Al “Leisure Suit Larry” Lowe reminisces about classic gaming, and the rise of the industry

Al Lowe:

I think one problem was that in the early days games — you know what an auteur is in the movie business, right? It’s a director who has the vision and maybe writes the script or certainly oversees the script and the entire project from beginning to end. It’s his vision. It’s his statement. The film is his vision. I think there’s a problem with that now because games no longer have that.

If you look at my games and you look at Roberta games, there’s obviously two quite different things there. You look at Tim Schafer’s games. It’s a different set. But it feels like those people. If you’ve played Larry, you know me. You can’t hide that much. There’s not that much left of me that I haven’t shared with you already if you’ve gone through all those games. That’s the kinda guy I am. I’m not pornographic. I’m not sick. I’m not a lot of different things. But I’ve got a streak of naughtiness in me and I like to laugh a lot, and that comes through in my games. I think that’s true of Roberta. She has a sense of fantasy. All that game out in the King’s Quest games. That was one of the things that I thought was part of Ken’s brilliance, that he recognized that talent in people and allowed them to pursue it. He allowed them to develop the game without much interference.

A fascinating retrospective, with a generous dollop of grousing about the suits who signaled the end of a golden age.