Leisure Suit Larry in The Land of The Lounge Lizards - Development

Development

Al Lowe, a former high school teacher, had carved a niche for himself at Sierra with his work on such Disney-licensed edutainment titles as Donald Duck's Playground, Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, and The Black Cauldron, which he wrote, designed and programmed. In 1982, Sierra had released a text-only game on the Apple II titled Softporn Adventure (it was the only text adventure that was released by a company which had established its name on providing a graphical alternative to such games). In 1986, after Sierra lost a Disney license, Al Lowe suggested that Sierra remake Softporn Adventure with the improved tools now at their disposal, and Ken Williams agreed.

Lowe, who considered the original Softporn Adventure "a primitive, early effort", borrowed its basic structure and added a graphic game engine (Adventure Game Interpreter), improvised humor, and an on-screen protagonist, Larry Laffer. Chuck Benton, creator of Softporn Adventure, is included in the Leisure Suit Larry's end credits, as the layout and puzzles of the game are identical to those found in the earlier title. However, Lowe said that in Softporn Adventure "there were no characters in the game. There was no central character at all. There were almost no characters to the women. And so it was a real role-over. I think there’s one line of dialogue that I kept of the original game and all the rest was fresh."

The game was co-designed and illustrated by Mark Crowe, creator of the Space Quest series, and co-programmed by Ken Williams. An accomplished jazz musician (The Lounge Lizards being a jazz band's name), Lowe also wrote the main theme music called "For Your Thighs Only", and some of his compositions appear in later entries of the Leisure Suit Larry series. The theme was composed in 20 minutes, inspired Irving Berlin's 1929 song "Alexander's Ragtime Band". Lowe said it "sounded so unusual, so different, so fresh compared to most computer game music, that I decided to write something with the same pep, simplicity, humor, and out-of-sync attitude."

For the first remake, Al Lowe served as director and designer, also helping to program the game, and Ken Williams became executive producer. Other key people included Stuart Moulder (producer), William R. Davis Sr. (creative director), William D. Skirvin (art designer), Oliver Brelsford (lead programmer), and the music other than the theme song was composed by Chris Braymen. The 1991's Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards used the new game engine Sierra's Creative Interpreter and was released in 1991 for the Amiga, DOS and Macintosh platforms.

Due to the adult nature of the game, the game includes an age verification system consisting of trivia questions that Al Lowe assumed children would not know the answer to. As many of the questions are U.S.-centric, they risked frustrating non-American gamers. If played today, the questions also include out-of-date cultural references. (One question begins "OJ Simpson is..." and one wrong answer is "under indictment.") In the original AGI version, the age verification screen may be skipped by pressing Alt-X (or in the 1991 SCI remake, by pressing Ctrl-Alt-X).