| LEISURE SUIT LARRY IN THE LAND OF THE LOUNGE LIZARDS |
  Sierra is one of the formative game companies of the PC Genre, and they had a lot of firsts. They had the first graphical adventure with Mystery House in 1982 for the apple II, they made Kings Quest to showcase the IBM PC Jr. in 1983, but Ken and Roberta Williams - the fouunders - were not the only creative types on their team, no, they had a Seattle Jazz Musician named Al Lowe, whose also quite a comedian, as a game designer and developer, and one of his first self-run projects, if not the first, was the bawdy tale of a 40 year old loser kicked out of his parents house on a quest to get some action - Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. It was inspired by a previous text adventure with a more nefarious title.
In the First Leisure Suit Larry, this tongue in cheek comedy graphical adventure, released on Sierra's AGI engine in 1986, and later in 1989 in VGA format using the SCI engine, you guide Larry Laffer around a city with a bar, a casino, a corner store, a night club, a hotel, and a wedding chapel. You basically spend the night looking for a...uh...."willing female participant" with a lot of fail. You have exactly 8 hours to pull this off before Larry offs himself. This includes such hijinks as breaking into a shady brothel, marrying a woman from a nightclub within an hour of meeting her, gambling to build up your finances again and again, and of course, like any Sierra game, avoiding death as much as possible. The game is a cult classic and shows just how much more lapse our sensibilities towards morality to the subject matter at hand are now. For starters, you have to take a quiz at the start of the game, to get in, by answering with your age, and then answering a series of now very outdated multiple choice questions. Despite the subject, the game is actually pretty PG-13 actually, no worse than your average 80's late night teen sex comedy movie - which is basically what it is as a game, except you're playing a middle-aged loser. That Mysterious Game of my Youth I Was Never Allowed to Play My sister and her friends used to play this on her computer in college around teh time I was 10. I was NOT allowed to play this game. As such, it made me wonder just how horrifically vulgar it must havve been. I was imagining something along the lines of Basic Instinct, when I turned 16 and got to play this on my bro-in-law's 486 in the basement suite of their house off the original, single, 720K floppy - complete with xeroxed hint guide, I really have to wonder how the heck this was deemed "too adult" for me at 10? I was hearing worse on the school bus.....stuff that would have made ol' Larry Laffer HIMSELF blush! If you ask me, this game handled the story with class and style, not to mention a lot of self-depricating humor. I put on Night Ranger and Metallica (I introduced myself to Metallica just a little while playing this game - ride the Lightning!) - the perfect soundtrack - and went to town playing this at 16 and honestly, it became one of my favorite games. It's not as long as Monkey Island, nor as complex as Freddy PHarkas, it's just right. I can usually beat it in a few hours using the save-gambling trick. Still though, if you're old enough to be watching a movie like "Cannonball Run", "Cannonball Run II", "Lovelines", "Zapped", "The Girlfriend from Hell", or pretty much any Troma film, you're old endough to play this game. I feel the "adult-ness" of this is severely over-estimataed. But hey, it came at a time when Ronald Regan and the Washington Wives were blaming Dungeons & Dragons, Ultima, and popular music for "corrupting the nation's youth" - geeze, the Gen Xers seem to be the best behaved on the planet right now as far as I can tell - maybe we should go back to games like this, and copioius amounts of New Wave and Heavy Metal! After all, theh real corrupted pariahs on society are corporate crooks and politicians. VIDEOS
#SEPTandy 2022 - Let's Play Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (on actual hardware) ~ Tandy 1000A |
