In late 1980s, Al Lowe in cooperation with Sierra-On-Line released his smash title: Leisure Suit Larry in The Land of The Lounge Lizards. The goal of the game was quite innovative - being a 40 year old virgin who has just discovered, that his live could be changed, you decide to spend a wild night in Lost Wages, full of bars, discos and casinos. The goal of the game: “score” as many girls as possible and stop being a virgin. The game itself was aimed at “mature audiences only” - after starting the program, the user was given 5 questions, that only an adult person would (or rather: should) know. If the player fail the test, he would be immediately thrown out back to the DOS prompt with a comment stating, that the game can be only played by (or with) an adult. This itself was quite revolutionary, since the game was obviously intended NOT to be played by kids.

LSL was possibly the first game on PC, that let the player see and interact with the environment: there was this small little guy on the screen that you could move. There were buildings and streets you could SEE, and the neon signs actually flashed! More complex interaction (such as picking up objects or talking to people) was still limited to giving commands using the keyboard and a very extensive list of keywords but the fact that you were REALLY walking around in the game world was truly mind blowing. This, along with amazing game music (very sporadic, but still amazing for that time) and funny dialogs made the game an instant hit and very soon LSL was followed by LSL2 continuing the series with further games to this day (although the main author, Al Lowe, has not been involved with the series since LSL7).

What was the true success of the game apart from its original setting and graphics? Possibly the extent of actions you could perform on surrounding objects (and on yourself for that matter). Picking up a table or throwing a glass of whisky at the bartender would usually result in a funny comment uttered by the game and some things that you could do were simply hilarious (for example, trying to type MASTURBATE in the command line or F*** A DOG ;) ). A new experience, unseen in other games of this genre at the time was presence of a narrator. All dialogs and text in the game were written in such a way that you, as a player, had a feeling that your game is being watched all the time, making the entire experience more “bonding” with the main character. Larry Laffer himself was so goofy and silly, that the player instantly took a liking to him, despite narrator’s mockery and making fun of him on several different occasions. Leisure Suit Larry is definitely a game, where you can feel the atmosphere and can easily get sucked in pretty quickly.

Speaking of graphics, the environment currently occupied by the player was drawn using the mind boggling EGA graphics: an experience quite luxorious at that time, since color screens were not so popular yet. However, the true quality shock was experienced during Larry’s interactions with women. You were actually able to see a close up of them, which resulted in a beautifully drawn (remember: “at that time”!) pictures of pretty girls. In total, the game contained 4 such images, which was more than enough to increase the blood pressure of male players ;).

Can a contemporary player find Leisure Suit Larry attractive? That depends. As mentioned before, LSL is a series still in production, latest games have a full-raph 3D graphics support, which makes the gameplay look a lot more reasonable, than the first games of the series from over 20 years ago. However, veteran players will surely agree with me, that games from the beginning of LSL saga had a specific climate, that nowadays is very difficult to reproduce. If  the fact that you have to input commands with a keyboard seems repelling, you might try the official remake of the game from 1991 with the official Sierra point-n-click interface. The remake supported 256-color VGA graphics, high quality sounds and music, which made the gameplay a bit more pleasing to the eye (I actually started my LSL encounter with this remake, not seeing the original game until 2004!). That said, if you feel like rekindling the fires of good old adventure games, be sure to get interested in Leisure Suit Larry.

(The following rating concerns the original EGA release of the game)

Sound – 1/10 – There was virtually NO sound during the game. On several occasions you could actually hear some music, but apart from this – silence was dominant.

Graphics -3/10 – By today’s standards the game graphics were terrible. Note however that this was one of the first adventure games that supported graphical representation of the environment at all!

Overall - 8/10 – The game was addictive. VERY addictive. Amount of things you could do with yourself, your surroundings, other people and humorous comments in the game got the game a whole lot of fans. And there was this original “goal” of the game….