For those of you that haven’t played a Leisure Suit Larry game before, what sort of expectations would you have going in? As long as you’re vaguely aware of the series’ decades-long reputation, then something along the lines of an adventure game filled with wall-to-wall sex, nudity, and scantily clad women would probably come to mind. In other words, the sort of thing that would make the most respected people in the community - those that buy up all the 4AM timeslots on commercial TV - reach out for their bibles in disgust.

A loveable loser.

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Why's the waiter in the hot tub?

A gruesome death awaits behind three. Choose wisely, Mickey.

MR. LOWE’S OPUS

Something like this, Kosta?

It’s unfortunate that many see this long running series from Sierra as a set of crude games where the goals are to seduce and sleep with a bunch of different women. Unfortunate, but also not entirely unfair because in some ways that sentiment is right. The Leisure Suit Larry games can get crude and for many entries the goals are that simple, but what almost always gets lost in the translation is that as a whole these games (well, the ones developed and overseen by Al Lowe) are not malicious or predatory in any way. In fact they’re quite funny, and when you get right down to it are comedies. Sex-themed comedies which, even with six Larry games released, is still a pretty rare thing.Anyone who has spent any real time with a Leisure Suit Larry game will know that the majority of the laughs are mined from Larry Laffer being the lovable loser, trying and subsequently failing in his efforts to seduce various women.For the most part these games are devoid of any actual nudity or explicit sexual content too. And in a weird way the fact that Larry’s goals in his early adventures are in finding love, makes both the character and the games endearing. Even if a lot of the humour can feel, well, dated.In 1981 Sierra acquired the rights to publish a game for the Apple II called Softporn Adventure, and based on that tile you should be able to guess what it was about. “A time-travelling cyborg who goes back in time to stop the human resistance from ever getting their hands on his hands?” Not quite, that would be silly. No, Softporn Adventure is about a nameless party-animal type trying to score with a bunch of different women in a Las Vegas-like environment. And as we’re talking about 1981, the year where Luke Skywalker found out some pretty interesting news about his parents, it was strictly a text-based affair.Although well received by some critics, Softporn Adventure was still seen by many as a pretty simple game with very little depth. When put next to the various ‘High-Res Adventures’ being developed by the likes of Roberta Williams, as well as other text adventures from Infocom, technically it looked and felt quite primitive. But this didn’t stop Softporn Adventure from becoming a bit of a cultural phenomenon. After all, it was about sex, that thing that parents divert their children’s attention from by changing the channel to a more appropriately violent program.With no real graphics and just a screen full of text, the controversy around Softporn Adventure quickly blew over. And over the next few years, as the profile of Sierra grew alongside the boom in home computer sales, the company began creating true graphic adventures; starting with King’s Quest Now, based on the success of Softporn Adventure you might imagine the studio releasing a string of Sex Quest titles, but a year or so before the release of King’s Quest Sierra got the rights to develop games and educational software for Disney. And as part of that deal it would have to effectively stop selling Softporn Adventure, and in the process remove it from its software line-up.So in the early ‘80s Sierra became a studio that created games that could be enjoyed by the entire family, as well as the makers of educational software that would teach kids about stuff like Mickey’s involvement in the faking of the moon landing.By the time he bought an Apple II in 1980, Al Lowe had already been working as a high school music teacher for over a decade. During this time his career had reached its peak in terms of salary. Not that he entered into education with dreams of untold riches, but more and more of his time was spent doing paperwork and getting involved in the administrative side of things.Based on movies depicting the American education system you can probably guess that he didn’t have a personal assistant or secretary. He was most likely too busy worrying about arts funding and explaining to parents that their child’s ability to bust dope rhymes gave them a special insight into the works of the original MC, William Shakespeare.What Al actually wanted though was access to a word processor, something to make the whole typing process a lot quicker. Now that may sound like a reasonable thing to ask for, but thirty plus years ago a word processor cost in the thousands of dollars. Sure that seems like a crazy amount of money for a piece of software that lets you write something with the ability to edit out all of your stupid ideas

like a talking razor with an Italian accent that says “that’s a nice close shave!”

Before you ask, no, she doesn't come with the computer.

The Creepy-as-all-hell Wizard and the Princess.

Ken Williams. (Again. Hehe.)

OPEN DOOR… TO ADVENTURE & LEISURE SUIT LARRY 1

Al Lowe, prankster.

Larry chases a blow-up doll across the title screen.

“ This commitment to the ‘you can never have enough jokes’ school of comedy is one of the hallmarks of the series.

For example...

You've got my number.

“ The clever and often funny parser responses are also probably the only parts of the game that have aged gracefully.

Many interactions - like changing TV stations - turn into a running set of jokes.

Exhibit B. (Of many.)

, but computers were still a relatively new thing in the workplace.So with no option of getting the school district to buy him the software he needed to make his job easier, Al was able to gain access to one of their computers and slowly but surely teach himself how to program and in turn create little applications that did just that.Not seen as a chore or a cumbersome thing to do, this tinkering quickly became a passion and in no time Al Lowe became a hacker and programmer in the truest sense, learning the ins and outs of computing through magazines, books, going to conventions, and just looking at code. With help from his wife he was also able to package and sell the software via mail order and at conventions. At home he would also use his computer to play games with his son. Mainly those created by Roberta Williams at Sierra; titles like Wizard and the Princess. This led him to start developing his own games in the mould of Sierra titles, but with the aim of making them both fun to play and educational.Whilst at a convention showing off his game creations in a small booth, he was able to brush shoulders with all the burgeoning new players in software publishing. Still a relatively small industry, there was a genuine drought of quality software and an eager audience ready to play the latest and greatest games. This meant that his efforts drew immediate attention, and amongst all the offers from publishers looking to license his software the one from Ken Williams at Sierra made the most sense. Sierra games shared a similar sensibility, plus it didn’t hurt that their offices were close to where he lived.It wasn’t long after this that Sierra stitched up the rights to create software utilising Disney characters, so it made sense to hire Al Lowe, the high school music teacher turned programmer to help create a new line of educational games. At Sierra he would quickly become a jack of all trades, working on various titles as a programmer as well as creating music for a number of games.So how did Al Lowe go from programing and writing music for King’s Quest II and III , and then leading development on an adaptation of Disney’s The Black Cauldron, to Leisure Suit Larry? Well, it just sort of happened.Once Sierra lost the Disney license, Ken Williams was speaking to Al Lowe over lunch one day about potential projects. Al told him he wasn’t sure what his next game should be, so Ken mentioned Softporn Adventure and floated the idea of updating it using their AGI engine. It was a pretty big seller back in its day, and Ken Williams was actively looking for new avenues that Sierra could explore within the adventure genre.Al remembered the game vaguely - he had a pirated copy somewhere at home, so he told Ken that he would have to check it out and get back to him. When he got around to playing Softporn Adventure later that evening he found the experience to be crude and the handling of the subject matter completely out of date, even by mid-1980s standards. Upon returning to Ken Williams he famously said “that game is so out of date it should be wearing a leisure suit!”And that’s when it clicked, the only way he could conceive of remaking the game was to completely rewrite it as a comedy, making fun of both the premise, situations, and most importantly, the main character.The premise of 1987’s Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards is a pretty simple one. You play as the 40-year old Larry Laffer in the fictional town of Lost Wages with one simple goal, to lose your virginity. Kind of like that Steve Carrell movie but without a mutton chopped Seth Rogen. Development on the game would be completed over the course of three or so months, with Al Lowe taking programming and writing duties and Space Quest co-creator Mark Crowe working on the graphics.As a remake, some of the puzzles and scenarios were lifted almost verbatim from Softporn Adventure. So much so that the creator of that game, Charles Benton, is credited as one of the designers. But apart from specific puzzles and an overall framework, the entirety of the writing was handled by Al Lowe who, as it turned out, had never written a joke before he started working on Leisure Suit Larry.With no real reference point or experience with comedy, he basically made the decision that if he thought a particular idea might be funny, he’d put it into the game. This is a design methodology that is pretty rare in gaming, and more commonly found in movie spoofs from people like Mel Brooks or David Zucker, where almost every scene or moment includes either a punchline or setup.This commitment to the ‘you can never have enough jokes’ school of comedy is one of the hallmarks of the Leisure Suit Larry series.As a game from 1987, the questions can get a little confusing, especially in relation to the dystopian future-scape we currently live in called 20xx. But many of them are still quite funny, and their playfulness instantly positions the game and entire series for that matter, as a tongue-in-cheek experience with a seemingly unquenchable juvenile sense of humour. As opposed to the adults-only, strictly no-kids zone that many believed it would be.As a parser-based adventure the majority of the jokes are found in the written descriptions of events and the responses given to players, as opposed to the story elements or animation. With that in mind this is one of the first instances of an adventure game where the parser responses and descriptions come in the form of an unseen narrator referring directly to the player as ‘you’, as opposed to Larry.Although this may seem like a minor point to raise, what it somehow manages to do is place a percentage of the blame for the depraved behaviour and situations directly onto players. So when the game begins on a seedy neighbourhood street corner outside of Lefty’s Bar, if you were to say, walk up to the nearby telephone pole and type in “HUMP POLE” the parser would respond with...Now the reason why someone would type in “HUMP POLE” as a command is between that particular person and their therapist. Let’s just say that treatment is going well, and that particular person is now allowed visitation rights once a fortnight with their editor. During these visits he (or she) passes on some of their latest scribblings about retro gaming, written on toilet paper, for publishing.This is not only in stark contrast to other Sierra titles at the time, which often stumbled with the different ways to phrase certain commands, but with the original text-based Softporn Adventure too, which barely registered any commands at all.As a comedy with mature themes and a seemingly risky premise, perhaps Al Lowe felt that bit of extra pressure, but either way he was able to create copies of the game early on with specific code that would capture and catalogue player movement: what they were typing, and where they were typing it. He handed out versions of the game to friends and colleagues, collated the results, and then systematically created jokey responses to a large number of potential phrases.In other words, the world is full of people that hump telephone poles.