There’s this terrific book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, which is full of pen portraits of legendary codeheads. The secret origin of every hacker follows this basic pattern: got their hands on a computer at an impressionable age, had an experience which rewired their brain for life, ended up basically unfit for most forms of human contact.
Well, something similar happened to me. It was 1989 and my dad took my mother to Paris for their anniversary weekend, leaving my grandparents to look after me and, crucially, his work laptop. This was a deeply ’80s laptop: a weighty grey suitcase of a thing complete with smeary monochrome display and a complement of applications designed to brighten the day of your average bored participant in the fledgling knowledge economy. There was Washing Machine (a programme whose sole purpose was to tease a passable facsimile of a spin cycle noise from the PC’s bleepy internal speaker), Leather Goddesses of Phobos (racy science fiction text adventure; sadly the game’s accompanying scratch ‘n’ sniff card was nowhere to be found) and Leisure Suit Larry (…in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, to give its full title).
Larry is what rewired my brain. The actual gameplay was frankly terrible: you controlled the title character as he smudged his way through state-of-the-art 16 colour representations of a singles bar and a 24-hour wedding chapel among other locations (all rendered in 16 different shades of grey by the laptop’s LCD screen). And you died a lot. Virtually every move you made in Larry seemed to result in the main character’s annoying demise. By contrast, in Leather Goddesses of Phobos trying a new action was more likely to lead to a message reading “You have encountered stale pizza. Scratch off panel number 5.”
But because the plot of Larry was deemed to be risqué (the goal was to find a way for Larry, a middle-aged man, to lose his virginity) in order to play you had prove your age by correctly answering five trivia questions geared to the over-18s. For example: “Which song was not recorded by Elvis? a. Hound Dog b. Love Me Tender c. What’d I say d. Heartbreak Hotel.” (9 year-old me: “Where’s option e., ‘Who the fuck is Elvis?’”). Obviously this provoked a certain rebellious impulse in me and I simply kept reloading the game until I had all the correct answers memorised. As a result, I had no idea who John Belushi was but was aware that he had appeared on Saturday Night Live. I knew that G. Gordon Liddy had found fame as a member of The Plumbers. I knew that a person named Jayne Mansfield had existed and that she was not a sportscaster.
This set a pattern of context-free trivia knowledge that has persisted to the present day. When I was 18 and spending an hour a night drunkenly prodding at the touch screen of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? quiz machine at the foot of the stairs in Glasgow’s famous Garage nightclub, it was really all because of Al Lowe.
Al, as I found out sometime later, once Wikipedia had happened, was the creative powerhouse behind the Leisure Suit Larry franchise. In my years of frequenting computer game stores I had seen but never actually bought his work both on non-franchise titles like Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist and on such Larry sequels as Shape Up or Slip Out! and Passionate Patty in Pursuit of the Pulsing Pectorals. Was he still at it, I wondered, hard at work on another instalment, provisionally titled Leisure Suit Larry and the Half-Bright Innuendo? Surely his website, linked at the bottom of the wikipedia article, would hold the answer.
On clicking the link I was immediately greeted by a Flash animation of Al Lowe’s head, balding, bearded and lasciviously gyrating like… well, I want to say ‘like Banquo at the feast’ but ‘like a Reliant Robin driver outside the schoolgates’ is probably nearer the mark. The text content revealed that Al had parted company with Larry‘s publisher years before, and that despite his offering to contribute he’d had no input into the series’ most recent entry, Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude.
The website reproduced an appalling email exchange on this topic. You can read it in the original if you like, but let me paraphrase. One of the writers who had been hired to work on Magna Cum Laude had contacted Al after completing work on the game, essentially to say “Thanks for your creation, it has been a real honour to work on this iconic series which you originated.” Al responded with a severe case of “Interesting that you have finished work months before the game hits the shelves. In my day we used to work hard, improving the game right up to the last minute. Back then we used to care about QUALITY. Best regards, your hero.”
In the absence of Larry-related employment, the website continued, Al had been hard at work compiling a book collection of humourous emails entitled You’ve Got Laughs! but was otherwise retired. And although I had no reason to disbelieve that, some impulse led me to check the website again a few months later.
By now it was 2006, and at this time an Al Lowe-related announcement stunned the world. You believed I had retired, Al told us all, you thought the world had seen the last of old Al Lowe. But that was just a cunning ruse! All this time I have been hard at work on a HILARIOUS NEW GAME! It’s called Sam Suede: Undercover Exposure. I’m writing it, iBase Entertainment are developing it and it will be my GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT. Al Lowe is BACK, baby, and BETTER THAN EVER!
Shortly thereafter, iBase Entertainment announced that it had run out of money, was shutting down production and that the release of Sam Suede: Undercover Exposure had been postponed indefinitely.
