The Lounge Lizard's Tale Mike Gerrard meets Al Lowe - creator of Leisure Suit Larry. (This article first appeared in Atari ST User magazine, July 1989 and is reproduced here by kind permission of Mike Gerrard.) In late 1987, an adventure game came out which delighted reviewers and also proved to be very popular with Yuppies in the City of London, whose addiction to the game even made the pages of the national press. It wasn't, as you might have thought, the Magnetic Scrolls adventure Corruption, which IS set in the City. It was, of all things, a funny, sleazy, naughty, tongue-in-cheek romp called Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, and the publisher, Sierra On-Line, could have cleaned up selling clue books that were Filofax-compatible. The creator of the Larry game, Al Lowe, was in London recently to publicise the sequel, Leisure Suit Larry II: Looking for Love (In Several Wrong Places), and he told Atari ST User what the response to the first game had been like in the States. @~"The initial feedback was a little scary. It was very hesitant, @~and stores that would normally take a fairly large order for any @~Sierra game were making very small orders indeed. We were really @~sceptical as to whether it was going to succeed. @~"This was in June and July 1987, soon after it came out, but by @~August everyone started to re-order. Orders got bigger, and from @~then on just steadily climbed." Climb it did, picking up a few awards along the way, like Best Adventure Fantasy Game of 1987 from America's Computer Entertainer magazine. But what about the rather rude humour of Larry, how did that go down with America's moral majority? After all, the game does feature hookers, french letters, and a general atmosphere of wine, women and song - all done in the worst possible taste. @~"We did get criticism of the risque side of the first Larry @~game", +Al said, sipping his Perrier and looking totally unlike a @+Leisure Suit Larry. ~"People said that it was chauvinist, which @~maybe it is, and they also said it was a little too risque. So we @~decided to play that down a little in the sequel, but now we're @~getting feedback from people saying: Hey, you went too far, it @~was too clean!" Creating Larry Laffer games isn't the only thing Al Lowe does at Sierra On-Line, as he's also one of the company's principal programmers. He does the coding for the King's Quest series of role-playing games from designs from Roberta Williams, who founded Sierra with her husband Ken in May 1980. It began, like so many companies, as a backroom business, but slowly grew into a multi-million dollar industry. At the time Al Lowe also had his own little backroom business which grew out of several of his many interests. He's played jazz saxophone since the age of 13, and went on to gain a master's degree in music education from the University of Missouri. He still plays jazz sax both in a big band and in a four-piece group, and had to cancel a few engagements to enable him to come to England. After graduating he got a job as a high school band conductor, and spent 10 years playing British band marches - music's as popular and important as sport in American high schools. Then he became music supervisor for the school in California near where he lives. @~"This was more of an office job", +he explains, ~"and I started @~programming computers at work. I was the first kid on my block to @~use a word processor - that kind of thing. This was on a @~mainframe at the time, and I wrote some software that made my job @~easier. @~"I bought an Apple II because it was transportable and the band @~did a lot of travelling. We performed at the Jazz Festival in @~Montreux and flew 500 people across the United States to play at @~Reagan's inauguration ceremony. @~"Anyway, I programmed the Apple for a while, then bought some @~educational games but I didn't think they were very good. I saw @~that a lot of educational software was very weak. @~"I had this background in education, I had this background in @~programming, I had an Apple computer at home and I had a three- @~year-old son. So it made sense to put all those things together @~and write something he could play." Al wrote several graphics-based adventures aimed at young children and one of them, Dragon's Keep, is still being sold by Sierra some eight years later. He was publishing these games himself and discovering that publishing is hard work, involving such exciting aspects as putting disks in boxes, putting boxes in jiffy bags, buying stamps and dealing with bounced cheques. Roberta Williams saw some of his games, and suggested he let Sierra do the publishing while he concentrated on what he did best, writing and designing games. Al was already familiar with Sierra's games, because the first two products he bought for his Apple were published by the company. Fortunately he liked them more than the educational software he'd seen and was happy to throw in his lot with Sierra in 1982. @~"I did appreciate its games, liked the adventures, and went on to @~buy all of them, so it was easy for me to catch on to the style @~and begin writing. @~"I didn't get into adventures by the usual mainframe text-only @~route. I started out playing graphic adventures and much prefer @~them. I've played text games and they don't hold my interest. @~I've a movie person; I like motion pictures, animation, graphics, @~music and all of that." The movie influence shows in one of the best sequences in Larry I, where Larry Laffer dances with a girl in a disco, eventually throwing her up into the air where she disappears for quite a while before eventually coming down again. @~"The dancing", +says Al, ~"is straight out of Saturday Night Fever, @~all that John Travolta stuff. And when I designed the game I made @~it so that there was this disco with the girl in it who needed to @~be chatted up. I set up the puzzles that needed to be there and @~one of them is dancing. @~"I talked with Mark Crowe, who does the graphics, and said that @~we needed a funny sequence, so what could he make the guy do that @~would look funny? We had one or two ideas and then I said: Hey, @~how about throwing her up in the air? @~"That was in the movie Airplane, and I loved it when the guy @~dancing there threw his coat way up in the air and then a long @~time later he caught it again. So I stole that one, yeah!" In producing the Sierra style of 3D animated graphic adventure there is often a great deal of interaction between the artist and the designer, and between the programmer and the designer. In the case of the Larry games Al Lowe is both the designer and the programmer, so he tries not to design things he can't program. With the King's Quest games he is purely a programmer and Roberta Williams has total control over design and graphics. Al has also worked on most of the titles that Sierra has done jointly with Walt Disney Productions, such as Winnie the Pooh and Donald Duck's Playground, and he also designed and programmed the Black Cauldron game based on the film by Muppet man Jim Henson. It's for the Larry Laffer character that he is now best known though, and the development of that is interesting, as the character didn't exist at all in the original plans for the game. @~"We had a design for a game that was very old", +Al says, ~"and we @~wanted to implement it in the new language that Sierra had @~developed with fully animated graphics and so forth. When we @~looked at the design it was fun. It was basically the puzzles @~that went to make up Larry I, but there was no main character, it @~was just whoever was playing the game typed the commands. @~"Another problem was that the game was about the player trying to @~pick up these three girls. Well I just couldn't do that, not @~seriously, so what I did was to make it tongue-in-cheek, make it @~a parody of that kind of life-style. @~"To develop the game we needed a main character though, and we @~were discussing it round the table one day asking 'what kind of @~guy is this?' and someone said, 'you know, he's the kind of a guy @~that would wear a leisure suit', and that sounded right, that @~stuck." We may not have leisure suits in Britain, but for Larry Laffer read medallion man and you start to get the picture. Larry originally had a different name, though. @~"He had another last name", +Al reveals, ~"in honour of one of my @~friends at the company who was kind of this type of a guy. But he @~left Sierra just as the game was ready to go out and we didn't @~want to leave his name on it, it wouldn't have been right. @~"I pulled down my Encyclopaedia Brittanica and started looking @~through the L section, because the title was so alliterative. I @~got to Laffer and I knew that was it. There is a noted Canadian @~economist called Arthur Laffer, so we took that poor guy's name @~and made him Larry Laffer. @~"The Land of the Lounge Lizards came about because of the music I @~play. In the jazz group we get to a see a lot of guys like Larry @~and lounge lizard is a common musician's derogatory term for @~someone who hangs about in bars and tries to pick up girls." Larry Laffer, the computer character, has been more successful that Larry Laffer the pick-up artist could ever be, and already a third game is planned. The first part will be very much like Larry 1 to please those who want more sleaze, and the second part will be more of a traditional quest in the style of Larry II. It will also be the first Sierra game where the player has a sex- change part way through. Not the full operation, but at a key point in the adventure Larry leaves. And for the last quarter of the game the player assumes the role of the new love interest, whose name is revealed in the sub-title: Passionate Patty in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals. That may not be out before the end of the year, but meanwhile Larry fans are promised something called Leisure Suit Larry's Party Games. @~"That", +I am told, ~"is not an adventure, but it will be 3D and @~very animated." It sounds pretty adventurous to me. Mike Gerrard