Most commonly known for his hit, animated computer game series about the adventures of a hopeless lounge lizard in search of love, Al Lowe sits among a few select others as a true legend in the land of adventure gaming.  Although the future of his signature character, Larry Laffer, has been unofficially proclaimed a lost cause by the gaming industry, Al still dreams of the day when he'll be invited to introduce a new generation to the world of Leisure Suit Larry.

Just Laugh's Managing Editor, Matthew Gatesy, recently had the opportunity to chat with the comedic genius about life, love and the pursuit of a few good laughs.  Here's how the interview went...
 

Shall we just dive right in then?

Sure, let's go.

I was born a small black child... 

Well, I had always been the closet geek.  I was the guy who set up the AV equipment in high school.  I was the guy who had the band equipment, the PA system, when the band went places, so I ended up being tagged.  I was the guy with the tape recorder when I was in sixth grade, a reel to reel tape recorder.  I was always interested in electronics and gadgets and stuff like that.  When computers came along, I was fascinated by them.  When I was young, it always had to do with mathematicians, computing trajectories and things.  Stuff that I had no use for. 

Then later, when I was in college, it focused around business stuff, and I wasn't in business. Finally, I got out and started teaching.  I guess when I first had access to a machine, I became a school administrator, I was a district music coordinator and so I was operating out of the district office.  They had a Deck PDP 11-7D computer - Hot digity!  As I remember, they were really excited to get more people using the machine because, at the time, they wanted to get more memory.  They had 32 users and they only had a megabyte of memory, which was divided up between them.  And of course the programmers in the back room, they got double.  It didn't leave a lot of space for everybody else, but it was more than enough because nobody knew what they were doing anyway.  When they found out that I was interested they said, "Well, you can use it to make your job easier."  Really, how do you do that? 

What they gave me was a copy of a programmer's editor and a program called Runoff, which allowed me to format things, but you had to look at it in all these dot commands and stuff.  It was like looking at Word Perfect's reveal code or looking at HTML, actually, that's a better example for today.  You know, looking at HTML code and trying to figure out what exactly the page would look like.  So you had to run this other program called Runoff, and that was actually like the browser.  And then you could actually see what the program looked like, but you couldn't make any changes there of course.  It did help and it did get me interested in machines and how I could use them to make my job easier. 

So I was an early adopter of word processing.  The district couldn't even buy the word process that Deck sold because it was $8,000 and they didn't know of anybody else who would use it. Isn't that funny?  "What would anyone need a word processor for?"  Only the typing pool would use that.  I also got into databases and started doing some database design and work.  They were excited by that because no one ever used databases outside of the programming department. 

I wrote a set of programs that would calculate the scoring for a music festival.  That came about because, as a band director, I got stung several times by going to festivals where the common practice at the time was to have 5x8 cards filled out by each judge and a platoon of band parents with adding machines would add these things together and cross check their paper tape and then try to put the cards in order.  And several times we got a third place trophy and we got home and found out we had earned the first place trophy.  So I said, "This is the perfect solution, we should have the computer tabulate these scores."  And it was the perfect first programming job because I had never programmed anything before, but I knew exactly the output that I needed to have and I knew exactly the input because I had designed the score sheet.  So all I had to do was to do the computation. 

Well, it turned out it was a great thing, so I spent about a month while I was working full time developing this program.  As far as I know we were the first music festival in the country, in the world, to use computerized scoring, so I was proud of that.  From that, it lead to an idea that I could write games and make them educational and entertain kids, where as the typical software at the time was very boring.  I wrote games because I had a son and I knew he wouldn't play these other things, the homework stuff, but he would play games, so I wrote games that were educational.  At the time, Sierra was the biggest publisher of software.  Ken Williams saw the games and liked the way they looked.  He offered me a contract and I became an outside contractor with them for 16 years. It all started because of my background in education.

Well, I think if you stay long enough - I got out after 10 years.  Yeah, I think that's probably pretty accurate.  I had some rules in my band.  The band had an attitude that was pretty much like mine. We were kinda loose, but when we had to perform, when we had to have discipline, we had it.  We were good at sight-reading--I made them learn how to read and by that I don't mean English.  I mean the language of halftime shows and stuff.  Remember, this was all before computers designed halftime shows.  In fact, that was one of the main reasons I got interested in computers, because I wanted to design a halftime show with it, but by the time I got around to doing that somebody had else already done it.  Now I don't know of a band director that doesn't use a computer.  I had the idea in 1977.  Trouble was, the hardware wasn't up to it at that point.

I think all band directors are strange.  The rule in my band was if you could make me laugh, you could crack the line, but if you put out a joke and it bombed, then you got in trouble.  So you had to have confidence in your humor.  I had some guys that pretty regularly cracked me up, so they could get away with it.  And pretty much it was the kinds that determined it, if they laughed...  So we had a good time, but we also had a pretty good band program.  That was part of the problem. I got to be 35 years old and I had reached all of the goals I had set for myself in college.  I thought, "What the hell am I going to do?"  I had 20-30 years before I would retire, what kind of advancement could I do?  Then I got hooked on computers and suddenly it was obvious.

We didn't know we were the dream team.  We thought we didn't know anything and we were just kinda struggling to figure it out.  We thought all the other companies had these brilliant guys who had backgrounds in computer science and knew lots of ways of coding things and had all the secrets and all the stuff figured out.  Hell, we didn't know everyone was scuffling and faking it and making it up as they went along just as we were. 

I think my background in music was a big reason that our games looked and felt different than a lot of others, because we didn't have the background as programmers. I was a teacher.  Roberta was a big movie buff and a big reader, she was never trained in writing or directing or anything, but she was certainly self-trained.  And Scott was just a crazy guy with a great sense of humor.  So our stuff didn't come out looking like it had been done by programmers.  At first I thought it was a disadvantages.  Later, I looked at it like there were a lot of guys who could program, but I could be creative. 

And my team never missed a goal.  I think in the 27 products I did one was late, and that was because I didn't have a say so in when that goal was.  They said, "You'll have this ready by then."  And I said, "No we won't."  They didn't listen and they were wrong.  I also think there's also a lot to be said for being a jazz musician and being able to improvise, because when you stand up in front of a crowd you have to give it your best shot and do what you can do right now.  To a great extent, I think game design is that same thing.  You'll see guys, who know who they are, that spend years and years going back and forth over the same product, trying to get this tweaked just right and that tweaked.  And finally by the time it comes out, it's anticlimactic, it's outdated, it's old.  And people say, "Well, this was a good game 2 or 3 years ago, but now..."  I think that's a big part of it.  I think Freddie Farkas had 1,000 lines of dialogue.  You don't have time to sit there and spend an hour on each one.  You have come up with a snappy comeback or something that has a laugh in it or at least some spark of creativity.  And you have to do it right now, and I think the background I had falls into that.

I just spent a week with the Williams at their beautiful beach home in Mexico - went down there and played golf with Ken and Roberta and my wife.  Scott, I talk to every month, I suppose.  I've lost track of Mark Crowe.  I don't know where he is right now.  I followed him at Dynamix, but when they went under I lost him.  I don't know what happened to him.  So I see a lot of the guys.

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