Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies

Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies

The fourth installment of the Leisure Suit Larry series was officially Larry 5. The actual fourth part of the scenario was never made for various reasons, but it is jokingly referred to by both Sierra and fans under the subtitle of The Missing Floppies (or The Case of the Missing Floppies). Much gossip and rumor have spread to explain this: most believed that the original production floppies of the game were lost and the team would not remake it from scratch. Others referred to an internal office prank.

The actual reasons are mainly two and have been given by Al Lowe at separate points:

• Sierra began work on a multiplayer installment of Leisure Suit Larry that was to be played out over The Sierra Network. This failed due largely to technical reasons, and the planned multiplayer Larry game was shelved.
• The ending of Larry 3 was very definite and somehow metafictional (showing Larry and Patti coming to the Sierra studios and making games based on their adventures, living happily in a mountain cabin in Coarsegold). This completed a relatively cohesive trilogy with no sequel planned; Al Lowe was in a dead end because he couldn't find a way to start it since the scenario had completed a story arc.

Note that the Laffer Utilities and the Leisure Suit Larry 1 VGA remake are each sometimes unofficially credited as Larry 4, as the first was the fourth ever Larry production, and the latter, the fourth game to be made. Of course, similar VGA remakes of Space Quest I, Police Quest I, and Quest for Glory I were not given new numerical titles.

MAD Magazine had proposed what Leisure Suit Larry 4 might have looked like in a 1990 issue spoofing video games. Their idea was "the after effect of Larry's screwing around with the time coming for Larry having to pay the piper". They proposed the idea of Larry in a maze game similar to Berzerk, where he must steer clear of out-of-wedlock pregnancies he has caused, as well as private investigators, case workers, and angry fathers wielding shotguns, making it extremely difficult for Larry to continue his infamous carefree attitude towards casual sex.

On April 1, 2009 the Abandonware site Abandonia.com released an alleged "leaked copy" for download. This turned out to in fact be an elaborate April Fools Day prank: the screenshots were fakes, the review - fictional and the "game" archive actually contained 55 identical copies of scanned front casing of Xbox 360 version of Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.

On April 27, 2012, Al Lowe, the original game designer, revealed exactly what happened to the 4th installment in a video made for his then Kickstarter project.