Leisure Suit Larry retrospective: revisiting the original loser

“Ken sent me,” mumbles greasy, sex-starved and balding 80s every-man Leisure Suit Larry. From a monochrome display tied to a grey brick of a PC hummed the most terrible and catchy 8-bit music ever. From this XT desktop I typed furiously into my chunky keyboard as I tried to decipher the clues to this maddening game. I was eight and sex to me meant having my eyes covered by my mom whenever two people started kissing on TV. Larry was the forbidden fruit of my youth.

You may have fond memories of Leisure Suit Larry, but those are all quickly soured when the 80s original is booted up again, care of a US$9.99 purchase from Good Old Games. Not only do you get Larry 1, but 2-6 as well. That’s at least a month’s worth of frustration for less than the price of a pack of peppermint-flavoured lubbers. This article has been inside me since I was a young lad, eager to wrangle digital boobs from green-hued screen of my XT PC. I’ve got the skills to write it, have you got the strength to make it to the end? That’s the question I kept asking myself as I played Leisure Suite Larry: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards.

Does anyone still care about 2D adventure games? That’s what Larry is and that’s what I’m going to discuss. A left-to-right and back again adventure game with impossible logic puzzles and solutions that require not only a leap of faith, but a walkthrough to guide you past even the easiest of sections. This is Larry then, a puerile but lovable game mixed with hard-as-nails puzzles. Suit up.

Toilet humour

Larry, for the uninitiated, is a text-and-graphics adventure from the early era of PC gaming. Before the world went all fancy with mouse-based input (which was later shunted for 3D control), adventure games like Larry, Kings Quest, Police Quest and Zork were controlled by with the arrow keys and by entering text such as “PLACE KEY IN DOOR” or “HIT THE WINDOW, TAKE THE PILLS, GO BACK and UNTIE ROPE” (an actual string of commands you needed to enter to complete a section in Larry). There was no internet, there were no walkthroughs and getting stuck meant coming back to complete a section a few days, even weeks, later. I loved every damn minute of it. While games like Dark Souls are branded as too difficult, Larry might as well come out with a sticker saying “F— you” printed in bright yellow on the box. Here’s the actual walkthrough for Larry. If it looks confusing and convoluted here, imagine how it is to play.

This is what original 1987 Larry looks like in glorious EGA (64 colours to choose from, 16 allowable at any time).

Here’s the VGA (640×480) version with mouse input, released in 1991.

It’s an ugly affair either way, but I didn’t need much in 1987. All I wanted was a PC to play Larry on, because it was 1987 and a Nintendo was all I had. Super Mario was no match for adult humour and risque situations. Larry was a game you played with the lights off as you kept a watchful eye on the door to the computer room (remember when a computer was so mysterious it had to be in an actual room? Pepperidge Farm remembers).

Here’s the crux then: while Larry is now gross to look at and play, it’s still funny, in stupid sort of way. Here’s a key scene and if you care about the game at all, it’s a bit of a spoiler.

Larry’s goal in life, nay his entire reason for being, is to get laid. Larry isn’t Skyrim, so there was only one way to get his groove on, and that was by finding true love, or a hooker in Larry’s case. Finding and bedding said hooker was an exercise in blind luck, trial-and-error and light swearing. This is what needs to happen: Larry needs to go to the toilet, read the graffiti on the wall to learn the password to enter the pimp’s den, enter said pimp’s den with password, distract the pimp with a TV remote you get from a drunk outside the toilet (you give the drunk a bottle of whiskey, makes perfect sense), and finally climb the stairs to have censored sex with an 8-bit hooker. Protip: if you don’t purchase a condom first from the drugstore, Larry explodes. STDs naturally explode their victims, especially in the 80s. It makes more sense if you watch it in context. Barely.

The full walkthrough. Who the hell knew the solution to these puzzles before the net?

The mouth of madness

I look at Larry through rose-tinted glasses. I bitch and moan (often) but back in the 80s Larry was as flawless as The Last of Us. The original Larry, if played now, would be a torturous affair. The controls are too slippery, there’s no context or clue to each puzzle and the humour, plus the obvious sexuality is just plain dumb. The events in Larry are no more risque than an episode of New Girl. As a game, as a fun experience transposed into modern context, Larry falls flat. Now’s the perfect time to mention the brand new, freshly updated Larry which isn’t very… good. At all.

The new look Larry. If you scroll up, you’ll see how it neatly apes the VGA remake

Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded is currently sitting at a cumulative score of 58, according to Metacritic. That’s not good, I’d call that average at best. On the upside, some reviews say that the puzzles are “complex” and that the updated Larry is made for “the true fans”. As for the negative comments, there are many to pick from. “The world doesn’t need this Larry”, “the mechanics are painful”, “a shameless game” and my favourite “it doesn’t deserve to be remade.” But it’s here, it costs US$20 and you can buy it if you so choose.

Lowe expectations 

Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suite Larry was a public school teacher and self-taught developer, back in the day when games still came on cassette tapes and multiple stiffy disks. While Lowe has now been contracted to reproduce the first 6 Larrys in HD (there were seven, but the fourth was never made and is something of an inside joke for Lowe), he first cut his teeth with Sierra which gave him Disney-owned games such as Winnie the Pooh and The Black Cauldron to work on.

In 1982, Lowe knocked out the text-only Softporn Adventures which he described as “primitive”. So Lowe reworked the basic structure of the game and placed it into a graphics-rich environment. The results were initially underwhelming, as due to the adult nature of Larry, Sierra decided not to market it. But of course, the more perverted something is, the quicker it’s shared. From an initial first-month sale of 4 000 copies, Larry rocketed to well over 250 000 sales by the end of the same year, all due to word-of-mouth.

In an interview, Lowe even drops the fact that Larry made it into a top ten list for a few months. By July 1988, it was the third best selling game in America. This is why it sold: it was a game that your friends whispered about, it was how you transitioned from a boy to a man in most pre-teen circles. It was also (in the 80s) the best and the worst way to learn about sex.

But RW Liebenberg and Luqman Achmat, creators of upcoming mobile game Snailboy think that Larry‘s impact on culture and gaming as a whole was much bigger than that.

Liebengerg laughs when we ask for his thoughts on the series. “Larry! That was so long ago and was probably one of the most talked about / controversial games of its era,” he says, “I can’t help but to think that it was one of the games that inspired and fuelled the strategy/Sims genre we know today.”

Luqman meanwhile reckons there was a missed opportunity with the latest Larry. “I remember the old games, pretty fun, pretty funny, and addictive, but I’m quite disappointed that they didn’t remake the game, rather it seems they have just made a sequel in the same style,” he tells us. “Larry’s time came and went and left us with memories, and the tale should’ve stopped there.”

‘TOUCH THIGH’

Controls were faaaan-tastic. Larry moved with direction keys and took commands via text input. Want to wash your hands after using the crudely drawn urinal? “WASH HANDS IN SINK” worked wonders. Getting married? “MARRY GIRLFRIEND” did the trick. There was no mouse pointer to interact with, so object manipulation was done by text only. The VGA remake corrected this, but the game, and the gamer cut their teeth with text input.

What most of us did, well what I did, was to turn up the speed of the game to quickly shunt Larry from screen to screen. Scrolling 2D levels were apparently impossible to recreate in 80s adventure games, so Larry was a screen-by-screen affair. Walk into a new scenario, interact with every object in the room and stress when you’re stuck in a dead end after yet another mugger quickly ends your life.

And that was the thing with Larry — for some reason, most likely because games were still in their infancy and adopted Arcade-like models, the game had a points system. You gained points for every task, but the points meant nothing in 1987 and unlocked sweet bugger-all. There was also constant death for even the slightest mistake. Even walking too far off screen meant insta-kill via a mugger and a cloud of fisticuffs.

So the gameplay was awful — were the graphics and sound any better? For 1987, they were spot on. The Lounge Lizard theme song is as close to iconic as it gets and the chunky, 16-bit graphics soothed the eyes. Behind this ugly mass of pixels was a man in his sexual prime (Larry was 38 years old and balding) who had no time for games, despite the actual casino that existed in most Larrys. Even in his CGA incarnation, Larry looked and moved authentically grimy.

Larry was the seedy underbelly of games, a title that drew its humour from Police Academy and Porky’s. Most importantly, it was a game you could play while sitting on your dad’s lap. Never mind the fact that he would cover your eyes during the very brief moments of digital nudity. The most risque scene, shoved into the end of Larry involved bubbles, side-boob and little else. But this was the 80s man, and we lived dangerously. Just listen to this song, and let the memories wash over you.

Larry is well past his prime and if you add his virtual age to his actual age, he’d be 65 years old. You’re well past your prime Larry and booting up your ageing adventures gave me little to think about. Stick to retirement, it suits you better.

Image via Amazon.com