Leisure Suit Larry Leaves Lockup!

07 Jun 2011

Players (and “playas”) all over the world dropped to their knees today, surprisingly to pay homage to the master, the original top dog, the Casanova of computer games, Larry Laffer. Yes, the louche, lascivious, luckless but lovable star of Leisure Suit Larry is back — in his original incarnation.

Larry's original creator, Al Lowe, is working with the team from Replay Games to bring the original Leisure Suit Larry game to a whole new generation of netbooks, tablets and mobile devices — starting with Intel's Appup.com marketplace, where you'll find it this summer, on a device near you.

The new release is the 1991 remake of Larry's original scorching adventure Leisure Suit Larry In The Land Of The Lounge Lizards, which improved the game's original 16-color EGA graphics into achingly gorgeous 256-color VGA graphics, the 3D high-def of its day.

Now a whole new generation of fans can join Larry, cruising the streets of Lost Wages, pushing his luck, looking for love and Miss Right. Or maybe Miss Wrong.

The original Larry game sold far too well to be a cult classic; it was a best-selling ground-breaking, award winner. Upon the game's initial release, it sold badly, very badly. Prurient, prudish retailers thought its shocking content would end civilization, be a bad influence on children and maybe even lead to ‘you-know-what’. Al Lowe almost considered getting a real job. For a while.

But the game's laugh-out-loud humor, simple, engaging gameplay and just plain fun, led to great word-of-mouth until, over a year after the game was released, it achieved huge commercial and critical success, selling millions of copies. It even won the Software Publishers Association’s Best Fantasy, Role Playing Or Adventure Game award for 1987.

From his palatial penthouse apartment, high above the teeming streets of Lost Wages, Al Lowe offered these insights into Larry's success and return to the big leagues: "It's no fun telling people who want to play your games that their only recourse is to pirate them. Finally, Larry leaves his digital dungeon to delight those too young (or too smart) to play it way back when." Al expects a whole new generation of gamers to relate to a guy who's so out of touch he thinks a leisure suit is hip. "Men love the games because no matter how much of a loser they are, they're not as big a loser as Larry. And women love the games because, well, they've all dated a jerk like Larry."

Paul Trowe, CEO of Replay Games, said, "So many people enjoyed and were influenced by Larry's original adventure that it's an absolute pleasure to bring the smooth-talking charmer back to his legions of fans, a whole new generation of players and unimpressed women in bars and nightclubs everywhere. Working with Al means you can be sure the game is exactly how he intended it to be seen. It plays as smoothly as one of Larry's pick up lines. We're delighted, no, thrilled to be releasing Leisure Suit Larry In The Land Of The Lounge Lizards for a device near YOU, in the very near future."

Larry will be looking for love in all of the wrong places within the next several weeks. Watch this space for updates....