So as my next Sierra related project, we’re playing through the Leisure Suit Larry series which I remember enjoying immensely as a tweenager when hormones raged in unchecked flights of digital fancy. A series I remember as being a charming foray into the world of a 40 year old virgin in his efforts to end his celibacy over the course of 6 games.

As a test to see how well these games have aged over the past 15 years, I invited some friends to play the recently unearthed “talkie” version of LSL6: Shape up or Slip Out.

What I expected: A fun, nostalgic romp through point and click puzzle land with some ribaldry we’d all get a blushed chuckle out of.

What I got: An awkward wake up call of how awfully homophobic, transphobic, patriarchal, and sexist the 90s apparently were.

Let it be said the LSL series are purely satirical (I’m pretty sure, that’s what creator Al Lowe says anyways), and knowing that, let’s back it up a little bit to the very beginning. 1987 in The Land of the Lounge Lizards.

Main complaint, not a lizard to be seen. Also, the lounge was just a seedy bar (unless you count the cabaret, old chum).

I didn’t begin getting uncomfortable with the playthrough until we reached a conquest woman named Faith as the security guard to the Casino’s penthouse suite. The main reason (out of ample reasons) she refuses to sleep with you is that she has a boyfriend and she’s not about to jeopardise her future to have a fling with your polyester-clad ass.

The game’s hint to you to win her over?

Drug her.

Yes. Drug her. They didn’t go as far as roofies which is a (comparatively) nice touch, but instead some Spanish Fly to help “loosen her up”.

This made me reach for the quit button already, until something more startling hit me. When I was playing this game as a younger person, this seemed a completely viable and acceptable course of action. Sex, of course, being the almighty divining rod of social discourse for the acne scarred youth of the 90s.

I remain at odds with myself to continue the playthroughs as planned, or turn them into an “exhibit A” for how far we’ve come in our communal social structure to look back on were such apparent non-issues then, to the embarrassing and rage inducing statements they are in the modern era.

In a way, it’s a good thing we’ve made progress this far insomuch as it parallels the civil rights movement in the same way we look back and say “I would never support such segregationist nonsense!”. Also sobering though is the thought that if this represents a cross-section of the male brain in 1991, how much that does explain the backlash against the dissolution of the patriarcy, equal rights for sexual/gender identification which we all will undoubtedly look back on with the same disgust 15 years from now.

I’m not saying to boycott the past, but rather learn from it and keep your minds open as the series progresses as kind of a misogynist time capsule.

The later games in the series are not without their charm and even learn from their past missteps until LSL6 came along. I swear it used to be a favourite game of mine until I played it again in my adult years and realised what an awful person I was.

Therefore, do I continue the series and use the games as a cautionary tale and sign of social progress, or abandon it entirely and leave the past in the past, never to be repeated?

I’ll need to mull this one over. As well as apologise to my friends for playing Leisure Suit Larry 6 with me. Again.