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As you no doubt have heard by now, there's a new Leisure Suit Larry game coming down the pike this fall from Sierra and when I say Sierra I of course mean Vivendi.  I admit I was pretty excited at first.  Not that I ever really thought they'd go back to classic Larry adventure style.  You know, with the inventory.  Those days are over.  Forget 'em.  But I thought they might just make a fun, ribald game unsuitable for the whole family.

Some of the early signs have been good.  I like a lot of the early posted screenshots.  Larry has always had a bright, colorful cartoon style, and these images seem to be continuing that tradition.  I know that the hardcore adventure community pretty much universally loathed the last Larry game, Magna Cum Laude.  As for me, once I got over the disappointment that it was not an Al Lowe-written, true adventure game, I adjusted to what it was.  It wasn't a Leisure Suit Larry game, but it was an amusing, licentious romp. Albeit one with an absurd amount of drunken-sailor-level cursing.  It wasn't funny, but it was fun.  I guess the thing I liked best about it was the game engine.  It had a great 3D roam-anywhere freedom that, I suppose, if I were a regular action gamer I would have scoffed at.  But mostly I play ten- to fifteen-year-old DOS adventures on my ancient Windows 98 PC.  So Magna was more of a revelation to me than to most.

The new game is called "Box Office Bust," a title I understand even less than "Magna Cum Laude."  Larry Loveage, nephew of the man in white, returns.  This time he's roaming around a giant Hollywood movie studio getting into all kinds of wild, kinetic trouble.  Even though the game's official website at last check had close to no content on it, there's already a fair amount of buzz and info elsewhere on the web. There's a particularly good interview with BOB Executive Producer John Melchior at IGN that I will quote from because why bother the folks at Vivendi's press office if I'm just going to ask the same questions.

After a reasonable amount of puffery from Mr. Melchior (who is one of the three wise men, isn't he?) on what a rollicking good time the new game is going to be for one and all, he gets down to some decent specifics.  Here are a few of his more heartening utterances: "There really is nothing we are bringing over from the last game."  Wow.  Could the folks at Sierra, that is Vivendi, really have come to their senses?  Mr. M continues: "The last game was . . . just the wrong approach for this franchise.  Most of the criticisms . . . were not off base."  Even better.  Perhaps the adventure community's cries in the wilderness fell not on deaf ears after all, as per usual.  And then, the words we all have been waiting to hear: "LSL is most certainly an adventure game."  Well, the info page on the game lists it as action-adventure, and we all know what that means, Doom.  But this is the Exec Prod. Surely he would know what genre it is, no?

I thought Mr. Melchior made one other, telling comment that seemed to indicate he knew what he was dealing with: "At his core he [Larry] is a very nice guy who just wants a piece of the action."  How true.  Larry is not a leech.  He's lonely.  He's desperate.  He's horny, too, but he really is looking for love, not sex.  We, the players, are looking for sex.  But not good old Larry.  So.  Imagine that.  It seems Sierra, that is Vivendi, has hired a guy to run the show who may actually have played the earlier Al Lowe games.  Or at least read extensively about them.

Ere long, however, the interview takes a darker turn.  It's too painful to regurgitate them all, but two quotes jump out at you, like skeletons on a funhouse ride: "This game will be as mass market as it can get," and "We removed all the nudity."  But, Mr. Melchior, the nudity was one of the few consolations of the last game!  You can't remove that, too.  What the heck would be left?  That 3D tiddlywinks minigame?  The folks at IGN apparently hail from Australia, and the Aussies were ticked off that Magna was banned from their continent because of the nudity.  Sierra, that is Vivendi, is going to make damn sure their profit margin is not similarly eroded this time around.  In fact, I think the strangest thing of all about BOB is that it's apparently going to be made available for mobile phone.  How do you make a good 3D "adventure" game that can be played on a two-inch screen?  Because that's where the market is.  Just squeeze that sucker onto a Razr and don't let me hear another word of complaint about "resolution."

Eventually, the IGN interviewer asks the sixty-four-thousand-kilobyte question, to which Mr. M's answer is, "Al Lowe is not involved with this project."

Okay, folks, time to switch your mobile phones off right there.  The last go-round, for Magna, Sierra kept everyone, especially Al Lowe, in some suspense as to whether he would get the call to come aboard or not.  As Al himself explains on his website, the time came when he just never heard anything more from them.  I suppose one might argue that at least Mr. Melchior and Sierra, that is Vivendi, are being more straightforward this time.  No dance of the seven veils.  Al is out.  Enjoy your retirement.   Thanks for the mammeries.

Then Mr. M says something even curiouser: "Hopefully, when Al plays this game he cracks a smile and laughs a little knowing we did right by the franchise after all."  Well, it seems Mr. M has a sense of humor after all.  I think it is fair to say that Al was not, in general, thrilled to be left out of subsequent Leisure Suit Larry productions.  As a matter of fact, I recently talked to him about this over the phone, and this was his actual reaction to Magna Cum Laude: "It was like getting a video from your child's kidnappers. It's comforting to know that your kid is still alive, but . . . " As a matter of fact, Al was forthcoming on BOB, Magna and other related topics.

I started our conversation by asking Al what he thought of the first BOB trailer, which had just been posted on gametrailers.com and a few other places the day before. "I'm glad to see," Al answered, "that they're upholding the high standard they established with Magna Cum Laude."  In fact, Al felt that the trailer, at least, had been put together using random models, or at least low-res models.  Al was letting on that he thinks that Sierra, that is Vivendi, as they did with Magna, has farmed the production of the game out to a house that, let us say, was not among the higher bidders.  On the other hand, if you're actually planning to compress the entire enterprise onto a cellphone, why bother with high production values?

The trailer, if you haven't yet seen it, has a teenage Larry Loveage dressed in a Michael Jackson video outfit running from a gang of teenage mutant zombies.  Strangely, this iteration of Larry Loveage looks like some unnatural cross between Scott Baio and Pepe LePew.  He's clearly more of a wiseacre than a lovable loser.  The scene, I would guess, is drawn not from the regular gameplay, but from one of the fantasy, or movie, sequences Larry gets to play out.  According to the chatter on the web, it's a parody of some well-loved game trailer.  The only reference I recognized is the one to 2001: A Space Odyssey at the very end, with Larry reaching up reverentially to some giant looming gold-lame boobs.  This to me is the crux of the issue.  The folks who loved the original Larry games are the ones who get the Kubrick joke.  The kids who this new game is being marketed at, are the ones getting the Xbox game references.  One wonders what they make of the occasional references to this game called Leisure Suit Larry.  What on earth, they must think, is that?

Al made a very telling comment during our conversation.  He was reminiscing a bit about the good old days at Sierra (pre-Vivendi).  He said he remembered Ken Williams, founder and head honcho, saying that only about ten percent of America had personal computers then.  Just imagine what Sierra's profits would be when that gets up to 25 percent and beyond!

The thing Al realizes now is that that early ten percent was, in effect, the entire adventure game audience.  The first people to own computers were mostly techies and university professors and other well-educated folk, the very type to be interested in puzzle games.  Once the computer (and video game consoles) got into the hands of the masses, the gaming industry naturally catered to their tastes.  Doom, More Doom, and Magna Cum Laude.  God, that sounds horribly elitist.  True, but elitist.

People think that interest in adventure games died away and that's why first-person shooters came along.  But as Al points out, every one of his Leisure Suit Larry games made more money than the previous one.  It wasn't that it wasn't successful, only that a far more attractive cash cow came along.  The meager profits of adventure games were tossed aside to go after the big fish that the kiddies were gobbling up.

I asked Al about the "real" Leisure Suit Larry 8, "Lust in Space," the one he was planning to do at Sierra before he was unceremoniously axed.  Was that short animation of a 3D Larry walking out to a microphone really all that existed of that game?  Yes, Al said. He explained that he had always insisted on signing a contract before doing any serious work on any Larry game.  He and Sierra never got around to the contract stage for Lust.  As Al explained to me, it's very easy to think of the concept for a video game, but a hell of a lot of work to actually produce one.  He wanted to make sure he was actually going to get paid for that labor.

"I was very spoiled in those days," Al said. "Ken Williams and I would go out to lunch and he'd say, 'So what's next?' I'd give him my idea for the next game and he'd say 'Great.  Grab an office and go build it.'"

Al had his fingers in a lot of Sierra's pies during his glory years.  He remembers being called in as the "captain of the cavalry" team that had to rush in to rescue the production of King's Quest IV.  Apparently, the job of coding the game had been handed to a couple of less than experienced programmers.  Then, only a few weeks before the game was to ship, someone said, hey look in on those guys and see how they're coming along.  Well, they weren't. The code was a disaster.  There was a big team meeting, Al recalls, at Sierra on Labor Day in 1987.  The game was due to ship September 31st.  So Al and a whole bunch of others starting rewriting the code basically around the clock to try to meet the deadline.  Rewriting code, Al explains, is harder than writing it.  Sierra had an arrangement with the local motel where the programmers took turns sleeping in the rooms, with the sheets and whatnot changed after each shift.  Food was brought in, Sierra even had everyone's laundry sent out.  Somehow, in thirty days, they met the deadline.

Al, in fact, still gets royalties (however minuscule) from the sales of the King's Quest games, as well as, of course, the Leisure Suit Larry games.  So if you want to shift a few pennies Al's way, purchase one of those new classic adventure game compilations.  On LSL, Al still has approval of all box art and other matters because of the contracts he signed way back when.  For the recent Leisure Suit Larry compilation, they sent him the material and he couldn't help noticing that all the box art was from Leisure Suit Larry 7.  Unfortunately, LSL7 was the one game left out of the collection.  The responsible parties at the new Sierra ran around digging up what art they could.  But, as Al also points out, all the box art now is from the first few minutes of Leisure Suit Larry 5.  Presumably, they just slapped on the first stuff they could locate.

I asked Al if he isn't jealous, at least, of the graphics engines game programmers get to play around with these days.  Al explained to me that he never got caught up with the lastest graphics capabilities when producing Larry.  There was too much potential for something to go horribly wrong.  In fact, he would "freeze" the game engine about half way through production for that very reason.  He did, tantalizingly, admit that at one point during the Full Motion Video craze they brought in some live actresses for a test.  The results were just horrible.  First of all, they couldn't afford good actresses, and they needed not only great looking actresses, but ones adept at comedy.  How many actresses are there like that to begin with?  So FMV was a nonstarter for Larry.

The ninth anniversary of Al's departure from Sierra just passed (February 22nd). Besides that brief dalliance over his possible involvement with Magna Cum Laude, the only real gaming project he's started since was the iBase Sam Suede action game.  Sam is on what is usually called permanent hold.  Making professional games is expensive.  I pointed out to Al that there is now an amazing number of impressive amateur-made adventure games.  Was he ever tempted to turn his talents to one of those?  "I was spoiled at Sierra," he answered.  In other words, no. "I had a great run, I got lucky.  I got a hit record," Al added. "It's time to move on.  I've learned to play golf badly."

Not that Al doesn't still feel attached to Larry.  "He was the child I didn't expect."  Al says he'd still be happy to contribute to any new Larry game.  But Al is accustomed to being in control.  He admits that he doesn't think he'd adjust very well to being an outside consultant.

In 1979, Ken and Roberta Williams started up Sierra literally on their kitchen table.  Because they couldn't afford to have their first print ad typeset, Roberta painstakingly scissored the letters they needed out of other publications, then pasted it all together. (Note to the younger set: in that pre-PC age one page of typesetting cost about $500.)  Over the next approximately sixteen years, Ken and Roberta and Al and a whole bunch of other talented folk created a billion dollar company out of, mostly, adventure games.

Then it all started to disintegrate in the late 90's.  Ken sold the company to a guy named Walter Forbes and an entity entitled CUC.  Five years later the whole company had been essentially "pissed away."  It's not that Ken Williams didn't care.  Al told me that Ken would call the new management and offer to help.  But CUC seems to have made a few, let us say, bad financial decisions.  Forbes and one of his other top execs were tried for fraud.  When the news hit that the company was being investigated, the stock price dive-bombed.  One report I saw claimed that the company lost $14 billion in “market capitalization” overnight. (If you have further interest in this, there's a good brief history of Sierra here.  You can also, as I did, find the papers on the case at the DOJ.gov website.)

This was no laughing matter.  Certainly Al wasn't chortling.  He lost a small fortune in stock.  His $42 stock in Sierra dropped to $30 in one day.  A few days later it bottomed out at $8.  Al still had enough left to live comfortably, but that was some shock.

The strange thing is that, despite these "accounting irregularities," the video game business remained very profitable.  As hard as the new owners of Sierra tried to sink the place, they just couldn't manage to do it.  They basically laid off everyone, moved the company around the West Coast, just for the fun of it apparently.  Eventually, the company was acquired by Vivendi, a French entertainment conglomerate that, strangely, made its name as a water and waste treatment company.

I'm sure the folks who run Vivendi are very respectable, but I think we can see what actually happened to the gaming industry somewhere in the late 90's.  It became profitable enough to attract the big money boys.  They moved in and they were not Ken and Roberta Williams, a husband and wife fascinated by the new medium of computer games.  A charming cottage industry went mainstream.  The numbers are all that matter now.

Here's a quote from a technical paper I found on the web: "Vivendi Water is the leading global provider of water and wastewater treatment systems, products, and services with over 150 years of experience in the industry.  The company has an annual revenue of 10 billion € with over 110 million customers, including municipal authorities, industries, and consumers throughout 100 countries. . . . Vivendi Water's research strategy is structured around eleven key research themes covering the entire water cycle: management of water resources, network management, membrane technologies, treatment and disinfection of drinking water, water quality monitoring, waste water re-use, sludge treatment and management, municipal and industrial waste water treatment, desalination, and domestic water treatment equipment."  Personally, I might be a little insulted if my software company was being bought out by a waste management firm.  Sludge treatment?

Let's be fair here.  The new Larry game is months away from release this fall.  Maybe it will be entertaining in its own quirky way.  Maybe it will have more traditional adventure elements than would appear to be the case right now.  I'm not taking any bets, but hey, you never know.  I did think some of the forum comments I came across about the new game were particularly telling.  Here are a few choice ones:

"So, what? Did they decide it was time to make Larry a teenager now?"

"This trailer almost made me cry. LSL is a classic IP and they're pissing all over it. Such a sad story."

"Without Al there is no LSL game . . . just a wanna be LSL."

"For ****'s sake this looks like a Wii kids game. Poor Al Lowe. What have they done to your IP."

Admittedly, most of the people interested in this story at this stage would be fans of the old Leisure Suit Larry games.  But it nonetheless shows that there is an audience out there hungry for a real LSL adventure game. Vivendi would undoubtedly argue not enough of them.  The question I have is: If you have no respect for the loyal fans of Leisure Suit Larry, and have no respect for classic adventure game play, then why are you bothering to label the game "Leisure Suit Larry" in the first place?  Just call it something else entirely.  That way, Larry fans won't be disappointed and the kiddie gamers won't be perplexed.  Honestly, from what I can see right now, Vivendi is preparing to make a "mature" game for an audience not old enough to buy it.  Are we saying that the market for a game that irresponsible parents are going to have to buy for their tweeners is more profitable than a straight ahead old-style adventure game,  with an audience that is not only loyal but gainfully employed and already old enough to vote?

I suppose the answer to that question is yes.  We can hope for the best, of course, but at least now, if the new game comes out and you hate it, you know you've been hosed by a world leader in water technology.

Learn more about Leisure Suit Larry!

Read JA’s interview with Larry himself!
Al Lowe speaks to JA at the E3.
JA speaks with the designers of Magna Cum Laude.