Live Magazine February Issue February 2014 | Page 29

TERVIEW
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other hand, you can’t really relate to
a character that’s too far down that
trail; he had to be an anti hero, so
that was the tough part.
The jokes themselves, I didn’t really know how to be funny in a video
game. So I just, kind of... anytime
I thought something was amusing,
I threw it in! And that was the biggest surprise to me of all, that after

never knew anybody from there, we
never had the interaction. There
were no game-cons’ of any of that
stuff back then. We were just kind
of these guys laden up in the mountains and because of that, I tried to
make a game that would make Scott
Murphy laugh; that would make Ken
Williams laugh; that would make Jim
Walls laugh and so that was really
my target market. The fact that mil-

come up with some crazy idea and
I would say to my wife ‘well, you
know...what do you think of this?’
and she would go ‘ewwww’ and I
would go ‘oh, that’s alright I can put
that in’. And if she’d say ‘NO!’ then
I would say ‘oh, I guess that’s probably gone too far’. She was my best
judge on where my line was on this
thing.

“BUT YOU KNOW, I NEVER VIEWED THE GOAL OF THE GAME AS PORNOGRAPHY. I
NEVER THOUGHT THAT THE SEX WAS WHAT THE GAME WAS ABOUT.”
the game came out, people actually
thought it was funny because I actually had no idea what I was doing!

lions of other people actually bought
the game and spent hours doing it
always came as a surprise.

I think if something is funny, its
funny! It’s as simple as that. I
imagine you might have thought
‘what do gamers think is funny?’
at one point, but I guess it was
largely ‘what everyone else does’.

And when you made ‘Leisure Suit
Larry in the Land of the Lounge
Lizards’, did you ever feel you
crossed the line with any of its
racy content in the game?

I kind of went for what I thought my
buddies would laugh at. You know,
the people around Sierra that wrote
adventure games also played adventure games and because we
were so isolated away from everyone else, we didn’t really associate
with any body. We admired Lucas
Games, we played them, but we

You know, I had a pretty good censor. It wasn’t Ken Williams, because
all through our development, Ken
said ‘oh yeah, just go ahead and
make it as adult as you want to!’ until we got close to the end and then
when he actually saw the game he
was like ‘oh, I don’t know we can sell
the game with this or not’ (laughs).
But my censor was my wife. I would

But you know, I never viewed the
goal of the game as pornography.
I never thought that the sex was
what the game was about. I always
thought that the game was about
making fun of people who see sex as
you know, an end all... so important.
Absolutely! I think that actually
comes across fairly early on in the
game as well as Larry having this
kind of affirmation that he wants
more than just technically getting
laid.
Yeah, yeah.... but he will settle for
getting laid! (laughs).
How did audiences and critics react to Leisure Suit Larry’s adult