I’ve got to admit that I was a little surprised when I came across this particular Kickstarter campaign to remake the original Leisure Suit Larry game from all the way back in 1987! I was probably in my early teens when I first stumbled upon these great games without my parents’ knowledge … they say you never forget the first set of digitized boobs that you catch an obstructed glimpse at, and Larry was an entertaining romp into that mysterious world of sex and depravity that I’d previously only seen scrambled on the TV at two o’clock in the morning!
In hindsight, those games were actually pretty tame compared to what I could’ve been keeping beneath my mattress, and frankly that’s what made them so much fun because you never quite knew what kind of risque, yet harmless trouble the inept Larry Laffer was going to stumble himself into next. The dialog fell right into line with all of the rest of the great Sierra games that I was in love with at the time, not to mention the stories themselves … what can I say, Al Lowe is a hilariously twisted genius, to say the very least! We actually interviewed him for Just Laugh a while back and he was really fun to talk to – you can see it in the videos on Kickstarter, too – so it’s great to see that he’s on board and getting a chance to become reacquainted with such a classic character of his all over again, too… 😀
Anyways, it’ll be interesting to see how this progresses, especially given the incredible success that Double Fine saw with their fundraising efforts about a month ago – Al & Co aren’t asking for nearly as much, but they’re also not offering a new game, either … this will simply be a remake (of a remake) of the original LSL1, although there are numerous suggestions that if this title goes well, they’d like to continue remaking the others in the series as well and eventually even make a brand new one that actually stays true to the source material for a change! While it doesn’t sound like they’ve entirely bought the rights back for the franchise, it sounds like they were able to license remake rights for the first title with the hopes of reintroducing the brand and thus providing a reason for the actual owners to let them do the same with some of the others.
I guess we might as well take whatever we can get – a lot of those great, old Sierra titles went every which way during that period where the company was being sold to another conglomerate who didn’t give two shits about their legacy before then handing them off again, so if there’s enough of a fan base to wrestle those dusty floppies out from software purgatory to give ’em another shot to make nostalgic fans like me chuckle, then why not?
Besides, $15 for an enhanced copy of Larry 1 on my iPhone?! I spend more than that on real porn every month these days! 😯