In the contract Al Lowe signed for his first adult game, its working title was Money Quest. It came out in June 1987 as Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, had the worst first month of any Sierra On-Line release, and then sold by word of mouth until it reached the top of the charts. Lowe was an unlikely person to have written it. He had spent years as a school music teacher and band director, and he came to Sierra to run its educational software. “He’s the single guy I never was,” he said of Larry in 1990. “The only time I went to bars is when they paid me to.”
Fast facts
- Born: 1946; grew up near St Louis, Missouri.
- Before games: professional musician from the age of 13, a master’s degree in music from the University of Missouri, then a school music teacher and band director.
- Sierra On-Line: 1982 to February 1999, first running educational software, then as a programmer, composer and designer.
- Known for: the Leisure Suit Larry series, from 1987 to 1996; Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist (1993, with Josh Mandel); Torin’s Passage (1995).
- Music: King’s Quest II and the first two Larry games, among others.
- Later: a cancelled eighth Larry game, a comedy website, the unreleased Sam Suede, and Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded (2013).
The band director
Lowe had played professionally since he was 13 and paid his way through college in “every kind of band that would hire me”: within one week, he said, he played in a big band, a symphony orchestra, a country and western band and a rhythm and blues band. He took a master’s degree in music at the University of Missouri, where he was president of the marching band, and met his wife, Margaret, a fellow saxophonist in the college band.
He came to computers through the marching band. As a student he plotted half-time shows on paper, with bandsmen standing in for pixels, and thought a computer ought to do the job. Years later, teaching music, he got access to the school district’s minicomputer and was given a book on BASIC. In 2005 he told Retro Gamer his goal: “I wanted a program to score a marching band contest!” He bought an Apple II and started writing programs of his own. Accounts differ on the dates: The One put the start in 1975, and Retro Gamer in 1978.
Selling games from a card table
In the evenings Lowe wrote educational games for children. He and his wife folded cardboard sleeves and “literally stuffed the floppies into little plastic baggies”, he told Retro Gamer, and they sold well at an educational computer show. They then paid a month’s salary for the smallest stall at Apple Fest. There, he remembered, Ken Williams walked past and called out: “Hey ’Berta! Come and look. These games look exactly like yours.” Sierra had no educational software. It took his programs, and it took him to head its educational department. For the rest of that school year he taught by day and wrote for Sierra at night.
His early programs were for young children on the Apple II. Bop-A-Bet taught the alphabet. In Dragon’s Keep a dragon has hidden 16 animals and the player must find and free them, moving from one high-resolution picture to the next by choosing what to do. Electronic Games credited it as “Programmed by Al Lowe, Written by Mike MacChesney” and praised text written at second-grade level, a large labelled map that gave children practice with maps, and charming graphics, though “the soundtrack is minimal”. Lowe also lists Troll’s Tale among his games of 1982.
Programmer and composer at Sierra
When Texas Instruments pulled out of home computers, Ken Williams bought its licence for Disney characters, and Lowe spent, as he put it, “a year or so” as “Walt Disney software”. The contract, he said, was written so that Disney “received all the actual money”. He said he “had a finger in all the Disney stuff one way or another – as a designer or composer or programmer or all of the above”. Two of them, Donald Duck’s Playground and Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, reached British Commodore 64 owners through US Gold, and Zzap!64 thought the Disney games had “the edge over the home-grown product”. The Black Cauldron, based on the Disney film, was, in Lowe’s words, “my design”, though it “had a lot of programming help”.
He also wrote music and code for Sierra’s other games. He composed the music for King’s Quest II, and later the scores for the first two Larry games. He said he “programmed big chunks of Police Quest and King’s Quest III”. He learnt a new language for almost every machine and project: Apple assembly language, then Commodore assembly language, then C for Winnie the Pooh, then Sierra’s own AGI and SCI systems.
Leisure Suit Larry
In 1987 Ken Williams asked Lowe whether he could do anything with Softporn Adventure, a text game by Chuck Benton that Sierra had published in 1981. Lowe decided that a straight remake would look dated, and made it a comedy around one hero. The name came from a joke that Softporn was so out of date it should be wearing a leisure suit, and from a Sierra salesman called Gary who told the office about his attempts to pick women up. “Leisure Suit Gary” became, for the alliteration, Leisure Suit Larry. The Leisure Suit Larry entry tells the story of the game, its warning label and age quiz, and its slow start. By Lowe’s account it sold only 2,000 copies in its first month. By early 1988 it had reached number one, and it won the Software Publishers Association’s award for the best adventure game of 1987.
Lowe designed and wrote the sequels, taking Larry to a cruise ship in Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) (1988) and giving the player a second character, Passionate Patti, in Leisure Suit Larry III (1989). “I wanted to have a chance to work with a character that wasn’t so defined,” he told The One. There was no fourth game: after III came Leisure Suit Larry 5 (1991), which Sierra’s advertising explained by “the missing disks of Leisure Suit Larry IV”, and then Leisure Suit Larry 6 (1993) and Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail! (1996). He also designed The Laffer Utilities, a set of joke office programs inspired by how popular Larry was with office workers.
He tested his jokes on other people. “I believe firmly… in spending a lot of time asking people ‘Is this funny? What’s wrong with this? Did you understand that?’” he said in 1990. When Sierra moved to its point-and-click interface, he filled the games with responses to clicks on things. “People who don’t find the new games funny usually aren’t clicking enough!”
Freddy Pharkas and Torin’s Passage
Two of his games had nothing to do with Larry. Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist (1993), designed with Josh Mandel, is a Western spoof about a gunfighter turned pharmacist in the town of Coarsegold, named after the California town where Sierra started out. Computer Gaming World praised puzzles whose solutions “often contain several steps”, a copy-protection scheme built into the game’s mixing of prescriptions (“This is the way copy protection should be done, if it must be done at all”), and above all its comedy: Lowe and Mandel, it wrote, “manage to find new jokes to crack and new ways to crack old ones”.
Torin’s Passage (1995) was a family fantasy adventure, and it disappointed the same magazine. “From Al Lowe I expect Ren and Stimpy rather than Strawberry Shortcake,” its reviewer wrote, though he conceded that Lowe’s jokes, such as a character bumping his head on the menu bar and a black-and-white parody of a 1950s television sitcom, saved it from being “a complete King’s Quest clone”.
The eighth Larry
After Love for Sail! Lowe made Leisure Suit Larry’s Casino (1998), an online casino where players gambled, chatted and played party games, with Larry as the only member of staff. He told PC Player that the next Larry would be in 3D. It was not made. On 22 February 1999, in Lowe’s words, “Sierra informed me they were going to stop development of Leisure Suit Larry 8: Lust in Space”, and asked him to clean out his office after 16 years. PC Player reported the layoffs at Sierra, then owned by the French group Havas, and said Sierra was “not interested” in further Larry games. Lowe did not own the character. “I don’t own the rights to Larry,” he wrote. “Sierra does.”
Later life
Lowe later became chief technology officer of Jacknabbit, a start-up making online scheduling software, which had closed by early 2001. He kept up a comedy website and its joke mailing list, CyberJoke 3000, played saxophone in jazz bands and played golf. In 2005 he told Retro Gamer he was glad to have had no part in Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, which he thought “an embarrassing game”.
He tried to come back more than once. In 2005 he co-founded iBase Entertainment to make Sam Suede: Undercover Exposure, an “action comedy” in which characters are defeated by making them laugh instead of shooting them. “Where are the comedies?” he asked in 2006, comparing the comedy shelves of a video rental shop with its games. iBase could not find a publisher and closed in January 2007, and Sam Suede was never released. In 2012, with the company Replay Games, he raised money on Kickstarter to remake the first Larry game, and Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded came out in 2013.
In November 2018 Lowe began selling on eBay the backups he had kept of his Sierra work, starting with source code for the Larry games and planning to add King’s Quest III and Police Quest. Bids for the Leisure Suit Larry 2 source code passed $2,000. He warned buyers that they would not own “the intellectual property rights to the game, the code, the art, or anything else”.
Sources
- Marti McKenna, interview with Al Lowe, Sierra News Magazine vol. 3 no. 1, Spring 1990, pp. 8–9 and 32: Money Quest; the single guy he never was; St Louis; music career, degree and marching band; the district computer; Sierra since 1982; the Disney games and Black Cauldron; Police Quest and King’s Quest III; the languages he learnt; music for Larry 1 and 2 and Mike Dana on Larry 3; asking “Is this funny?”; his wife Margaret.
- Retro Gamer issue 19, 2005, pp. 55–59, “Leisure Suit Larry: the complete lowdown”: the marching band program; selling games in plastic bags; Apple Fest and Ken Williams; the educational department; the Disney licence from Texas Instruments and its terms; Softporn and the leisure suit joke; June 1987 and 2,000 copies; number one by early 1988; the SPA award; Leisure Suit Larry’s Casino; Magna Cum Laude; his website, golf and jazz band.
- The One issue 42, March 1992, p. 21, profile of Al Lowe: marching band director; 1975; Bop-A-Bet; Leisure Suit Gary; Passionate Patti; clicking in SCI games; The Laffer Utilities.
- Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 12, March 1984, p. 50: review of Dragon’s Keep, “Programmed by Al Lowe, Written by Mike MacChesney”.
- Electronic Games 1984 Software Encyclopedia (1983): Dragon’s Keep, Sierra On-Line, Apple II, $29.95.
- Zzap!64 issue 8, December 1985: educational games round-up, Donald Duck’s Playground and Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred-Acre Wood from US Gold/Sierra.
- Computer Gaming World issue 109, August 1993, pp. 50–52: review of Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist (designers Al Lowe and Josh Mandel; $69.95).
- Computer Gaming World issue 139, February 1996: review of Torin’s Passage.
- PC Player (Germany), April 1998: Leisure Suit Larry’s Casino and interview with Lowe (the next Larry in 3D).
- PC Player (Germany), May 1999, news: layoffs at Sierra; Lowe let go; Larry 3D planned; Sierra “not interested”.
- InterAction, Summer 1998: Leisure Suit Larry’s Casino.
- Computer Gaming World issue 199, February 2001, news: Jacknabbit and Lowe as chief technology officer.
- PC Review issue 7, May 1992: Leisure Suit Larry 5 advertisement.
- Al Lowe, “Is Larry Dead?”, allowe.com (web, secondary): 22 February 1999, Lust in Space, 16 years, the rights. https://allowe.com/games/larry/history-of-larry/is-larry-dead.html
- Al Lowe, “Disc-O-Graphy”, allowe.com (web, secondary): his own list of games and roles, including Troll’s Tale and the King’s Quest II music. https://allowe.com/al/disc-o-graphy.html
- Philip Jong, “Al Lowe”, Adventure Classic Gaming, 17 May 2006 (web, secondary): born 1946; iBase Entertainment, co-founded in 2005, and Sam Suede. http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/199/
- Chase Murdey, “Wedgies, Not Bullets”, Gamasutra, 30 May 2006 (web, secondary): “Where are the comedies?”. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/wedgies-not-bullets-i-leisure-suit-larry-i-creator-al-lowe-on-comedic-design
- Shacknews, “Leisure Suit Larry Creator’s ‘Sam Suede’ Resurrected”, 3 March 2010 (web, secondary): iBase closed in January 2007. https://www.shacknews.com/article/62612/leisure-suit-larry-creators-sam
- Unseen64, “Sam Suede: Undercover Exposure [cancelled]”, 8 December 2022 (web, secondary): the game unreleased. https://www.unseen64.net/2022/12/08/sam-suede-undercover-exposure-ibase-entertainment-pc-xbox-360-ps3-cancelled/
- Game Developer, “Former Sierra On-Line dev posts original source codes to eBay”, 30 November 2018 (web, secondary): the listings, bids over $2,000 for Leisure Suit Larry 2, and Lowe’s warning to buyers. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/former-sierra-on-line-dev-posts-original-source-codes-to-ebay