Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=34307

by smacktoward • 9 years ago

367 166 9 years ago

I found the original graphics of this game hilarious. Ive never heard of of the game, nor would buy it, but those graphics are timeless. They got me immediately laughing.

"Another thing to kill the laughs for me was the move to better graphics."

There's something to this. Some things don't need updated graphics?

saint_fiasco• 9 years ago

It ties into context, I think. This game is funny because it subverts the expectations of the adventure game genre. Improving the graphics weakens this association.

dogruck4• 9 years ago

Worth pointing out that, regardless of the context, comedy rarely ages well. For example, if you watch popular standup comedy routines from the past, they're often unfunny, even when performed by comedy legends.

tclancy2• 9 years ago

Some things don't need updated graphics?

I think the underlying theme of the article is the game was an organic whole. It wasn't just a good idea they put together in the technology available at the time, it was of the time. The best example is:

"once they started looking like actual pin-up girls, that dimension of the humor was lost. It gradually felt less like a joke about a guy who wants to hook up with sexy ladies and more a vehicle for actually looking at sexy ladies."

the improved graphics and the point-and-click interface completely change what the thing is. It stops being some wink-wink "You're playing video games because you can't find a date but we're such losers we had time to make a game for you" and something commercial and knowing. If you knew about any of the Sierra titles you were almost part of a family. You could write to the people there or at Infocom or wherever and reasonably expect a response. Now video games are an industry and every possible niche is filled to bursting.

Then again, there's always some indie game or single-A title that drags me back.

irrational• 9 years ago

"a vehicle for actually looking at sexy ladies"

So... google?

sillysaurus33• 9 years ago

Certainly. Undertale is a perfect example. Better graphics would kill it.

jacobkg• 9 years ago

Relatedly, I have certainly had the experience of remembering something as being hilarious only now to be turned off by how clearly sexist it is (which I never noticed at the time). This is especially uncomfortable when recommending content to a friend that I haven’t watched in a long time.

dogruck4• 9 years ago

What are the odds that after several additional years you will look back at today and think, "wow, how was I so overly sensitive to humor?"

oddlyaromatic• 9 years ago

This is life. We should do our best to be right even though we are probably not. It's that or throw our hands up and quit trying.

pfarrell2• 9 years ago

Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or smoot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it. - Thomas Carlyle

mattmanser• 9 years ago

Ironically, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/05/matt-l...

The comedians themselves are contradicting you.

Re-watch many comedians from the 80s and 90s and they're just being close-minded rather than actually being funny.

The worst I remember was when in the office we'd all call each other gay for silly things. "You not coming out tonight drinking? Are you gay?".

Then we hired a homosexual.

For months we still all made 'gay' jokes. He said he didn't mind. They would just slip out, that's how we talked to each other. "ah man, who would write a function like that? It's so gay!".

I still feel ashamed today thinking back on actually how hostile that workplace actually was to him. Even if he really didn't care, we were still basically constantly saying Gay Is Wrong. We were idiots. We were wrong.

It's not being sensitive, it's simply being close-minded.

jimmywanger3• 9 years ago

Remember, in King Lear the Fool was the only one able to speak truth to the King.

You're allowed to try to be funny about anything. Whether or not you succeed is dependent on how good you are. A non-funny joke is not funny. However, any joke is funny depending on how you execute it.

If you don't like a game, stop playing. If you don't like a TV show, stop watching.

tptacek• 9 years ago

It is not in fact generally the accepted standard among professional comedians than it's legitimate to attempt to be funny "about anything" so long as you have a decent chance of getting a laugh.

coldtea3• 9 years ago

Relatedly, I have certainly had the experience of remembering something as being hilarious only now to be turned off by how clearly sexist it is

That's part of the humor.

Plus a lot of people conflate sexual with sexist -- thinking about sex and working towards humping is considered automatically sexist in protestant-derived cultures (who'd rather we were all asexual and only interested in sex and in the other sex under very specific situations -- marriage, back in the day, a relationship, today).

eli• 9 years ago

Agreed, though the game is quite sexist and not merely sexual.

ineptech2• 9 years ago

I have this feeling too, especially around the sci-fi of my teenaged years (Niven, et al). It's important to remember that this is the expected result of progress; it would probably be worrisome if middle-brow media from a generation ago didn't seem sexist.

It also seems like we apply current-generation standards most acutely to the N-1 generation. Somehow, a 1980 novel where a woman needs a man to save her from a monster is more offensive than a 1780 novel where a woman needs a man to have an identity or own property or leave the house. Perhaps that's just a matter of emotional distance.

Tossrock2• 9 years ago

I remember after reading Ringworld on a friend's recommendation, saying that it had one too many alien species with non-sentient females for me. One, okay, interesting idea I guess, two, now you're doing a thing.

moomin• 9 years ago

I think that's true. The 1780 stuff can usually be dismissed as being something that no-one seriously believes any more. The 1980 one can't.

It's not just the cultural stuff, though. I read Dream Park and the Barsoon Project when I was a kid. Loved them to bits. Recently I found a copy of The Voodoo Game in a second hand book store and finally finished the trilogy. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but it was like watching an original series BSG episode and expecting it to be as good as... modern BSG.

vm• 9 years ago

I recently had to turn off Eddie Murphy's stand up special and a series of Norm MacDonald SNL skits because of how homophobic and sexist they were. They were iconic when they were made so I tuned in expecting some laughs.

Comedy keeps pulse of social norms. We've made progress over the past 30 years.

KekDemaga• 9 years ago

Eddie Murphy was considered offensive back then as well the only thing that changed is a different group of people are offended for different reasons. That's why its art.

CydeWeys3• 9 years ago

Norm Macdonald is one of my favorite comics, and you're right, a lot of his older material hasn't aged well. He doesn't do that kind of material anymore either, so he's making progress along with everyone else.

liberte824• 9 years ago

As a gay person born in the early 80s, I vividly remember how "normal" gay jokes were in movies all through my childhood and teen years. Although I didn't fully realize I was gay, a subconscious part of me did, because I remember how uncomfortable it made me each and every time. It was such a standard trope:

Gay joke happens in movie

Entire theatre groans, goes "Ewwwwww"

It was just standard formula. It started changing right at the end of the 90s / early 2000's with televisions shows like Queer as Folk, and Will and Grace, that treated gay people like normal human beings.

kilceem• 9 years ago

He's a sleazy dude trying to get a date. As others have said it is part of the humor and part of the difficulty.

rhcom22• 9 years ago

The rape-by-deception scene in Revenge of the Nerds immediately springs to mind.

philwelch• 9 years ago

This is an interesting subthread. Humor and social taboos have a fascinating relationship. A lot of old Monty Python sketches spoofed British uptightness and reverence towards Queen and country in a way that may have been somewhat subversive at the time, but the taboos have disappeared to some extent. Meanwhile, other taboos have been introduced into our society that make humor from previous times more uncomfortable.

We’re also developing bubbles, to the point where a comedian like Dave Chappelle, whom no one would consider to be on the right hand side of the spectrum, releases a comedy special that’s uncomfortable to watch for those of us who grimace at rape jokes.

Maybe we just need to forgive creative works that came from less enlightened times, and realize that we ourselves are in a less enlightened time than someone else will possibly be.

erikb3• 9 years ago

As long as the friend you suggest it to isn't actively discriminated in the content you suggest there shouldn't be problem big enough to bother. Are you this kind of person who likes to overthink things?

hmexx• 9 years ago

1) Video game humor is typically way worse than the humor in non-interactive media (interactivity has a price).

2) Humor evolves/improves over the years

Combine the two, and you would be hard-pressed to find ANY game that old which is still considered funny. Maybe "Day of the tentacle" ? I'd have to load it up again to check. it stuck out for me.

QAPereo• 9 years ago

Played DoTT when new, hysterical. Played recently, still funny.

That’s just me though.

padelt• 9 years ago

And me. I also still laugh about all the silly jokes in Sam'n'Max and You don't know Jack.

flavio813• 9 years ago

Video game humor is typically way worse than the humor in non-interactive media

Perhaps, but I had a lot of laughs finding great humor in Leisure Suit Larry I/II/III/V, Space Quest III, Monkey Island 2, and Day of the Tentacle.

I think adventure games enable different ways to create humor.

rhcom22• 9 years ago

A lot of the Fallout dialog holds up with its absurdity and gallows humor but I think you're right overall.

danbolt• 9 years ago

This is probably something games are still exploring as a medium, but I think designers are finding ways to show humour with game mechanics. An example might be a funny setting in Halo's Forge mode, or something crazy resulting from random elements in the new Zelda, or messing up in Surgeon Simulator. The interactivity makes the comedy personal in a special way, and I don't think books or film can quite repeat that.

I'll admit that older games don't quite have that je ne sais pas though. It seems like a thing we're more keen on nowadays, especially with stuff like streaming or roguelike elements coming back into vogue.

tekromancr2• 9 years ago

DotT holds up, played it a few months ago. Grim Fandango, too!

rangibaby2• 9 years ago

LSL along with Manhunter 2 and Space Quest 3 have fantastic graphics. Something about them just gets my imagination going.

aidos• 9 years ago

Brilliant - I haven't really read the article yet but....

I was discussing this last weekend with a mate. Neither of us have actually played the game but it was around when we were about 10. We were trying to imagine how bad this game could possibly have been that it was taboo, and yet it was around in his (and my friends) fathers collections. We speculated that it would probably be pretty horrific sexist geek humour.

I did a bit of Wikipedia research and it seemed like it pretty interesting game. Probably terrible, but ground breaking at least (though the wiki article and related material didn't make it sound terrible). Interestingly, apparently it sold well even though nobody wanted to admit to having it, due to the lewd nature.

derekp7• 9 years ago

The game is humor focused, and the humor is about on the same level as Mel Brooks or Steve Martin films from that time period.

romwell2• 9 years ago

I think this is the best description.

Steve Martin and Mel Brooks still have their audience today. I think that kind of humor is timeless, just out of fashion; I think it will always have its audience, but it's almost surprising that it was mainstream at some point.

In the same vein, you won't see "dad jokes" going away any time ever.

rbanffy2• 9 years ago

same level as Mel Brooks or Steve Martin

That's overly generous. The game was funny (I played the Apple II version), but not on the same level.

dec0dedab0de2• 9 years ago

I was about 9 years old when I first played Leisure Suit Larry at my friends house in the 80s. We were like ninjas with a lookout and everything, most of the time failing to guess the age test questions.

I recently played all the way through for the first time ever, and I thought it was a great game. I giggled at some of the jokes that my younger self didnt get, and the exploratory nature of the text parser really holds up. I could see how the updated versions would ruin it... Now I want to make a game in this style.

flavio813• 9 years ago

You can make a game exactly in this style, please google "AGI interpreter"; basically, all these Sierra games run over a runtime called "AGI" (Adventure Game Interpreter), and currently there are many tools that allow you to design a similar game, with the same graphics and gameplay.

billwashere• 9 years ago

In later versions of Leisure Suit Larry, they use SCI ( "Script Code Interpreter" and later "Sierra's Creative Interpreter")[1]. If people like adventure games then I strongly recommend ScummVM: a collection of reimplantation of adventure game engines [2].

[1] http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/SCI

[2] http://www.scummvm.org

bjpbakker• 9 years ago

I lost a lot of time in the age test too. I was about 8 years old and we just started to learn English in school (am a native Dutch speaker). I remember keeping a list of correct and wrong answers so I could get in more easily.

Great times and awese game back then. I agree with the article though, the remake of the game is nothing like the experience of playing the original.

roel_v• 9 years ago

Same for me. At that time, the 'drm' of games often consisted of a physical thing that let you solve some sort of puzzle at startup. For example, for monkey island, there were two discs you had to rotate to a certain position and then enter a certain symbol it would produce.

Anyway, for many years, I just assumed that it was the same for leisure suit larry; and that I was just missing the papers. Many of the questions didn't make sense to my (Belgian/Dutch) parents. At some point, they started questioning why we were asking all these questions, so we had to find another way to figure them out.

tnolet• 9 years ago

That is exactly what I did too. My friend had a much older brother though and he totally helped us out. Bless him!

mseebach• 9 years ago

Same for me. I remember discovering that it was a very limited number of questions and that brute forcing them was feasible.

tigershark• 9 years ago

I was maybe 10, and I remember that I was so pissed off by the age test that I found the way to bypass it simply using CTRL-Z. After that point I wasn't really much interested to the game because I didn't know what the hell to write and what to do. But at least cracking the age test was fun.

rconti• 9 years ago

I actually remember the (impossible!) age test a lot more than I remember the gameplay, though I think my friend and I played it quite a bit on his dad's 3-foot-tall 486 tower. I think we were ~5th grade at the time. We also kept a list of correct age test answers.

erikb3• 9 years ago

There's a whole genre of "Interactive Novel" players and creators out there. In percent it's a small community, but I bet as with everything of old times, the sum of all people in there might be bigger than the whole amount of computer users in 1987.

You'll enjoy it. They have game creation engines, standardized grammar for dialogues, compilers that build your game even for smart phones and all operating systems.

quantumpotato_• 9 years ago

A subset of "Interactive Fiction".

The latest in language: http://inform7.com/

"Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics and by the practical experience of some of the world's best-known writers of IF."

fendmark2• 9 years ago

Such a great article. I absolutely loved all the original Sierra games. There was something magical about them and this is the best explanation of this that I've ever seen. I was 8-9 when I started playing the first Police Quest, such a great game. I went back and bought the remake on Gog a few years back and it just didn't have the same play ability and uniqueness. I remember I always loved knocking over all the motorcycles outside the bar.

Alan_Dillman2• 9 years ago

The trick I figured out was to select age 99(the oldest permitted). The reason why is that the questions for that age bordered on historical facts. Empire State Building and whatnot.

The questions would have been written by middle aged men who were as unfamiliar with the pop-culture lives of 99 year olds as I was with theirs. So the questions were really low ball, and in a pinch, an encyclopedia could provide the answer instead of mom.

amelius• 9 years ago

It would have been funny if they adapted the rest of the gameplay to your given age.

sdwisely• 9 years ago

we had them all memorized as kids, until we realized there was a key combo that skipped it.

technion• 9 years ago

I also played this in its early days, and recently played it through in DOSBOX. The thing I've found is that, humour and text parser aside, these games really aren't that playable in 2017 because you follow this pattern.

Play for a bit. Look up solution to problem. Continue. Even if you swear you'll only use a walkthrough when you're really really stuck, you end up finishing the game in 45 minutes.

And it really made me really, we sank weeks into this, and never got past the first few screens in those days.

rangibaby2• 9 years ago

Playing games was different back then (for me at least). I would visit different places in the game as some kind of “virtual tourist” to explore and just enjoy myself. It’s not like there was anything else to do with a computer that wasn’t totally boring.

It was quite nice watching the vector backgrounds being drawn and filled in one polygon at a time too.

dec0dedab0de2• 9 years ago

I just dont look at the walkthrough. Unless I already beat it, and I'm going for maximum points

NIL8• 9 years ago

Your comment reminded me of how my friend and I would play that game. It felt so mischievous and exciting. It's nice to hear about it again and I agree, a similar game would be a blast.

Animats• 9 years ago

Here's the real successor to Leisure Suit Larry - "Become a Pick-Up Artist". Available for iPhone.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNpq3l6gxlI

DonHopkins2• 9 years ago

And then there's Scott Foe's educational mobile game, "Douche Defender"!

http://www.develop-online.net/press-releases/big-head-mode-d...

San Francisco, California: From games industry legend Scott Foe, Big Head Mode announces the debut of Douche Defender, a fun game that helps women to identify real-world pickup artists, free-to-play for iPhone and iPad in the Apple App Store.

“I’m always trying to bring something new, something that people have never seen before, something from the way-way out-there machine, and we have definitely achieved that uniqueness with Douche Defender,” said Foe.“There is a huge subculture of seduction lurking out there on the internet and this is both the first game that I have designed with female players as the targets and the first game that I have designed with real-world implications outside of the game, and so I am very excited to see how Douche Defender is received.”

SadWebDeveloper• 9 years ago

I was one of the early kickstart backers of the game, yes one those that waited a long time to get my hand on the game on day one (plus a shirt to remember the event) and when i was finally able to play the game, i got frustrated... with the new age verification questionary, it was harder than when i was a kid, got me at least 20 attempts to get in the game (i could probably cheat those question searching them with google but it didn't feel right at the moment) and by that time, i lost interest and just left the game there on my library then the reviews came and totally forgot about it, would probably play the game just to get on the same track as this article.

joering2• 9 years ago

Six installment was my favorite - everything was perfect form music to graphics (at that time) and there was amazing mood in the game I could play for hours trying to figure it all out by myself instead than from manual. I wish someone would write a contunuance of #6 with new missions in the same theme I would definitely pay monthly to get new mission but I'm sure there is simply not enough of us :(

This and Dune 2 were my favorite games of young days and most memorable moments with my family still all together.

romwell2• 9 years ago

Just reading your comment made LSL6 hotel theme play in my head.

I should add, LSL7 was a great game. On top of that, the recent remake of LSL1 (Kickstarter-funded, with tracks by Austin Wintory) is a good addition if you're a fan of the series.

Still, the graphics, feel, music, story and feel of LSL6 make it my favorite game in the series.

doc_gunthrop• 9 years ago

Dune 2 was a fantastic game. It's essentially the progenitor for RTS games like the Warcraft and Starcraft series.

chris_wot• 9 years ago

I tried playing Dune 2 after playing Command and Conquer, and I found it almost impossible.

sqldba• 9 years ago

My favourite was LSL2 because it was so absurd and LSL3 because it was so complex for a game at that time (and also absurd).

But yes LSL6 was a masterpiece. Finding the “Where’s Dildo?” items was a stroke of genius.

DonHopkins2• 9 years ago

The Apple ][ version of SoftPorn (written in Applesoft BASIC) lets you bet negative amounts of money in the casino and then lose on purpose, to easily make lots of cash!

tekromancr2• 9 years ago

MtGox had the same bug

drngdds• 9 years ago

The joke isn’t the joke itself, the joke is that this joke was told in this context.

Unrelated, but I think this is where a lot of The Onion's appeal comes from.

gilbetron2• 9 years ago

I worked with a guy who Leisure Suit Larry was based off of, appearance wise. His name was Nick Medici (sp?) and he actually was a really nice, gracious guy, but looked exactly like LSL. He told us stories of the Sierra days and the husband/wife that ran it. He also cooked really tasty food for us!

takeda• 9 years ago

Is there a picture of him to compare?

gilbetron2• 9 years ago

Like this: https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2007...

But real ;)

I haven't been able to find a picture of him, and this was about 15 years ago...

mypalmike• 9 years ago

Sort of tangentially related:

I recently read a book about ocean-crossing by private boat that turned out to be written by Ken Williams, the cofounder of Sierra (i.e. the husband you mentioned). It turns out that being ultra-rich from founding and selling a major software company can open doors to cool, expensive hobbies.

https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Ocean-Under-Power-Williams/d...

platz• 9 years ago

did anyone actually read the article?

This should be the take-away quote:

So that was the original Leisure Suit Larry. It was a game that provided an absurdist joke about sexy pixel women that entertained an audience of people frustrated with text parsers by subverting genre expectations.

The new versions of the game destroyed the essence of the game by moving away from text parsing to mouse-based, and by moving away from pixel graphics to rich graphics.

soneca3• 9 years ago

I love Adventure games. I was more of a Lucas Arts fan, I believe both for the richer narrative (as in Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion and Indiana Jones), but also because for a non-english speaker point and click was easier than writing.

But I was always fascinated by the potential of writing anything in King's Quest. The problem is that I never could play it properly. The frustration from the "find the synonym" game for english speakers is a complete block for non-english speakers. That with the Sierra game choices where you could die or get permanently stuck, made it impossible for me to play it. I remember me taking days of trial to find out how to "pick up a cup" on one of the first scenes because I only knew about take or get things.

But specifically LSL never was more than a curiosity to me. Maybe because I got to know it before puberty. The objective of getting laid did not look as interesting for a full game as facing a dead pirate or finding Atlantis. The nuances the author points out were all lost to me.

In the end it was just a curious game to know about like X-Man, the Atari's porn game

amigoingtodie• 9 years ago

What about Willy Beamish?

soneca3• 9 years ago

The name was only kind of familiar, so I googled it and WOW! I remember playing it and loving it. One of those things I would never remember spontaneously. Thanks for that!

I remember mostly because of the frog! Although, judging by the screenshots I saw on Google, I didnt go very far in the game. Only a few looks familiar.

greymeister• 9 years ago

"Hoopa Coiler Agamemnon!"

That was one of my favorites even though I can't stand the load times on Sega CD to ever play it again.

bobbyi_settv• 9 years ago

tvtropes had a good write-up of the "guess the verb" phenomenon with several Sierra examples including the infamous case of needing to "press" (but not "push") a button

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouCantGetYeFlask

liberte824• 9 years ago

Day Of The Tentacle FTW

Xoros• 9 years ago

"Friend of yours Bernaaard ?"

flavio813• 9 years ago

I think i have played Maniac Mansion like 300 times... truly an innovative game!

bravura• 9 years ago

I don't want to diminish your experience at all. But here's my story:

I learned to read and write by playing Sierra games. I played them with my dad. And I guess I wanted to be able to play them alone.

So the crappy text parsing forced me to learn written English. "Get knife" -> "What is a knife?", "Get sword" -> "I don't see a sword", "Get dagger" -> "You have the dagger". Over and over with many different circumstances. So I also learned to type.

I entered pre-school already knowing how to read and write, much to the chagrin of some teachers.

I am not saying this style of gaming was overall good. But it hard a weird unique impact on my development.

soneca3• 9 years ago

The point and click ones taught me english a lot, as the verbs and dialogs were in english as well, with no translations.

pmarreck3• 9 years ago

wow, that is amazing

I'm actually surprised that to this day, learning reading, writing and math has not been very incentivized/gamified.

lloeki• 9 years ago

Hopelessly intrigued by Chrono Trigger, I learned English by playing it back to back on ZSNES, banging my head as I was looking for some place, object or task I hadn't quite fully grasped, progressing from frankly mediocre to seriously nice reading skills by the end (or rather, 10+ ends) of the game. Next stop was DOTT, and since the Full Talkie novelty was only available in English, well, so be it! With all the wit and puns and accents, 5 min in I was like "Holy crap what have I got myself into?", but that was too late, I was hooked, there was no way I would not beat this game. With no other guide than a Harrap's I made it through the hard way. A delightfully painful experience it was to go way beyond my comfort zone with such good games, to which I owe to be fluent in English today.

viraptor• 9 years ago

Very similar here. To this day I can remember the frustration of trying to type "use handcuffs" in Police Quest, which was one of the few timed actions. (I think you got shot of you took too long) Single digit pecking at the keyboard made this extremely hard.

glandium2• 9 years ago

16 colors

Try 4 colors, on CGA. http://www.agidev.com/images/shots/cga_larry2.gif

kalleboo• 9 years ago

I wonder what it looked like on a CGA Composite monitor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc

glandium2• 9 years ago

Holy sh*t, this totally blew my mind! My first x86-based PC was a Sinclair PC200, which had CGA, and I had a RGBI monitor, and while online references of that PC suggest it had a composite output, I never used it. I thus had to endure the crappy output mode, and never knew it could have been so much better (and that a lot of the games I played were optimized for that better output).

I wonder if some emulators have a filter to get something like the composite output...

lathiat• 9 years ago

Gave a copy of Leisure Suit Larry to a friend in early high school. Their parent called my dad and gave them an earful, and my dad laughed and didn't understand why. Hahahahaha.

erikb3• 9 years ago

Oh so true. However, working in software companies my whole life I also see that without being a team leader with a long list of successes you could never convince your colleagues to go a different route with such kind of remake. Easy UI, newer graphics, exactly the same joke by word not by context. That's the only way such a remake can go. I guess if at all one could decide whether to start such a remake or not, if that set of "changes" is not acceptable.

epynonymous• 9 years ago

sierra games were definitely the best back then, king's quest, space quest, police quest, quest for glory, and leisure suit larry were the ones i played a lot, interesting and humorous, definitely on the same wavelength back then, i would spend hours exploring these worlds and marveling at the different ways i could have fun. i remember playing these games on my 286 compaq computer, 4 MB ram, would have to spend 5-10 minutes installing from 5-6 3.5 inch floppies, the nostalgia! can't imagine what the remake versions look like, but i can relate to what the author's saying, i'm sure there's some emulator where you can play the 16 bit versions somewhere. the first time i played leisure suit larry 2, the first thing to do is to check out these binoculars, you look in and see some woman undressing with some huge knockers, then the shades go down or a pelican blocks your view. the music was corny as hell, but so fitting, saxophone, electronic keyboard, really bad lounge music from 70's porn. i also vaguely remember shaving some piece of green wood into some phallic like symbol which some babe wanted, but once giving it to her, she goes off somewhere with the toy on her own and larry gets nothing.

this was all before nintendo and the consoles took over, man, i wonder how much money they made, such innovation back then.

subatomic• 9 years ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the text adventure documentary "Get Lamp", so I will. http://www.getlamp.com/

makecheck• 9 years ago

Hopefully we are on the verge of a new series of text games that can use machine learning. It would be really cool to have pretty much any wording be understood, along with an engine that can respond with more intelligence.

jakeogh• 9 years ago

aah, Tay.

bla2• 9 years ago

Mirror: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XksJ5T...

a-dub• 9 years ago

oh man, such memories of trading disks at school and downloading them at 1200 baud all night (once having to go into hiding having rung up an obscene long distance bill).

i think one thing that the author missed is the fact that there was a distinct brand of low-brow humor that permeated all sierra games. in the early days, they weren't professionals, they were a bunch of weirdos hanging out in the foothills of the sierra nevadas making weird stuff with computers. all the jokes were lame in all of their titles, everything was corny, but people loved it because there was a sense of camaraderie in the weirdness of having and playing pc adventure games. you bought that damn soundblaster, it's gonna play that cheesy midi music and you're gonna love it because you're into this weird computer stuff made by other weird computer people and this corny faux-hollywood-wannabe thing validates your weird hobby. (and all that money you spent on video cards and modems and all that other stuff and all that time you spent chatting with weirdo sysops)

so yeah, objectively it's crap... but the same thing could be said of star wars. i never saw it until 2001 and i never understood it, i guess you just had to be there.

rhblake• 9 years ago

Re: "bunch of weirdos hanging out in the foothills of the sierra nevadas", part three in Steven Levy's excellent book "Hackers" is about this -- mainly about Ken and Roberta Williams and Sierra in the 80s. Very much recommended.

fendmark2• 9 years ago

Loved Levy's book on Google, I'll definitely be picking this one up. Thanks for the reco

pbhjpbhj2• 9 years ago

Threads like this always make me wonder who might be mining it for age hints to associate with usernames.

There are lots of Reddit threads like "what's the crime you got away with" that feel like extremely blatant examples of that type of profile mining.

pronik• 9 years ago

Biggest influence adventure games had on me was teaching me how to type - when you're stuck in police quest and keep changing locations to find a missing clue and banging "open door" (sometimes with infuriating typos) for the 100th time in the last 5 minutes - that's a skill-forming exercise. I've never learnt the classical touch-typing, but I'm good enough thanks to Sierra.

jwdunne• 9 years ago

Funnily enough I noticed this playing FPSs online like rogue spear. Teamspeak wasn't really viable on a 56k so text was the only method of comms for me and my friends at the time.

I remember my dad being proud that I could type without looking. He asked me to demonstrate to his friend - I was in a rogue spear lobby at the time.

Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry

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