Interview: 'Leisure Suit Larry's Al Lowe On The Need for Comedy'

In today's main Gamasutra feature, Leisure Suit Larry creator and current Sam Suede: Undercover Exposure designer Al Lowe discusses his return from retirement, the formation of his new developer iBase Entertainment, and the lack of comedy in today's games. In this extract, Lowe touches on why he believes that comedic games are vital to the video game industry: "Let me put this way, the shelf is full of racing games and shooters, RPGs and action games. Where are the comedies? Look at Blockbuster in the video section and compare it to Blockbuster’s game rentals section. There's a huge hole on that shelf, and we're not going to try to fill it so much as try to start it, and I hope that at some point comedy games will be as common as comedy movies are in the movie section. It's not a brilliant insight; it’s what I do best. I've been looking for a good excuse to do it. We think it's there, and we might even be wrong. Part of the challenge of this is to get people to try it. With Larry the packaging always promised more sex than it actually delivered, but it got people to try the humor. Here were hoping that this is not going to be at an M-rated game. At least our plans are to release it with a Teen rating. Our goal certainly is to make it a clean enough game that it will sell well at Wal-Mart and other stores. And that may disappoint some of my fans. You know, maybe there are still people who think that the Larry games were about sex, which I never thought they were. I always thought that they used sex as a lever to make people try the humor." You can read the full Gamasutra feature for more on Lowe's return and his views on the modern video game industry (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).