Before Sierra On-Line would let you play Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, it asked you some questions. The game was sold as a comedy for adults, and the quiz on its title screen was, in the words of Sierra’s marketing director John Williams, “the trivia test designed to keep youngsters out”. It did not keep out readers of Computer Gaming World: the magazine’s review in November 1987 told them that typing ALT-X at the first question skipped the lot. Behind the quiz waited Larry Laffer, 40 years old, thrown out by his mother at 38, dressed in a white polyester suit and determined to find romance before dawn. The game had the worst first month of any Sierra release. A year later it was at the top of the charts.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Sierra On-Line, Coarsegold, California. Electronic Arts distributed the Amiga version.
- Designer: Al Lowe; The Games Machine named Mark Crowe as his partner on the game.
- Released: June 1987, for IBM PC compatibles, at $39.95; versions for the Amiga, Atari ST, Apple IIGS and Macintosh followed.
- System: Sierra’s AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter), with a typed parser.
- Origin: a remake of Softporn Adventure, a 1981 text adventure by Chuck Benton, published by Sierra when it was still On-Line Systems.
- Series: six games by Lowe from 1987 to 1996, then further games from other studios, and a 2013 remake with Lowe.
Softporn Adventure
Sierra had published an adults-only game before. Softporn Adventure, a text-only Apple II game, was on sale from On-Line Systems at $29.95 by the end of 1981. Antic’s reviewer explained its aim in December 1982: in a “computer-generated city” in the year 2020, the player had to win the affection of three women, and raise the money to do it at the casino’s blackjack tables and slot machines. It used the standard two-word commands of the time. Computer Gaming World later remembered it as “a hit software package”.
Al Lowe, looking back in The One in 1992 and Retro Gamer in 2005, said the game sold 25,000 copies at a time when there were only 100,000 Apples in existence, and that its box, which showed Ken and Roberta Williams’s own hot tub, appeared in Time magazine’s first column about computers. He was less kind about the writing: “There was zero humour in it,” he told Retro Gamer, “but Chuck Benton was a programmer after all.”
From Softporn to Larry
In 1987 Ken Williams asked Lowe whether he could do anything with the old game. Lowe, a former school music teacher, had come to Sierra to run its educational software, and had joked that Softporn was so dated it ought to be wearing a leisure suit. According to The One, he decided a straight remake would look tawdry and turned it into a spoof, built around a single hero instead of the anonymous “you” of the original. A Sierra salesman called Gary, who told the office about his attempts to pick women up, gave him the character; “Leisure Suit Gary” became, for the alliteration, Leisure Suit Larry. Lowe kept the old puzzles. “I thought the puzzles were pretty good and simply ripped them off,” he told Retro Gamer, and he later wished he had spent more time rewriting them.
The result was an adventure in Sierra’s 3-D animated style, built on the AGI system that also ran King’s Quest and Space Quest. Larry walks in front of and behind the scenery while the player types commands. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer, Roy Wagner, praised the animated bar signs, moving taxis and elevators, and a parser that did the tedious steps for you: “BUY BEER” was enough, where other games wanted you to get the wallet, open it and pay. The PC version ran in 256K with CGA, EGA or Hercules graphics, and came on both 5¼-inch and 3½-inch disks.
One night in Lost Wages
The game takes place in a single night in the town of Lost Wages. Larry starts outside Lefty’s bar and travels by taxi between the bar, a casino, a convenience store, a wedding chapel and a disco, gathering the gifts and money he thinks will win someone over. He can play blackjack and the slot machines to raise cash. Computer Gaming World advised saving before every bet. The Games Machine’s reviewers said three of them spent an afternoon round an Atari ST losing at the blackjack table.
Most of the jokes are at Larry’s expense. He is, in Wagner’s words, “a jerk with bad breath”, and the game keeps finding new ways to embarrass him, or to end his night early. John Williams argued in 1988 that the game “contains no real nudity” and turned rude only if the player typed something rude first. Sierra’s box carried a warning that Ken Williams had worded: “This game contains adult subject matter. Parental guidance is suggested.”
Selling an adults-only game
Sierra released the game in June 1987, and it started badly. Lowe remembered the worst first month Sierra had ever had, though the figure has varied in his retelling: 2,000 copies in Retro Gamer, 4,000 in Computer Gaming World in 2004. John Williams described the trade’s nervousness in Computer Gaming World in January 1988. Some large customers would not stock the game at all, some chains stocked it but refused to advertise it, and a distributor with an influential bestseller chart left it off, even though it outsold most of the games listed. One independent dealer returned his demonstration copy cut in half with a hacksaw. One of the first letters accused Sierra of going “into the porno software business”.
Then the sales rose. Williams wrote that “lots of retailers were selling lots of Leisure Suit Larry, but no one wanted to admit it”. Lowe said there was no advertising: sales doubled every month by word of mouth, and about a year after release the game reached the top of the charts. The One reported that sales only began to slow when the third game came out, in 1989.
The press was divided. Computer Gaming World enjoyed it (“With good graphics, good design, and good fun provided, who needs ‘good taste’?”) and The Games Machine gave it 83 per cent. Williams reported that Macworld had panned it, saying it “contributes nothing to enlightened male attitudes toward women”, and that Info criticised Sierra for treating women as sex objects. The Software Publishers Association gave it its award for the best adventure game of 1987.
The age quiz caused its own trouble. Computer Gaming World had printed the ALT-X bypass for readers it assumed were adults; after Williams’s complaint the editors conceded that “we probably should not have published the tip”. Williams also described a call from a mother whose son had a pirated copy, from which the cracker had removed both the warning screen and the quiz.
The sequels
Lowe made five more Larry games at Sierra, most of them on its newer SCI system. There was never a fourth: after the third game, the next was Leisure Suit Larry 5, which Sierra’s advertising explained by “the missing disks of Leisure Suit Larry IV”.
| Game | Year | What was new |
|---|---|---|
| Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) | 1988 | One of the first games on SCI; a cruise ship, spies and music for the new sound cards |
| Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals | 1989 | Introduced Passionate Patti, and let the player control her as well as Larry |
| Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work | 1991 | The first Larry game in 256 colours with Sierra’s icon interface |
| Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! | 1993 | Set at a health spa; the CD-ROM version gave Larry a voice, Jan Rabson’s |
| Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail! | 1996 | A new cartoon look, on board a cruise ship |
In 1991 Sierra also remade the first game in 256-colour VGA with the point-and-click interface. The Patti games were a deliberate change of pace. “I wanted to have a chance to work with a character that wasn’t so defined,” Lowe told The One.
Later history
Lowe, by then retired, had no part in Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (2004), a 3D game about Larry’s nephew, Larry Lovage, published by Vivendi. Computer Gaming World called it “the shameful sadness that is Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude”, and Lowe told Retro Gamer he was happy not to have been involved. Another game without him, Box Office Bust, followed in 2009.
In 2012 Lowe returned. With the company Replay Games, he raised money on Kickstarter for a remake of the first game, passing the $500,000 target in April 2012; Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded came out in 2013. The German studio CrazyBunch then made two new games for the publisher Assemble Entertainment, Wet Dreams Don’t Dry (2018), which sends Larry into the world of dating apps, and Wet Dreams Dry Twice (2020).
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 41, November 1987, pp. 44 and 47: Roy Wagner’s review (price, systems, designers, the quiz and the ALT-X bypass, Larry’s age and story, graphics cards and memory, the parser, gambling).
- Computer Gaming World issue 39, August/September 1987, pp. 30–31, and issue 43, January 1988, pp. 48–49: John Williams, “The New Wave of Adult Entertainment Software”, parts one and three (Softporn as “a hit software package”; the release, retailers’ reactions, the hacksaw, hate mail, rising sales, Macworld and Info, the trivia test, the warning label, the pirated copy, the editors’ note on the bypass).
- Computer Gaming World issue 35, March 1987, p. 61: Sierra announcing Leisure Suit Larry as a “humorous (read risque)” release.
- Computer Gaming World issue 40, October 1987, p. 56: the Amiga version, from Sierra.
- Sierra Newsletter vol. 1 no. 3 and no. 4, 1988: the Apple IIGS and Macintosh II versions; “a 40-year-old nerd”.
- Sierra News Magazine (InterAction) vol. 3 no. 2, Summer 1990: the Software Publishers Association award, and AGI for the Leisure Suit Larry series.
- The Games Machine issue 5, April 1988, p. 82: review of the Atari ST, Amiga and PC versions (£19.99; Al Lowe and Mark Crowe; 83 per cent).
- Creative Computing, December 1981, p. 229, and Antic vol. 1 no. 5, December 1982, p. 80: Softporn Adventure on sale from On-Line Systems, and Davey Saba’s review.
- The One issue 42, March 1992, p. 21: profile of Al Lowe (Softporn’s sales and Time; Leisure Suit Gary; the first month; sales slowing with the third game; Passionate Patti).
- Retro Gamer issue 19, 2005, pp. 55–59, “Leisure Suit Larry: the complete lowdown” (June 1987 release; Softporn, Chuck Benton and the hot tub; the puzzles; first-month sales and rise to number one; the SPA award; Magna Cum Laude).
- Computer Gaming World issue 246, holiday 2004, pp. 122–123, “The many misadventures of Leisure Suit Larry” (Lost Wages; the 1991 remake; the sequels; the interview with Lowe on sales); and pp. 16–17, Magna Cum Laude.
- PC Review issue 7, May 1992: Leisure Suit Larry 5 advertisement.
- Shacknews, “Leisure Suit Larry hits his Kickstarter goal”, 25 April 2012 (web, secondary). https://www.shacknews.com/article/73502/leisure-suit-larry-hits-his-kickstarter-goal
- Steam, Leisure Suit Larry – Wet Dreams Don’t Dry store page (web, secondary): developer CrazyBunch, publisher Assemble Entertainment. https://store.steampowered.com/app/765870/
- Wikipedia, “Leisure Suit Larry” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release years of the sequels, Box Office Bust, Reloaded (2013) and Wet Dreams Dry Twice (2020); the Apple II version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry