Nor was he bashful in the least if said joke was a little - or a lot - off-color.
#Larry lounge lizard how to
His reputation as a very funny guy preceded him everywhere he was the sort of natural comedian who not only loved a good joke but knew how to deliver it in such a way that you almost couldn’t help but laugh. If you actually knew Al, however, it all made more sense.
#Larry lounge lizard software
Until now, he had been Sierra’s children’s software specialist, who had spent the last couple of years making games with Disney - about as far away from Softporn as one could get and still be working in the same industry.
Judged on the basis of his work history at Sierra alone, Al Lowe would seem the strangest of choices to assign to a sex farce. Ken therefore invited Al Lowe to lunch, to ask if he’d like to have a go. He wasn’t interested in revisiting Softporn, but, as long as he was properly credited and remunerated for his original work, he wasn’t averse to someone else at Sierra doing so. The New England-born Chuck Benton, after hanging around Sierra for a couple of years working on various lower-profile programming projects, had long since concluded that neither California nor the games industry was for him in the long term, fleeing back East to start a technology company of his own. What, then, might happen if Ken gave the world a sexy game with pictures? Clearly sex sold in the realm of computer games just as well as it did in that of any other form of media. Why not in the realm of games? If he needed further encouragement, it came about this time in the form of Infocom’s Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which rode Steve Meretzky’s naughty wit and more sexual innuendo than actual sex to near the top of the sales charts that 1986 Christmas season, becoming despite its increasingly passé text-only format Infocom’s last major hit and last title to make a real impact on the industry at large. The sex comedy had long been an established commercial winner in the cinemas, accepted or at least tolerated by all but the most morally conservative segments of society. Always eager to see computer games as mainstream, mass-market entertainment, he was naturally eager to pursue any fresh fictional genre that could help push them there. And yet Ken still couldn’t quite manage to forget Chuck Benton’s ribald game, so different in style and subject matter not only from any other adventure game in 1981 but also from anything available now, more than five years later. With Sierra now pursuing deals with the likes of Jim Henson and Disney, those days seemed like ancient history, the cover art a dispatch from another life.īy late 1986, with Sierra now known chiefly for Roberta’s family-friendly King’s Quest adventures, those wild early days seemed more ancient than ever. Small wonder that Softporn was quietly dropped from the catalog that year. And then there was that cover art, with Roberta Williams, who by 1983 had become the wholesome centerpiece of much of Sierra’s public relations, posed topless in a jacuzzi with two other women and a mustached waiter straight out of Porn Chic Central Casting. And not only was it an all-text adventure, but it wasn’t even a very sophisticated all-text adventure at that it was a painfully slow BASIC-driven experience with a two-word parser. Right from the beginning its text-only presentation - it was the only text-only game of any sort ever published by Sierra - placed it decidedly at odds with the rest of the company’s catalog. Still, while Softporn turned into a huge early hit for Sierra and helped to garner for the company some of its first national attention via an article in Time magazine, its shelf life was relatively short. It became on that day the only adventure game, ever, that he sat down and solved all by himself, just like any ordinary fan. Ken Williams had always loved Softporn, right from the day he first discovered it and spent three or four hours obsessively playing it. Larry’s dream girl, who also features on the Leisure Suit Larry box cover, pays homage to Softporn‘s famous cover art.
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