<\/div>Leisure Suit Larry is an adventure game classic and I have many fond memories of it, so I dismissed this person as a crank who doesn’t appreciate a good dick joke – the kind of person who has decided to cultivate a sense of smug superiority in lieu of a sense of humor. But reading the review put me in the mood to play it again, so I picked up the 2013 remake<\/a> and gave it a go.<\/p>\n What I discovered when I returned to the game in 2013 is that the reviewer was basically right. Maybe they were trying a little too hard to be offended by things and maybe their ignorance of old-school adventure game mechanics hampered their ability to understand the puzzles, but it was pretty hard to argue with their conclusions regarding the humor. The game wasn’t nearly as funny as I remembered it. It’s a strange sensation to revisit a joke that made you howl with laughter 30 years ago and find it doesn’t even cause you to move any of your facial muscles. Not even the potent forces of nostalgia could salvage it. It just wasn’t amusing or fun.<\/p>\n So what happened? Why did Larry stop being funny?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For the young and innocent among you: The name has been shortened over the years. Originally it was titled “Leisure Suit Larry and the Land of the Lounge Lizards”. It’s an adventure game in the style of the Old Sierra titles like King’s Quest, Police Quest, or Space Quest. You walk around a lo-fi 16-color world, type broken sentence fragments into the parser, pick up inventory, and try to untangle the dream logic behind the various puzzlesStrangely enough, the puzzles were a lot less insane than its contemporaries. A few of them even made some kind of sense.<\/span>. <\/p>\n The game was remade with modernized graphics in 1991, and then again in 2013. The original was based on an even older work, a 1981 text-only game called SoftPorn Adventure. I never saw or even heard of SoftPorn Adventure until decades later when I looked up the series on Wikipedia. I know Leisure Suit Larry borrowed the premise and puzzles of SoftPorn, but I have no idea if they shared jokes or if the text game was even intended to be humorous at all. <\/p>\n In the game you control Larry Laffer, the original 40 year old virgin. He’s decided to hit the town and lose his virginity once and for all. He’s a dorky, balding (and in the remakes, also short and pudgy) traveling salesman in a Leisure SuitHe was also a stealth mockery of a salesman named Jerry<\/a> who worked at developer Sierra On-Line back in the 80’s. He would come back from business trips with improbable tales of all of the incredibly hot women he’d bedded. The programming staff hated him and so borrowed a lot of his attributes for their loser protagonist. The leisure suit itself was mocking how old and anachronistic SoftPorn Adventure had become.<\/span>. An important detail that gets lost on younger audiences is that Leisure Suits were faddish novelty clothing and that by 1987 they were shockingly, woefully out of date. The closest analogy I can make is this: Imagine a dumpy middle-aged white guy showing up at a rave in 2016 while wearing MC Hammer parachute pants and a Flava Flav<\/a> clock. That<\/em> was who Larry Laffer was. He was a man with breathtaking social ineptitude. <\/p>\n So your goal in the game is to overcome your seemingly insurmountable shortcomings with regard to looks, career prospects, social standing, personality, personal taste, and sex appeal, and somehow convince a woman to have sex with you. The game takes place in the city of Lost Wages (Las Vegas, obviously) and features a handful of locations: A dive bar, a convenience store, a 24 hour wedding chapel, a casino, a Hotel, and a few others.<\/p>\n I’ve never heard anyone else mention this, but it’s a gameplay detail I discovered as a teenager. I noticed there was an in-game clock, and that the story began at 10PM. The clock ran in real-time. So I wondered what would happen if you let the game run until morning? What happens when the sun comes up? I correctly intuited that they wouldn’t have daytime versions of all of the locations. My guess was that the game would just ignore the clock and that the game would continue with night scenery. It turned out I was wrong.<\/p>\n But finding out was actually kind of difficult. You couldn’t just walk away from the game and come back 8 hours later, because the game randomly pops up messages that would stop the clock. It would tell you how bad your breath was getting, prompting you to use the breath spray object in your inventory. These messages come up every five minutes or so, meaning you’d have to sit there and hit enter every five minutes for 8 hours straight to keep the clock moving. After some experimenting, I found a situation where the game wouldn’t give you these messages. I know it had something to do with the alley beside Lefty’s Bar. Maybe it was hiding in the dumpster, or maybe it was hanging from the rope on the fire escapeIt’s a long story.<\/span>, but somewhere in that alley was a spot that disabled the breath spray prompts. Once I found that, I let the game run overnight and came back to see the result in the morning.<\/p>\n What happens when the sun comes up? Nothing right away. The game continues to run. But as soon as you walk outsideThe alley counts as an “indoor” location for some reason.<\/span> the game ends. Larry realizes that the night has ended and that he’s still a virgin. So he pulls out a gun and blows his brains out. It was a surprisingly dark ending that I’m sure most people never saw.<\/p>\n Despite the morbid threat of suicide, Leisure Suit Larry was hilarious to my 17 year old self when I played it in 1988, and yet I was numb to it in 2013. Why? Why has the funny left Leisure Suit Larry when Ferris Bueller’s Day Off<\/em> and The Three Amigos<\/em> still maintain a lot of their original charm? It would be easy to dismiss this as the damage inflicted by my ongoing reluctant slide to maturity, but I laughed while watching Spaceballs<\/em> last year. While there are a lot of things you can call that movie, “mature” isn’t one of them. <\/p>\n The problem is that Leisure Suit Larry was very much a product of its time, and while the various remakes have given the game a graphical facelift, they can’t re-create the particular arrangement of gaming culture and gameplay tropes that made the original such a hit.<\/p>\n The main joke of the game was that it constantly subverted the normal expectations established by the existing [$Genre] Quest titles, which were basically clean, family-friendly adventures. You had the same interface, the same pointless score bar at the top, the same style of inventory-driven puzzles. Except this game was about boning instead of saving the kingdom. It was a game about dick jokes and innuendo in a style of game that was usually a collection of common story tropes and lame puns. <\/p>\n The joke isn’t the joke itself, the joke is that this joke was told in this context<\/em>. It was like a newscaster telling a dick joke, or hearing a Muppet say “fuck”. It was shocking and transgressive. Players had never seen a game “go there” before. <\/p>\n The joke – the idea of doing something edgy or profane in this kind of adventure game – was as old as the games themselves. It was born about thirty seconds after the first player booted up the original King’s Quest and typed “fart” into the command line. It was a joke players had been creating for themselves, and a joke that the games had stubbornly refused to participate in.<\/p>\n >FUCK PRINCESS Leisure Suit Larry was just the first gameNot actually the first game. It was just the first one that became popular.<\/span> to participate<\/em> in the joke. Suddenly there was a game that would respond humorously to your shenanigans instead of replying with clinical bafflement. When you tried to screw someone (or everyone) the game understood your intent and explained why you couldn’t. Just having the game correctly parse<\/em> these crude actions was a punchline all by itself. The fact that it followed up with a humorous reply was just gravy. <\/p>\n But today? That’s not even a joke anymore. We’ve got entire genres of games dedicated to ribald matters. We’ve got games about showering with your dad<\/a>. Games about running a pornography empire<\/a>. We’ve got action shmups engorged with homoerotic imagery<\/a>. We’ve got match three games about trying to screw anime girls<\/a>. Penises are no longer a secret in the world of videogames. It’s no longer shocking or edgy to make these kinds of jokes.<\/p>\n There’s nothing left to subvert.<\/p>\n Another thing to kill the laughs for me was the move to better graphics. I know I’m already redlining on the scale of “stuff old guys say” in this article, but hear me out.<\/p>\n In the other adventure games, upgrading their graphics made it possible to create more moods. Once you had more than 16 colors to work with, you could make places that seemed genuinely spooky. Places that seemed forlorn. Cheerful. Vibrant. Muted. The designer had more options. But the 4-bit graphics of Leisure Suit Larry were already pretty good at conveying the mood of the world: Cheap, sleazy, and gaudy. As graphics got better, it created an odd distortion. Suddenly those pixelated ladies weren’t so pixelated anymore. Their presence began to overshadow the rest of the scene, and now the dominant mood was “vaguely titillating”. As the years went on and graphics continued to improve, this progressed to “overtly<\/em> titillating”.<\/p>\n It was kind of funny to have a game make a fuss over how “sexy” a lady was when she had the same number of pixels as old 16-bit Mario. But once they started looking like actual pin-up girls, that dimension of the humor was lost. It gradually felt less like a joke about a guy who wants to hook up with sexy ladies and more a vehicle for actually looking at sexy ladies. This changes the tone of the jokes. It’s the difference between a comic where two stick figures are screwing, and the exact same joke told with photographs of real people. To wit: It’s no longer the exact same joke. <\/p>\nIn Case You Missed It<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Did You Know?<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Where Did The Funny Go?<\/h3>\n
<\/div>A Subversible Vehicle<\/h3>\n
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\nYou don't have one of those.<\/strong>
\n>PISS ON FARMER
\nThe farmer doesn't need one of those.<\/strong>
\n>TAKE SHIT
\nYou don't see one of those here.<\/strong>
\n>SHOW KING MY DICK
\nI don't know what that means.<\/strong>
\n<\/tt><\/p>\nGraphical upgrades<\/h3>\n
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