Narrative Flood

Leisure Suit Larry And The Quest For Love

The launch of Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust really depressed me, partly because I thought we’d outlawed games that bad sometime around the release of Rise of the Robots, but mostly because it again reminded me of how badly the Leisure Suit Larry games have always been treated. Yes, really. Obviously, they’ve got their defenders, but there’s no shortage of people willing to start their hate-engines at the mere mention of them, often without ever having actually played one.

It’s hardly a surprise, of course. A fairly steady theme in gaming is that despite all the slinky spy catsuits and jigglyboob physics and dodgy character art, not many gamers are willing to admit to being the target audience. Instead, any game that dares to cover sex, or sex-based issues, is guaranteed to be hauled over the coals, regardless of how well it actually handles the issue. Take Playboy: The Mansion, a perfectly decent strategy game. Or… well, there must be others. Either way, to some level, many games get caught in the crossfire, and often for the wrong reasons. As with all culture, it’s not typically content itself that’s the problem, but its context.

And here, the Larry games offer a more mature experience than you might expect.

Love at first dialogue puzzle

To recap, there have been eight Larry games now, not including spin-offs, broadly broken into three eras. There was the original trilogy, released between 1987 and 1989, three cartoon styled ones (1992-1996), and two 3D outings, Magna Cum Laude and Box Office Bust, which didn’t star the original Larry Laffer, but his nephew, a misogynistic, masturbating advert for chemical castration called Larry Lovage. These hideous games finally brought the series full circle, turning it into what everyone had always thought it was. But we’ll get to that later.

The problem with the original Larry trilogy was a disconnect between what they were about, and what they sounded like. The idea of a loser main character trying to score with random women made the games sound like porn – the first game was based on a terrible, terrible text game called Softporn Adventure, and was as much a parody of it as a remake – rather than the interactive Carry On games they inevitably were. They may have had some sexy/supposedly sexy bits in them, but the main focus was laughing at Larry’s misfortunes. If you were looking to be aroused, you were playing the wrong game. Aside from the occasional half-glimpsed breast or suggestive background detail, the action itself took place off-screen, or in one case, behind a big CENSORED sign.

Larry himself is an interesting character – his backstory and stated goals clearly setting him out as a man living out a frankly sad fantasy. When we meet him at the start of the first game, he’s a middle-aged virgin desperate to escape his boring life by reinventing himself as a 70s style swinger. However, far from a ladykiller, he’s complete dew-eyed innocent to the people living in the seedy, cynical gambling town he’s decided to seek his fortune in, and this quickly sinks in. His stated goal is to lose his virginity before daybreak. This can be done in about three minutes, five if you want him to survive the experience. This was a Sierra game after all – death was never far away.

However, in practice, this quick fling with a prostitute clarifies something else in his head. He’s no longer a virgin, but that no longer counts. He realises he’s after something more than that, and while he doesn’t say it outright, the rest of the trilogy makes it very clear: no matter how much he claims to want to live the polyamorous life, what he’s really after is the right woman, and love.

No, really.

Romeo and Juliets

Now, the Larry games weren’t great sweeping romances, not by a long shot. These were early adventures, with primitive storytelling aims. None of the characters are depicted in much depth, and mechanically speaking, all are puzzle elements in the greater machine rather than anything approaching believable entities in their own right. There are plenty of negative themes to pull out of the interactions too, not least the hint that almost every woman in the series is shallow enough to at least consider giving Larry what he wants in exchange for a trinket or quick favour.

However, there were more positive elements to these relationships too. The trinkets for instance. A fairly standard pattern was that Larry would attempt to take short-cuts on the road to happiness by winning girls over with purely materialistic gifts, like rings and credit cards, and in one case, a bottle of mysterious drugs. When he finally met up with his One True Love, a good hint that he’d found her was that the puzzle required something rather more personal/spiritual – an apple for a woman called Eve in the first game, dragging himself out of a rut in the third game, and saving the indigenous people of a tropical island paradise from a maniacal supervillain in Larry 2.

(Yes, Larry 2 was… odd…)

While the romances were extremely short in the individual games – Larry hooks up, credits roll – we’re explicitly told what happens between them. In each case, Larry drops the swinger lifestyle at the drop of a hat in favour of a loving, monogamous, honest relationship. They don’t last, but not because he breaks it off. His lover from the first game kicks him out on the street claiming she doesn’t remember him. His wife from the end of Larry 2 divorces him in favour of a lesbian casino repairwoman. As a result of this, Larry 3 has him specifically give up on relationships, put his suit back on, and specifically go out to get as many women as he can… only to fall harder in love than ever with a piano player, Passionate Patti, introduced at the end of the last game. He dances the usual humiliation tango across a tropical island to win her affections, and once he’s lost a few stone and risked death in the name of getting her a present, she finally agrees to give him a shot.

So far, so Leisure Suit Larry.

Except that now, things take a very different turn. The two end up in bed together, and realise that for once, they’re both completely in love. True, by this point they’ve known each other for roughly ten minutes of real time, but hey, love is love. This time however, it’s Patti that shatters it, by accidentally whispering her current boyfriend’s name as she drifts off to sleep. And after two and a half games of frustration and failure, Larry finally snaps and gives up. He leaves her in bed, gets dressed, and storms off to his probable death in the island’s lethal jungle. This being a Sierra adventure, it’s surprising he even makes it that far without seven deaths, but hey, no matter…

The result of this cut-scene is a complete shift in perspective. Now, you’re the girl chasing after Larry. Design-wise, these puzzles aren’t great – lots of annoying mini-games and a ridiculous fourth-wall breaking ending involving alternate dimensions, witch doctors, and a job offer from Roberta Williams – but they do the job. Larry and Patti are reunited, and the series ends on a cheery picture of the two of them looking out over a lake, programming a Sierra adventure game about their adventures. Which is exactly the same bloody ending as Space Quest III, but never mind. The series ends on a happy note, and one that in a fair and just universe, would last the test of time.

Haha. Fat chance…

Not Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places

By the time Larry 5 rolled around, the world was a different place. In case you don’t know, there wasn’t a Larry 4. Its non-existence was a plot point in Larry 5, but mostly an explanation for how Larry went from creating adventure games alongside a beautiful naked woman to being a low-level schlub at a porn movie production company. Where before he’d been a regular guy, he was now a deformed troll of a man with a fixed grin on his annoying face. The world was no longer the tacky side of town, but a universe seemingly inspired by the carpets in a particularly unpleasant Las Vegas casino. What little plot this appalling game had is barely worth mentioning. Larry is trying to track down a hostess for a home video show, while at the other side of the country, Patti gets recruited by the FBI for no particular reason. Also the Mafia is involved.

Really, just pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s a complete mess, and its existence is one of the few things that can excuse the more recent games for completely misjudging the series.

The one lingering element of the original games was Larry’s romantic side. As with Larry 3, the viewpoint switched between the two characters, except this time, it was every time they fell asleep. As part of the switch, we got to see glimpses of their erotic dreams. Larry’s were all about Patti, the woman he lost in mysterious circumstances between sequels. Attending her concerts. Sailing through Venice at her side. As for Patti… well, after mentally banging her way to wealth and riches, she seemed moderately happy to see him when they met and hooked up at the end of the game. Moreso than he deserved, to be honest.

This was the end of Larry as a romantic character. Despite the duo getting back together at the end of the game, Patti promptly disappeared, never to be mentioned again. When we next saw Larry, he was swinging his way through a health-club in the gross-out heavy sixth game. The final girl was a hippie chick called Shamara whose entire personality was as thin as her transparent clothes. Like the previous games, Larry won her over with spiritual gifts as opposed to materialistic ones, but like his original One True Love Eve, his only real reason was that she was a) female and b) there.

The seventh game, Love For Sail, didn’t even bother trying. It was another reinvention of Larry, but whereas the last one had turned the series sleazy and mean-spirited, this version embraced the comedy side. Set on a cruise-ship, it was a world of bright colours, cheerful characters, and endless torment. Larry was now a full-on hedonist, at least in his mind, which let creator Al Lowe really pull out all the stops when it came to slapstick, violence and horrible embarassment to inflict on the poor guy. It was all much sillier than before, but so shamelessly so, from the godawful puns to the brilliantly smarmy narrator. A few scenes went too far, including a horribly misjudged scene involving an old man with a weak heart, and an alternate ending sequence that may have been the original Hot Coffee, had anyone cared about such things back then, but for the most part it was exactly the naughty postcard come to life that the series needed to be.

It was also a pretty good adventure in its own right, and arguably the episode that suffered most from the stigma attached to its name. Had the later, non-Al Lowe designed games deigned to used it as their template, maybe the franchise would still be worth paying attention to as a funny, silly, sometimes sexy, but generally fun and good natured comedy series. Did they? Hell no.

Breaking Up Is Easy To Do

Instead, they seemed set on actively plumbing the depths, stripping out everything that made the series likeable in the name of profanity (never mind the fact that beeping is almost inevitably funnier than cursing) and appealing to the American Pie market. Not content to be a shockingly bad game in its own right, Magna Cum Laude reinvented Larry (or rather his nephew) as a chauvinistic sociopath. Romance? Sentiment? Forget it. The game literally hands out girls as mission objectives, to the point that there’s one that Larry breaks the fourth-wall to complain about having to seduce. Technically speaking, the original Al Lowe games used a similar concept, but again, the devil is in the details. Larry had to complete each girl’s quest to progress, but the games (with the exception of all-over misfire Larry 5, although technically, you could finish that one without actually accomplishing a damn thing) never framed it in such a way that you were specifically doing it for this reason. His nephew in Magna Cum Laude is actively and openly earning points, often with complete disdain or disinterest, as a way of getting onto…

…a dating show… to win a date… with the exact same girls.

Seriously, what the hell?

Box Office Bust is… it’s either as bad or worse, and I’m not sure which. The romance sequences, at least up until the point where I microwaved the disc in disgust at the shocking, shocking platform sections, are entirely built around one-night stands and being a manipulative bastard. Larry tells whatever lie he needs to get whatever girl just appeared on his workplace’s Employee of the Minute board into bed, sleeps with her, and moves onto his next snack like he’s dining at Yo! Slut. The original games definitely had their dodgy moments, but nothing so comprehensively cynical and unpleasant. Or maybe I’ve just got the wrong idea about love. I’m single, after all. Maybe second base really is getting sprayed in the eyes with Mace. It’s been a while…

The perception of the Larry series now may be down to these two horrible games, but really, their reputation was with them long before the slide, and it was always somewhat unfair. There’s a reason that despite being dismissed as chauvinistic games, the Larry series had a strong female following over the years, and it certainly didn’t hurt that the character was more a swinger in his own mind than on-screen. He was a loser, no question, but a loveable one. The joke may always have been at his expense, but you had to have a heart of stone to, on some level, not want to see him rewarded for all his trials. That’s completely gone now. It’ll probably never return, no matter how much fantastic potential there would be in a properly done GTA style Larry.

Still, it’s worth remembering. And if we want to hate, there’s always Les Manley.

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