Good day my lovely deviants, and welcome back to Joyful Stick. Miss the last entry? You can read it here. Today we’re yet again going to handle things a smidge differently, as we’re reviewing the Leisure Suit Larry series. This infamous lineage of games left a huge mark on the industry, but for none of the reasons you’d expect. So grease that hair and pick up your shoulder pads-let’s dive right in.
Cocaine Crunchboys And Early Game Development
“Oh, that’s always existed. It’s just impossible to hide it now thanks to the internet,” she says. DrippyDreamz-my editor and long standing friend-catches me by surprise with this. Not because it’s shocking per say, but because she says it so casually that I know it’s an inherent truth. That doesn’t make it any less surprising though.
I’d just watched this interview with Al Lowe, the head writer/programmer/artist/musician behind the early Leisure Suit Larry games. I’d sought something out after having delved into the games briefly because-well. We’ll get to that in a moment.
What I found instead was Al Lowe recounting many, many hours of crunch, working on primitive machines with extremely small teams that didn’t communicate with one another. Hours spent consuming coke, not seeing family and rarely leaving the office. Al Lowe talks several times about sniffling his way through the months right up until the game shipped. It wasn’t just this interview either, but many, many others in which Al repeats the same phrase. When asked what he was proud of with the titles, Al will sometimes sheepishly admit he’s happier about King’s Quest or the Winnie the Pooh title he worked on for Disney.
Other times, Al will smile with a twinkle in his eyes and answer honestly. “Money,” he says with a grin, “I loved getting paid”.
Al and company would “work from january until october” within technological restrictions that would sound made up if I listed them here. Al was usually in charge of a majority of the games’ raw design-logic programming, art, and music. When the LSL titles would finally ship, only then would the team take a break. “I’d take a month off,” he’d say, “I’d go smile at seeing the title on the shelf. And then I’d get back to work,”
Hearing, reading and seeing Al himself admit to these working conditions elicited two responses out of me right away. One, a child-like fascination at what he and his team were able to accomplish with such limited means. Second?
The horrifying realization that the entirety of LSL was the by-product of gross, inhumane working conditions. Al’s story is by no means unique; tales of the early days of Atari and McAfee software mimic it almost verbatim. Hearing Al talk about that time period only re-affirms something I’ve grown to notice a lot more as technology becomes inseparable from our identity. The houses that built our consumer experiences laid their foundations with inhospitable offices, pennies-to-dollars wages, cocain, speed, weed and sex. All done with a total lack of oversight whatsoever or actively encouraged from the top down.
No, things have not gotten better either. Total lack of oversight and encouragement of “Frat house” behavior is what got Blizzard in hot water-and it’s also what made Leisure Suit Larry, with it’s grossly offensive, racist and misogynistic content happen at all. I went in totally blind to what I was going to be playing, and in my search for answers afterwards couldn’t help but hear Drippy’s words ringing in my ears.
“Oh, it’s always been like that,”
The Leisure Suit Larry games, I’ve come to realize, aren’t merely a by-product of their time. They are “the times”, a signal flare of corporate and artistic culture that we’ve only begun to weed out as consumers, artists and designers. LSL couldn’t, wouldn’t happen today with the same conditions without being one of the largest industry scandals ever.
Yet we got a new installment just last year. Which, by the way, I got berated by the head writer for critiquing on twitter (it wasn’t Al, gods if it had been).
Seeding in the fetid soul grows rotten fruit. LSL’s earth was barren at launch, yet many people remember the series through a nostalgic lens. After playing the games, I couldn’t help but wonder why. Who were these games made for? Who were they trying to appeal to?
It’s easier to answer that if I actually talk about them, I suppose.
Leisure Suit Larry 1 (1987), 2 (1988) and 3(1989)
It would be incredibly unfair, disingenuous and wrong to judge these titles based on their graphics, programming and level design with a 2021 lens. They’re literal antiques you can cop from multiple digital storefronts (however, I recommend GOG). It would be like looking at the toys your grandparents played with as children and saying they were shit.
Yet, I can’t help but mention things right off the bat that made me irate.
The first three titles have means of “age gating” their content via trivia questions from the era. As of this writing, I’m 31 (not to mention a producer of NSFW content myself). I couldn’t get in. You have to answer five correctly or the game shames you for being “a kid” and kicks you out right away. From a design perspective, this is just as bad now as it was then. LSL premiered well before the internet came into common usage. Meaning, if you didn’t know the answer to a trivia question, you either had to ask someone that did or hope your electronics magazine had the answers in a guide or review. The questions were all based within what was “pop culture” during the late 80s-which is a polite way of saying they’re references NOBODY will fucking get now.
In a way, I admire this method. It was a brilliant way of keeping kids out of the game. But in doing so you also alienated anyone that wasn’t a “normie”, well versed in baseball, the presidents and what was on TV at the time. That’s before we get to absolutely groan-inducing items like “negro junk dealer” being one of the answers. Christ.
Should you manage to make it within the titles, the sprites and the like will seem alien. Keep in mind, “adventure games” were in vogue with what were known as “parsers” back in the day. Meaning, LSL 1-3 essentially control as fancy text adventures. If you’re curious about something, you have to type it into the parser, pray to the machine spirit the logic recognizes it and then hope for a sensical answer. If this seems ridiculously involving and prone to false-positives within the game, you’d be absolutely right. Some will excuse this as technical limitations of the era, which is something I’d almost buy if these early titles weren’t ridiculously fucking hard. They follow “adventure game logic” in that several puzzles simply do not follow a logical progression whatsoever. Quitting from frustration at the sheer stupidity of some puzzles absolutely can, has, and will continue to occur with these titles.
Mechanically speaking these titles are actually pretty god awful. I can’t even begin to fathom what playing them must have been like back in the day. From a narrative standpoint, they set the bar for what the series would grow to become-Larry Laffer is an affable goon stylized as a caricature of Italian men (or jewish men depending on who you ask). He’s horny and he wants to fuck, and will fall-up through “zany” circumstances to make it happen. Along the way the “jokes” come a mile a minute, often punching down and at the expense of people’s skin color, religious beliefs or gender. Simply put, I can tell Al Lowe and company didn’t pass the scripts to anyone. LSL 1-3 are overtly offensive even for their respective media era.
I find this astounding as Monkey Island debuted in 1990, taking a radically different approach. Monkey Island’s jokes usually landed without the use of rampant hate, had puzzles that made sense and would never lead to a situation in which the player couldn’t have some idea of what to do and where to go. Al himself confirms that he and people from multiple companies (including MI publisher Lucas Arts) would talk, swap games and more as a means of “product testing”. One can’t help but wonder if the folks at Lucas Arts took one look at LFL and altered the trajectory of their work. I think the proof is in how people speak about both of the titles.
People love Monkey Island. It’s been rebooted, reloaded and re-released multiple times over the years to critical acclaim. It’s synonymous with adventure gaming and the best of what the early 90s had to offer.
People just remember Leisure Suit Larry, often with a sly grin and a grimy wink. “Oh yeaaah,” they’ll say with a hearty chuckle. But never anything more. If you say the title to anyone born post 2000, if they’re aware of the series at all? It’s often via having watched a Youtuber play Magna Cum Laude, the red-headed step child of the LSL franchise.
They never mention LSL 5-6 (there’s no LSL 4 and it’s the one running joke that’s actually chuckle-inducing), Love For Sail!, Wet Dreams Dry/Wet Dreams Dry Twice. Because at the end of the day, none of these are really worth mentioning, especially the later titles. As the nature of game design has changed in a radical way towards making independent production like Lowe’s easier to accomplish, the market is rich with wonderful, unique and full ideas. LSL’s success is due not to it’s humor, programming or Al’s efforts in crunch-but rather, because nothing else was really out there at the time.
Al Lowe sacrificed his personal health for this. And for what? For who?
Why?
That’s a question that Al himself answered at the start of this article.
Money.
Magna Cum Laude And Poorly Rendered Breasts
So, time to reveal a secret.
Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude was my first exposure to the franchise. It debuted on Playstation 2 with censoring, and even then I still wanted to play it. I was a horny teenager and a curvy piece of driftwood could have caught my attention. And yet, Magna Cum Laude couldn’t merit a single twitch, even then. It was quickly forgotten about with my copy eventually making it’s way to our local Gamestop. When I was getting ready to write this review, I was sure to pick it up. I gave a slight smile as I noticed my release was the uncut version. I wasn’t going in blind, just nearsighted by my own hazy memory of the game.
One of my friends described Magna Cum Laude best: “It was the one that sunk the entire franchise”. An odd thing to hear, but as I began playing and researching the title I soon realized why.
MCL was produced without Al Lowe’s involvement whatsoever. Al himself only found out about the game later when he got a letter from one of the designers. They did him dirty, sure-and the end product was something that wore the skin of the franchise like Leatherface. Magna Cum Laude is an open-world 3d title which features Larry’s nephew (still called Larry for some reason) desperately trying to “score” with as many girls as he can on campus. If there’s a pornographic trope, it’s present in the game. You’ve the “southern bell”, the “twins” and plenty more. The title plays out over a series of minigames, with most girls being beddable after 8-10. Sex scenes are unlocked via flawless performances. If you’re into incredibly poorly acted moans and polygonal breasts that have aged like rancid meat, you’re in for a treat.
It was strange sinking back into MCL, this title that was both familiar but not. After the bar for narrative had been set in the center of the earth by previous entries, my hopes weren’t high for the game. Boy, did it fail to meet literally any of my expectations. I realize that “having standards” and “Leisure Suit Larry” don’t exactly coincide together-that I, having played any of this franchise, should have changed my expectations, but I don’t find asking for jokes to at least be funny to be too much.
Magna Cum Laude carries on the “family tradition” of having the lowest possible barrier of entry for “low brow” humor. By the time Larry said “Your breasts put you at a natural disadvantage!” during a game of quarters, I was exhausted. When Daisy Mae (the southern cowgirl) said she couldn’t sleep with a gentile, I let out a sigh that reverberated throughout the universe. Yes, the game is supposed to be “low brow”-which is very low considering it came out in 2005-but it can’t even accomplish being funny while doing that. All the while, it tosses mini-game after mini-game at you in a barrage of outdated trivia references and lines that make Larry seem anything but a ladies man.
I’ve played games that featured the “goon looking to fuck” gimmick. None of them tried as hard to make me chuckle and fail like Magna Cum Laude did. I’ve played titles for this very article series that also utilized mini-games as a means of reaching orgasm in-game and for the player, and few of them ever mechanically dropped the ball like this one.
The title also features ex-porn star turned convicted sex offender Ron Jeremy as “the dildo fairy”, which made me clench my jaw the moment he was on screen.
There’s so much about MCL that is an absolute mess even without Al’s involvement. For both the time and now, I can’t pinpoint a single redeeming quality about the title that hasn’t been executed better elsewhere. If you’re desperate to see the sex scenes, I actually recommend finding them on the tube site of your choice. I made it about halfway through my replaying of the game before I lost the will to continue.
A Legacy Of…
So.
Here I am.
Having played six different (but strikingly similar) titles. Though the graphics might have been updated and the engines changed, Leisure Suit Larry sits as an uncomfortable slurry in my gut. It’s not funny. It’s not innovative, not really. The sex scenes were anything but remarkable. After a point, I lost the ability to laugh at Larry’s plight as the dunce.
Yet, here I am writing this even still.
It’s time I answered the question of why myself.
Leisure Suit Larry is not a good franchise. I’d argue it’s actually never really been that great, just viewed with lenses of love for a by-gone era. The early days of computing were indeed incredibly magical and special, but they were that regardless of Leisure Suit Larry’s existence. As Larry was attempting to two-step his way into some hetro-normative loving, Fallout released. Heroes of Might and Magick 3 came out. Christ, Doom wasn’t too far removed from Larry’s debut. All of these massive, market-altering titles happened right alongside Larry’s published works.
They left the series in the dust.
So.
Why play these titles? Why care enough to write about them at all?
It’s actually simple.
Without Leisure Suit Larry falling up, Joyful Stick wouldn’t exist. LSL kicked the door open for bawdy humor, nudity and “adult content” in games even if it’s own attempts were poor. The titles were racist, misogynistic and horrible mechanically and narratively. They also paved the way for titles I have greatly enjoyed reviewing here. And now?
Al Lowe remembers them as a pay day, a brief part of his expansive catalogue that he occasionally gets interviewed about. He talks with a smirk about the technical limitations he and his crew faced, but never directly talks about the narrative of the titles individually. It’s at the point he even gets them mixed up sometimes.
Because they’re all practically identical.
If LSL gets buried permanently as a franchise with Al Lowe, I don’t think it’ll be a loss. But LSL will never actually die. It’s corpse has been picked up and puppeted by other companies, ones that even with radically different cultural perspectives perpetuate the same song and dance the series has grown famous for. Sometimes Lowe was involved, sometimes not.
Whose to say?
Who cares to remember?
Not I, deviants.
Not I.
-j