Retrospective of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards

“This game is so out of date, anybody who plays it would have to wear a leisure suit.”

Al Lowe- Game Designer

By Patrick S. Baker

The husband-and-wife team of Ken and Roberta Williams founded Sierra Entertainment as On-Line Systems in 1979 to develop and market business software for the TRS-80 and Apple II. But the couple soon discovered text adventure games and Roberta had the brainwave of adding graphics to such adventure games.

Thus, with Roberta designing and Ken doing some programming, they developed Mystery House, the first graphic adventure game. Released in 1980 Mystery House sold 15,000 copies sold and earned some $167,000 (about $565,000 today). Buoyed by this success On-line Systems shifted from business software to adventure games.

Besides doing in-house game development, the company also started to publish games from independent game developers. One of those independent developers was Chuck Benton.

Ken met Benton at the Boston AppleFest trade show in 1981 and bought a copy of Benton’s risqué adventure game, Softporn Adventure. Softporn proved to be the only adventure game that Ken ever sat down, played straight thru, and solved on his own. Ken soon bought the right to publish the game.

The packaging was revised to include the now famous, or infamous, photo of three topless women in a hot tub. The three women were Roberta and two other women employees of On-Line Systems. The game was hit, with some 50,000 copies sold, but was dropped from the company’s catalog in 1983, largely because On-Line Systems, renamed Sierra On-Line, was working with Disney and that family-friendly company was not happy with “Mickey Mouse sharing the same catalog with Softporn.”

There are two versions of how Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (Larry) came into being:

Version One: By 1986 Sierra On-Line was best known for such family-friendly fare as King’s Quest and Space Quest. Yet, Ken still had the idea bouncing around in his head to produce a ribald game akin to Softporn. His chance came with the success of Infocom’s best seller of 1986 Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Ken decided to strike while the iron was hot and update Softporn. Ken reached out to Chuck Benton, who had long ago left the gaming industry, but Benton had no interest in revising Softporn. So, if he was appropriately acknowledged and compensated for his work, Benton wished Ken good luck with the project.

After that Ken invited Al Lowe, former high school music teacher and “Sierra’s children’s software specialist” to lunch and asked him if he would like to take a try at developing a game based on Softporn Adventure. This was not as odd a choice as it looked at first, as Lowe had a reputation for having a keen and ribald sense of humor.

Lowe agreed to try and spent a week reviewing the old game. In his next meeting with Ken Lowe’s first words were, “This game is so out of date, anybody who plays it would have to wear a leisure suit.” But if Lowe were allowed to mock Softporn, he’d give developing a new game, kinda, sorta based on the old game, a go. Ken gave his permission for the mocking.

Version Two: After Sierra lost the licenses for Disney’s characters, Lowe was looking around for a new project when he recalled Softporn was a good seller. With Disney no longer an interested party in Sierra, why not remake Softporn for a new generation of gaming computers and players? After replaying the game, Lowe realized he couldn’t revise it but could laugh at it and went to Ken with the idea. Ken agreed and Lowe was off and running.

Lowe took about three months to have a version of Larry ready for playtesting. Then another three months to revise the game based on feedback from the testers. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was released on 5 July 1987.

The “hero” and the player’s avatar in the game was Larry Laffer, a balding, 40-year-old male virgin. Larry decided to try and “get lucky”, that was lose his virginity, in the city of Lost Wages, the game’s parody of Las Vegas. Larry was dressed in the eponymous white leisure suit, had no luck with women at all, and proclivity for using double-entendres. Larry’s plot and some other elements follow the same structure as that of Softporn. The player won by getting Larry to finally sleep with a woman without catching an STI.

Larry landed with a thud, selling a mere 4,000 copies on release, fewer than any other Sierra game at release. Many stores just would not stock the adult game. Most famously the then retail electronics giant RadioShack refused to sell it. Others would sell it, but not advertise it. One Sierra employee quit because of Larry. Lowe said he thought “…I had wasted six months of my life.” More importantly Lowe was paid on a royalty basis for each game sold, so it looked like he was not going to get any real money for his work. However, word-of-mouth and decent reviews soon made the game a huge success.

Reviews at the time were mixed. Typical of negative reviews was Macworld’s review of the Macintosh version in 1987 which stated, “At its best, Leisure Suit Larry surprises you with clever animations that make you laugh…” but “…at its worst, the game is offensive…also “Larry is a jerk” and stays one. Plus, the game’s portrait of women was “retrograde.”

On the positive side, The Games Machine said Larry was entertaining and enjoyable, if “wholeheartedly sexist” and gave it an 83% overall score. Computer Gaming World’s stated that Larry “is a lot of fun to play and is very humorous … with good graphics, good design, and good fun provided…” so “who needs ‘good taste’?” Esquire magazine that surprisingly, many of the game’s players were female.

In 1988, the Software Publishers Association gave Larry an award for the Best Adventure or Fantasy/Role-Playing Program of 1987.

An updated version of the game titled Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards with Video Graphics Array (VGA) graphics and the updated sound was released in 1991.

Larry‘s success spawned twelve sequels and spin-off titles. The combined sales of the Larry franchise were more than 1.4 million units by March 1996.

Sources:

1up: 20 Years of Leisure Suit Larry

Adventure Classic Gaming: Interview with Al Lowe

The Digital Antiquarian: Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards

Adventure Gamers: A Sierra Retrospective: Part 1 – The Pioneers of Adventure

Computer Gaming World, May 1988.

GameSetWatch: Great Scott: Infocom’s All-Time Sales Numbers Revealed

Adventure Gamers: “Leisure Suit Larry 1 review”

Esquire. “Before There Was Computer Porn, There Was This Guy”

Macworld December 1987: “How Not to Meet Women”

Games Machine, The: April 1988 “Leisure Suit Larry”

Sierra On-Line Form 10-K (Report)