a month. It was a simpler time back then.There was no company-wide anything, everything at Sierra was learned as we went along. So you’d go off and do it your way, because nobody knew how to do anything. Roberta Williams, for instance, would write giant monolithic design documents, with page-long paragraphs that described every sequence. But she would omit many of the ‘if not, then do this’ clauses. So we programmers had to figure out what happens if you don’t do that. Usually we would ask her what she wanted, but often we’d just work it out ourselves. Sometimes she’d be fine with that. Sometimes, not.One key goal in designing Larry 2 was to stage the game so it would fit on multiple floppy disks, [but] you could play without swapping disks. I made six smaller levels where each could fit on a single floppy, which is why the game is structured as it is. Of course it wasn’t long before people were installing games onto their hard drives and all that effort was moot.Remember, none of us really knew what we were doing! It’s hard to imagine today where schools teach game design, but we were making it up as we went along. We did the best we could, but a lot of it was just guessing. If you did something that we didn’t know how to handle, we just killed you! We didn’t huge budgets for art or programming. Later on, as we got better at designing games, we found ways around that.One of my favourite parts is at the airport, where you can stand in one of three lines. And as soon as you do, the other two lines move while your line stops. It seems like that happens to me whenever I get into a line so it was a little joke that ended up as part of a game puzzle.The goals with all the Larry games were that simple, to make people laugh. Every guy I know loves telling dirty jokes and is interested in sex. While there were risqué TV shows and movies, there were no games like that. So I thought I’d go a little bit towards that, I didn’t really get very dirty, but at least I pushed the line a little. I didn’t use any profanity or nudity. Everything was innuendo. Granted, there was a lot of it! Everything was implied, mainly because the graphics were just so bad back then. If we tried to show something it would have been ludicrous. A bunch of big square pixels isn’t exciting to anyone.Towards the end of Larry 2, when you actually see the girl out in the ocean and she’s got two pixels for nipples, the game is like “Whoa! She’s topless!” I did that because it was so stupid to consider it nudity. Plus, I thought it was funny. We didn’t have a font with large letters (and of course no scalability! Every font in those games was drawn one letter at a time, by hand!) So to do that gag with big letters, I had to create the font myself, bitmapped, turning pixels on and off for each letter.I’m not sure, but it would have taken at least an afternoon. The tools we used were created by our in-house guys and since they were made just for us, they weren’t commercial quality. They crashed all the time if you did something wrong. At one point, one program corrupted your hard drive. Every time I compiled the game, I had to reformat my hard drive and reinstall everything!I set myself up with a challenge. To create a game where you play part of it as Larry and part of it as Patty. That hadn’t been done before. And there were very few games where you played as a woman. And none where you switched halfway through. Figuring out how to pull off that change in the game, and especially why, was a real challenge.I was a big fan of the movie Blazing Saddles and that was my homage to that film’s ending. When Mel Brooks did that whole scene at the end where they broke into the studio, there were so many fourth walls broken. And I thought “nobody has done that in a game” so I put you on “the sets” of Space Quest, Police Quest, and King’s Quest.That damn tongue! That was just mean. I hated that scene and tried to talk her out of it. I kept saying, ‘This isn’t fair. At least colour the edges of the tongue where you need to go or something. I mean, give us a clue!’ And she was like, ‘No that would make it too easy.’ Although I think we left in the debugger routines so, if you hold down both shift keys and the grey minus-key on the 10-keypad, you can skip that whole bit. That’s how we used to cheat and skip over parts like that during development and those commands shipped in a lot of the games we released.The greatest game I ever designed! Check it out. Not one design error!!This was the first Larry game that didn’t use typing or a text parser and instead used an icon system. After we made the change it was a bitter pill to learn how easy our games were. I put the same amount of puzzles in Larry 5 as in Larry 3 but people solved the game much faster because they didn’t have to guess which words we wanted them to type. That change was a learning experience for me, as well as the other designers like Jim Walls, Scott Murphy, and Roberta. After the first few non-typing games shipped, we figured out that we needed to include more puzzles. Typing commands was also a key part of the difficulty of those earlier games. Who knew?I had mixed emotions about moving away from the text parser. The timing was right to do it, but on the other hand it limited the games’ flexibility. In a typed game I could respond directly to all sorts of profanity and stuff like that, which is where a lot of the comedy came from. That’s why I included a zipper icon in the point and click Larry games – I wanted something funny that players could control. The icons made the games less flexible and simpler to play.I just wanted to make players laugh. Whatever I could think of that someone might find funny was good enough for me.I still laugh at the totally-inside jokes in this game. I had an agent named Desmond who threatened Larry with saxophone reeds under his fingernails! I defy you to find another reference as obscure as that one.This was the first Larry game with voice, and a game we had to make twice. The engineers who developed our development engine swore that the new “high-res” interpreter would be ready in time for Christmas, but by June I didn’t believe them. So my team developed our game in low-res and actually got it out in time for Christmas. Then, when that version had shipped, we reproduced the game in high-res and added voiceovers.Working on Larry 6 was probably the greatest development environment I ever had. Sierra set us up in a separate office building, down in Fresno, away from HQ, so we didn’t have to commute an hour on a dangerous two lane back road. We had a great team of artists, animators, and musicians, all working together in a small office, and all focused on the same game.This felt like I finally knew what to do and how to do a game the right way. I had finally figured out how to create an adventure game. Before was always a learning experience where I was figuring it out as I went along. With Larry 7, I felt like I finally knew what to do. Too bad it was the final game!We actually did a video shoot with some actresses but it was so excruciatingly painful that everyone who saw the footage agreed, Larry should stick with animation. We found a studio, hired actresses, and filmed scenes with dialogue. But it was so bad. Partly because I wrote caricatures and unrealistic dialogue. But to see a live woman say them was painful. One of the actresses was a star of some soft-porn cable movies where she was believable, but having her do comedy whilst being sexy was just horrible. One test made us realise that we couldn’t and shouldn’t continue. And that was the end of it. I’m convinced the decision to stick with animation was the right choice.

Thanks to Al Lowe for his time, and you can check out his website where Al provides CyberJoke 3000™, a joke-a-day email service as well as links to all the detailed design documents he used when creating all the Larry games at Sierra.Kosta Andreadis is a freelance writer and musician based in Melbourne. Check out his tunes and his Twitter.