
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry - smacktoward
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=34307
======
dec0dedab0de
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.

~~~
bjpbakker
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
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.

------
soneca
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

~~~
bravura
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.

~~~
pmarreck
wow, that is amazing

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

~~~
notzorbo3
There's plenty of gamified learning out there. It's just not something most
educators want to use for some reason. Learning has to be boring and dull
after all!

Meanwhile, I started learning english (not a native speaker) at age 5 because
all the broadcasted cartoons were in english, with subtitles. I remember my
dad loading up gamified math puzzle games on the Commodore 64 for me to play.
And this was some 32 years ago.

I don't know why it's so underused. Perhaps educator are afraid they'll be
seen as lazy or not serious about their teaching if they use such measures?

What I do know is that gamification was one of the best ways of being educated
as a kid.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Gamification is used a lot in UK education, at least PBL appears everywhere.

The problems with gamification centre mainly around intrinsic vs extrinsic
motivation. Some studies strongly suggest that you're teaching kids to seek
the rewards of games rather than helping them to find fulfillment in their
education.

Gamification works well if you're looking for mechanical responses; it might
work better for deeper thinking if the game element is well designed.

Kids feel that fun education is better, but that doesn't necessarily mean it
is/isn't the best method.

Some things in studies - money - turn out to be bad motivators for tasks, with
larger sums interfering more in people completing more complex tasks. PBL
probably follows a similar model.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation/](https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation/)
is worth a look.

~~~
gboudrias
> helping them to find fulfillment in their education

This did not happen to me or my friends until university. I doubt anything
would've fooled us into liking school, but learning games at least would have
passed the time quicker.

------
jacobkg
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.

~~~
vm
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.

~~~
liberte82
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.

~~~
pmarreck
I probably laughed at some of those jokes and as a person who (much later)
majored in psychology and realized that "appeal to disgust" is a fallacy (also
that almost EVERYONE's secret sexual fetish grosses almost everyone else
out... that's just the peculiar nature of sexuality), on behalf of all 80's
teens, I apologize.

~~~
liberte82
Never heard of the "appeal to disgust" fallacy before, looked it up.
Interesting. :)

~~~
pmarreck
now that you know of it, you'll see it everywhere. I'm sorry, in advance. :)

Closely related is the
[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_shame](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_shame)
which is part of a general category of fallacies called emotional appeals.
You'll also note they're used constantly in debate ("pathos", it's called),
because (unfortunately) they are effective, despite being wrong (as far as
rational arguments go, at least). The only way to immunize yourself and others
against these sorts of tactics is to understand these fallacies so that you
can recognize them before you are irrationally swayed.

------
a-dub
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
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.

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

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

That’s just me though.

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

------
drngdds
>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.

------
pronik
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
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.

------
gilbetron
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
Is there a picture of him to compare?

~~~
gilbetron
Like this:
[https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2007...](https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2007/11/27/larry328.jpg)

But real ;)

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

------
platz
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.

------
DonHopkins
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!

~~~
tekromancr
MtGox had the same bug

------
SadWebDeveloper
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.

------
epynonymous
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.

------
Animats
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNpq3l6gxlI)

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

[http://www.develop-online.net/press-releases/big-head-
mode-d...](http://www.develop-online.net/press-releases/big-head-mode-debuts-
douche-defender-world-rsquo-s-first-game-about-pickup-artists/0180224)

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.”

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

------
glandium
_> 16 colors_

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

~~~
kalleboo
I wonder what it looked like on a CGA Composite monitor
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc)

~~~
glandium
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...

------
joering2
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.

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

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

------
pbhjpbhj
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.

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

------
lathiat
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.

------
erikb
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.

------
bla2
Mirror:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XksJ5T...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XksJ5TFkk3cJ:https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/%3Fp%3D34307+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
makecheck
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
aah, Tay.

------
icantdrive55
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?

~~~
tclancy
>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
"a vehicle for actually looking at sexy ladies"

So... google?

------
aidos
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
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.

~~~
romwell
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.

