[14] Conversations with Video Game Legends

From about 1999-2000, while a college student at Orenthal James' alma mater, I started a web site geared toward adventure games.  This is when the genre was starting to fade, but there were still many, many fans left.  At the time, the competition was mainly Adventure Gamer (which would later evolve to Adventure Gamers, thanks to losing their domain name) and Just Adventure, which soon later added a plus at the end as a way to remove the word "Just" at the beginning.  So here enters Adventure Central, which lasted a few years and had a few guest reviewers, but I never made any serious moves about it.  

Running this website was a great way to appear legitimate to get review copies of games from publishers for free.  I had actually started doing this 7 years earlier with a zine-style magazine I had created.  It never actually went to any readers, but I wrote articles and sent sample issues (and reviews) to the publishers all the same.  I got many games for free, and even got some impressive hardware, but that was usually loaned and had to be mailed back.  But I had some nice sound and graphics cards for a month at a time, sometimes.

The game companies would often send games, and sometimes promotional materials.  For example, Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts) would provide screenshots in the format most preferred by the magazines... color slides that the printing presses would reproduce.

I have a collection of slides, mainly from LucasArts and Sierra.

Sierra sometimes came through with simple, but cool merch.  For example, they sent me some prints of the original artwork used in King's Quest V.

"Look out, a poisonous snake!"

And Access sent lots of swag over the years, and I have very few pieces left to photograph, because I lovingly used them.  The Mini Maglite branded for The Pandora Directive gave me very many years of loyal service, and even items like this letter opener branded for their Links golf games was quite useful.

Cutting edge promotional materials

But it also game me access to the people themselves, sometimes.  For the website, I reached out to Al Lowe, who graciously agreed to an interview.  Sadly, I've long lost his phone number, so I cannot be blackmailed into providing that, but I remember I bought a mini-cassette recorder and a hookup to the telephone to record our conversation.  

Pretty sure this is the one I bought at a nearby RadioShack.  Amazingly, there's still a market for these?

So, here in its entirety, is the interview I posted online 23 years ago.  I think I might still have the recorder and the tapes, and I'll try to post some audio if I can find it, something that would have been unthinkable in the days of dial-up internet.

Al Lowe, father of the modern adult adventure game

I was blessed to spend the better part of an hour talking with Al Lowe, best known for the successful Leisure Suit Larry series published by former adventure game giant Sierra On-Line. A legend in computer games, he often brags that he is the oldest game designer in the business. Or, I should say, he was. Courtesy of Sierra's massive layoffs in February of this year, dubbed Black Monday, Al was given a reason to take a break from computer games. He has since worked on his web site, which has some interesting Larry lore, and on a new book to be published soon by Alexander Books.

Al humbly gives a brief bio before I can ask the first question. I was born in a small log cabin outside Gumbo, Missouri… Of course, us dedicated fans already know that it was, in fact, Larry who grew up this way. Proof is in this excerpt of this excerpt from The Official Book of Leisure Suit Larry [2022 note: this link is long gone, but this link will be enlightening.].

After the hatchet man did his job at the beginning of the year, what have you done?

Well, what have I done since is I've retired. I've played a lot of golf, I've screwed around with my web site… I've just enjoyed my life. I've had a great time, and you know, people have asked me about retirement, and my answer is, it's highly underrated. It's like when you have a really great vacation and you have to go back to work on Monday. Well, I don't! It's that simple. So I'm really enjoying life.

What made you decide to retire?

Well, several things. When Larry's Casino shipped, in July of 1998, I started in negotiations with Sierra for a project and we kicked around several ideas, but with the management in place at the time (who is no longer there, of course) felt like another adventure game would be a good idea. I was not convinced. My feelings were that adventure games had stopped selling and that adventures were really in trouble; that the buyers had gone elsewhere; there's a new generation of game buying public into other things and not into games that made you think, that made you solve puzzles, that made you understand relationships. And they created, rather, were into killing. And I'm a pragmatist in that I think games need to be successful if they follow what the people want and I didn't want to give the public something it didn't want. I didn't want to give them another game. However, at that point, everyone did market research. They studied things, and they said, "Well, we do want to do another adventure game, we do think that Larry's got legs, we do think that Larry can handle another game, and everyone wants to see how you can handle humor in 3D." There was never a decision not to go 3D.

I think all of us looked at it at that point, and then, when you're looking at starting a project, you're looking at, "Where will the market be in two years?", "What will games be like in two years?", because that's the competition, not what's out there now, and no one believed that a 2D game would be successful in the year 2000. So, we start exploring 3D and I start thinking of ways that I can be funny by letting people move the camera around and see things that wouldn't be able to see before, and so we came up with a lot of ideas like that. But in the meantime, Sierra went through some real cost-cutting problems. They had games that didn't ship and they had no income, they had poor sales because they had few products out that year, and suddenly they had to do something.

Back in February when the decision was made to release all those people, it didn't come as a surprise to me because I had been trying to negotiate a contract to get things in writing with these guys, and they just kept putting me off, writing me off... "Oh yes, we do, we want to do the game… but we don't have the contract written up." Well, part of the problem was that the guy I was dealing with probably knew he was on his last leg, on his way down; in fact, he was fired, I'm sorry, he found his opportunities elsewhere, but he never did get a contract to me. It was just as well, because my feelings at the time were that adventure games were still in trouble. I was willing to go with their better judgement and do one more game and see what would happen. When they decided that it wouldn't go, my fears were realized, I guess, which is what I thought for months, that there's not going to be the sales for another product to justify the expense.

Do you think there's a hope for reviving adventures? With Gabriel Knight being touted as the adventure to save all adventures…

Well, You know, I really want Gabe to work. I really want Gabe to be successful. I mean, for many reasons, one of which is I really like Jane Jensen, she's the writer I wish I could be. (laughs) You know, I have a lot of admiration for her. However, the subject matter is so… edgy, daring, so I don't know how wide the appeal will be, so if the community banks its future on one game, I think maybe they'll be in for heartbreak. The other thing about that game is that it's 4 years old. It is a 3D game, but it's developed over years by several, consecutive different teams that kind of threw out what the first one had done. Knowing what I know from the talk at the water cooler, you know that they've had a really difficult gestation, and it's not as smooth or great as it should have been. It's very expensive, that's the other thing. They've spent millions and millions of dollars on it. And I don't think it could make a profit, no matter now many copies [it sold], it would have to be huge.

Something you said caught me off-guard, you said something about the material in Gabriel Knight being edgy, being daring. How does that differ from when you came out with what was the second adult adventure game?

Well, I think Larry 1 was fourth or fifth, actually. One of the reasons that they decided to do Softporn is that Leather Goddesses of Phobos did well back in the old text days, and it was kind of edgy, not very.

Her books are doing well, that's the other thing, because you can't make a living if it takes four years to get a game out, you can't live on one game every four years.

And this is why you were trying to get some monthly pay this time around instead of going just for commission?

That's true, I've always worked on a royalty-only basis, betting on a successful product. And that was part of the reason why the negotiations took so long. I don't think Sierra was in it, I don't think they were ready to put their money where their mouth was. They could spend some money on development, but paying me was just another thing. You know, Grenewetzki has been pounded on the web and by e-mail for being the hatchet man and all this stuff, but I don't know if he made any decisions that I wouldn't have made or that Ken Williams wouldn't have made, off to a degree here and there. I think the gist of what has been done is just practical marketing. I mean, it's just business, it's just good business. You can't continue, unless you're a dot-com company, you can't make money by losing money. Actually I think the dot-com companies will soon realize that. You know, I don't hold any grudges against Dave Grenewetzki, and I don't hold any grudges against Sierra. I would be willing to work with them again, but part of it is, I've got to be sure it's worth my time. I'm not interested in spending the next 2 years working my butt off to produce a game that sells 50,000 copies. That's not my idea of fun.

So what do I think for the future? I think that RPG's made the loop, and god knows action games were completely dead, you know, there were no action games, so they certainly made the loop, and I think adventures can as well. The problem with adventures is that so many of the things that adventure games is have been usurped by other genres, whereas, story lines used to be non-existent in action games, but suddenly action games have stories. Puzzle games have stories, and there are puzzles being used in other games. All the things that adventures did well are being taken over and done also, so we were like this prototype or breeding ground for ideas and how to do things. But do I think there's a future? Yeah, I think there's a future. Someone's going to have to produce some cool, precedent shattering game to show the rest of us how to do it and I think Larry 8 could be that. The reason I would be interested in doing the project was that no one had done a game that had a completely independent camera, had puzzles that were based on 3D and a sense of humor and all the other stuff, and I thought maybe this was the game that could break through.

Did you have a lot worked out for Larry 8? Did you have a lot worked out in your head, did you have the feeling that this should be able to work, this would be a great thing to try in 3D?

We never got to that point. The Sierra management wanted me to do brainstorming sessions with the artists and programmers and think about all these things, and I refused until I had a contract, because I had seen how they had jerked Jane around. She had gone months, month after month doing work without a contract, and I didn't want to get caught in this trap so I purposely didn't invest any time there. And just in case if I'm right and these things really do have a future, I don't really want to talk about [Larry 8] now but what I can tell you is, I know that there are ways to be funny with a camera. I mean, we've seen it in movies.

You know, one of the things I loved about The Matrix was the bullet-cam, a bullet type camera where you could freeze an action in time and change the camera angles. It's actually a technique that, I understand, was developed by a Seattle Times photographer, who took multiple still cameras and mounted them around a circle, say, and had someone shoot action with a movie camera, and then at a particular point in the action, shoot one picture, one frame from 40 still cameras, then on the computer. They freeze the action and show that one frame from each of those 40 different rolls of film and so it lets you see action frozen in time from many different perspectives, well that's exactly what we can do with computers, with a 3D camera. My thinking was that technique of being able to stop the action at any point and being able to freeze things and move the camera around at different angles… but I don't think anyone's done that yet.

You know, one more tool to make you smile.

Not that you need any more, though…

(laughs) Well, you know, I wanted to do different things. I was really interested in doing a 3D game. I've never felt like there's been a 3D game, I don't think there's been a 3D interface yet. I was proud of the interface in Larry 7, I thought it was a really good way to work with the right click menus.

And I preach to others the typing games, the parser games, so it was a step back in the right direction…

Yeah, yeah, and my only problem with that is I wish that I had spent the time to, once we had that thing in there, I wish that I had the time and was able to go back and wrote jokes just for the parser, because It would have been great to have a whole other set of jokes that only the people who bothered to type would have noticed. But we didn't want to miss Christmas.

What feedback did you get on typing [in LSL 7], did the adventure fans of the time like it?

The biggest reaction to the typing was… um, well, they just ignored it. It was oblivious I guess. Most people didn't notice it. I mean, most reviewers made mention of it, but very few fans even bothered. It was one of those things, all of us from the old days remembered and loved it, but I don't think anyone else now really bothered, except die hard fans… Apathy, that's the word I couldn't come up with. Go back and slice that in…

Well, some of the mouse interfaces have been a little… disappointing. For example, in the remake of Larry 1, the handling of password to get upstairs in the bar…

Oh yeah.

That has got to be the worst example of using a mouse in an adventure puzzle.

Well, yeah, you know, that game is funny because we really didn't know what we were doing. I did both Larry 5 and that remake in the same summer, actually spring, and it was the first game I did [in that engine]. I didn't really know how to use it; it was pretty new territory. I mean, that's no excuse, but at the time, we had the puzzles, and we wanted to make everything object oriented.

You know, it'd be interesting to know how many people played the remake because the original sold, gosh, 400,000 copies BEFORE we did the remake.

That's a number I don't think you'll find because the remake was still small enough it could be pirated easily.

Just like the first version, on two 360K floppies! Isn't that a crack up? Think about that, man, I've been to web pages that are bigger that that

And they seem to have less content…

Oh yeah! It was amazing how much stuff we packed in, but remember the pictures, they were vector graphics! In Larry 1, 2, and 3, those pictures were drawn by artists who started out drawing black lines and tracing them from point to point and then filling them with color. You know, I can't tell you how primitive they were, but there were very neat, in that you only stored the vectors, the start point and end point of the line. A whole screen would take 3k I guess. 64k VGA pictures, a lot of them would take 2k, 3k, and you still can't get compression like that. If we had had JPEGs…

You're working on a book, which as far as I can tell isn't out yet. What's going on?

Well, I'm hoping it will be out soon, lets put it that way, RSN…it'll be out RSN (real soon now) and it turned out to be more of a project than I considered. I'll tell you the background. Over the past 12 years that I've been online, I have gotten humor from everybody, I mean, everybody knows I'm interested and that I'm a sucker for it, so over those years I've received thousands of things. I think I've saved about one out of ten, and what I'm doing is going through that and culling it once again, cleaning up the grammar, cleaning up the English, cleaning up the punctuation and all the other stuff most online humor has, and tidying it up and turning it into a book. So it's not original humor, you see, but stuff I've compiled off the Internet, things that are really funny, kind of public domain and been passed around. But what I'm doing is putting it all together at one site at one time.

A collection of 100 jokes culled from 10,000… I'm actually toying with the idea of including a CD with all this material on it, so you can e-mail it to your friends

A lot of the jokes I'm really proud of, because, so many of the jokes are so wordy, and so poorly told…because people don't tell jokes well.

The title, we haven't mentioned yet, is "You've Got Laughs". How much AOL stuff is in there?

Not a lot, actually… I've never thought AOL bashing was that funny, maybe because I've never been a victim.

Something we haven't heard much about is your music life… back when you were a teacher, you were playing the clubs, ever since you started designing games, we haven't heard much about [this part of your life]…

Well, let's see, until I moved to Seattle, I played a lot. Back when I was in California, I was in a group that performed, let's see, 4 times a month, maybe more, which was enough. When I came here, I was very busy, I didn't make the contacts, I didn't have the contacts, so I kind of backed away for a while. So what I've been doing here, is playing with groups that play music that I like to play that don't necessarily play in public a lot; there's a whole underground movement in musicians who get together to play for themselves. They're called rehearsal bands. And they literally rehearse and they don't give a damn if anybody comes to hear them. They don't care if they get jobs or not, they go out and play, they don't need the money, they play what they love, and I've been playing with several groups like that here, and right now I'm in two that meet every week, so that's two nights a week. I guess the bottom line is, I'm playing more now than I ever did before because I've got the time. It's a good thing about retirement.

So when's the CD coming out?

Never. (laughs) Never. If I get a good cut, I'll put up some MP3's.

You know, if I don't start asking you some Larry questions, the readers will start at me with pitchforks. Here's one sent in by a reader: sometime around when icon based games were starting, there was something called Little Larry's Guide to Life supposedly under development, very briefly. What, and why?

Wow! That must have been somebody that worked at Sierra. That was probably one of probably 5000 ideas that were kicked around for trying to expand the line. We were trying to come up with things that people hadn't seen before, and literally, it was a Ken Williams mention… My reaction to it was, "Wait a second, why would anyone in life want to take lessons from a loser?" and Ken's reactions was, "Well, they would know what NOT to do", well, yeah, so we kind of pitched it back and forth in that way. We only talked about it for maybe 10 minutes,

We pursued it for 5, 10 minutes because there is something to be said in that. The other thing was, that was when The Simpsons was starting up, and Bart Simpson was this wonderful negative example of behavior. So we actually went down that path for a ways, saying, "what if we did this" and "what if we did that", and I think that's about the time we did The Laffer Utilities. The problem with that program was that it was about 4 years ahead of it's time. If we had brought that out after Windows was well established and commonplace, in that period where After Dark was just a phenomenon.

If people are amazed at toasters on the screen, it doesn't take much to satisfy them.

Yeah, but part of the problem was the original Laffer Utilities were in a command line driven interface. You had to type in these things or put them in batch files, load it in your AUTOEXEC.BAT, and it was just a little too much trouble for people. But when Windows became popular, with limited multitasking, then it kind of made sense to have a little shell program running…

But by that time, it was too late.

Yeah, it was too late, but you know, it's funny, that thing ended up selling a quarter of a million copies, and that's damn good for a product like that. It was a big success in spite of the fact that it was years too early.

You probably get a lot of questions about Passionate Patti and why she never came back, but I was surprised more that you never even made a reference to her after she left, after saving Dan Quayle's life…

Heh heh heh. Part of it was the public's reaction to Larry 5. I think that I tried something different in Larry 5, part of it was the interface, part of it was that I thought people wanted replay value, and Roberta went down this path as well, she tried to do.. I think it was one of the Laura Bow games, and we said, "Yeah, people love to replay the games, let's make an easy path for the people who don't want challenge, and lets make a really difficult path for the people who do." So Larry 5 you could finish, and get, I think the record low score was 165 points out of 1000. But what I found was, most people were just stumbling through, following the easy path, and when they were done, they said, "Well, this is too easy!" and they had a score of 250 or something out of 1000 because they took the easy path through the game. And then they didn't go back and replay it! I mean, maybe 5% did… but they didn't, and so in that reaction to Larry 5, which was "What do people really want?" I did a strong bit of sole searching, about what people liked in the games and what they didn't, and my conclusion was, they didn't like movies. Larry 5 had too damn many stretched of time where you did nothing but sit there and watch a cartoon go by, and I vowed to get rid of that; vowed to get rid of extraneous stuff. You know, they liked the girls, they liked the interaction with the characters, the idea that they were in charge and had the upper hand. So, Larry 6 is a definite reaction to that feedback that I got from Larry 5, and consequently, I didn't bother with Patti. I went for the essence of Larry, I guess, and think that's why originally there were 10 girls in Larry 6, I think we ended up with 7. Part of the reason that Patti didn't return was that I felt she wasn't part of the whole idea, and frankly, I had trouble coming up with reasons for her, a worldly wise and weary woman, to be interested in this guy. Obviously the Revenge of the Nerds joke was good for one trip. In the back of my mind it was that she was going to come back but it didn't work in Larry 7 either. I don't know, maybe she would come back in Larry 8, because I've got some great ideas for her, but I won't talk anymore about it (laughs).

Hey, don't forget the fans want to see her in 3D…

(laugh) Exactly.

You programmed, wrote, did the music for, produced, and probably copied the disks for some of the earlier games. Do you ever wish you could have focused on one thing more? Do one of your roles more than you did?

Well, actually I did. As the years went along, you've got to remember, I did three games where I drew the graphics. Imagine that! I mean, boy were they bad! (laughs)

If you met Larry in real life, would you be his friend?

Yeah! And that was one of the things I worked hard on that character was that he was, at a first glance, a swarmy, distasteful, kind of character, you know, but by the end of the game, people liked him. And that was hard to do. And particularly women. I talked with many women over the years, and they took one of two attitudes. The original posturing was, you know, "You're a male chauvinist pig, producing this material, blah, blah, blah," and my question would always be, "Have you played the game?" And they never had, because every woman that I had ever spoke with that had played the game, loved the game, because, in reality, Larry was this kind of anti-male chauvinist. I mean, It was a female chauvinist game because the women always got the upper hand. They always got the goods on this guy and they always came out on top. So in that sense, it was really difficult to make Larry this kind of bad person, I guess.

[Larry 2] was a game easy to die in, Larry 5 was a game quite hard to die in, what was the feedback on that?

I guess part of it was in Larry 5 we had to kill you because we couldn't think of a way out of it. By Larry 6, I figured out that there were ways out of everything.

Now, you see people picking apart the engine used to create [the older games]...

I think that's really wonderful. Actually, I went to Sierra's management and said, "Why don't you make this public domain, why don't you let us tell these people how this thing works..."

It's funny, Ken Williams was no longer involved with Sierra then. When Ken and I talked about it, his opinion was "Hell yeah! Let 'em have it!" He was really an old hacker.

Well, they wouldn't have to worry about competition now, they don't do adventures anymore

Nobody's going to buy an AGI [Adventure Game Interpreter] adventure game, at least I don't think so...

Of course, but lots of people are playing them…

Exactly! So why not be a hero? Why not share what we know about that technology, give them the tools that we have, let them have fun? I would have given away SCI [Sierra's Creative Interpreter] too!

Their problem was, nobody could support those tools.

They fired almost everyone who knows anything about them

Either that or moved on. I was the only guy left who went through that whole period. Mark Crowe, too, but he left in February too.

Also, it's battling a galloping horse with every one of those products. The goal was that we would be able to be backward compatible, but the reality was we were never backward compatible. So, any product that we created, we had to save the "state of the art" at that point. You had to save the tools, you had to save the compiler, and everything that was used to create that game. Somewhere I have all that stuff, I think it's on 5 1/4" floppies, so it's pretty much copy protected. (laughs) But I have all that stuff for Larry 1 and I think I still have Larry 2 and 3. Those games were small enough that I could save the original source code. It would be an easy download at this point, but I can't do it because I'm not the owner. But I haven't asked Grenewetzki yet...

Where would be the last place on Earth you'd find Larry Laffer?

A funeral. No, he could be funny there. Maybe a church. No, he's been there. I'll tell you where the last place would be--as a hermit.