When did cleverness become passé?
When did innuendo become unnecessary?
When did thinking become superfluous?
The joy of humor is in getting the joke. It’s more satisfying when you are mentally involved, when you must think before you laugh. If you don’t know where a joke is going, getting there is fun.
But the opposite is also true: When the journey is obvious, the reward is slight.
Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry, wrote adventure games for sixteen years during the heyday of Sierra Online. He is currently involved in a Kickstarter campaign to raise development funds to bring back his iconic title, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards.
I grew up loving humor. I’ve laughed at comedians from Bob Hope to George Carlin to Louis C.K. I love films by the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen. Weird, wild, and wacky is fine by me. “Anything goes” is a great philosophy ... until the creators grow lazy.
Too much of today’s entertainment purports to be funny, but the humor is mostly wisecracks, put-downs, gross-out jokes, or obvious puns. What happened to cleverness? Wit? Topical references?
Of course, it’s easy to tell which sitcoms to avoid: anything with a laugh track. Producers tell you when they don’t respect you. It’s a lazy response to unfunny material.
It’s the same with videogames. For about a decade, computer games were funny. While Leisure Suit Larry was one the first humorous games, the late '80s and early '90s were filled with one hilarious release after another: Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Space Quest, Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and on and on.
One day, it stopped. Within a year, humor disappeared from gaming. Why?
The joy of those adventure games was immersing yourself in an alternate world, one with strange, unique characters, interesting locations, and rules of logic; one filled with puzzles that forced you to think; where gameplay was based on contemplation instead of twitch; and where humor had time to be properly set up.
For the most part, those games were written by amateurs, since there were no classes on creating interactive stories. I learned to program by reading books, but there were no game design books then so I learned the only way I could: by playing the games of others, analyzing them, and then trying my best to do something similar or better. I made some beginner’s mistakes in my early games but, over the years, I learned and the games got better. Through trial and error, we created a genre.
We thought we were inventing a new storytelling medium: interactive stories in which you were the star. Adventure games were perfect for 1980s' computer users. Back then, if you weren’t a puzzle solver, you didn’t own a computer. Remember config.sys files, autoexec.bat files, setting interrupts, managing extended memory? No? Consider yourself lucky! It’s a wonder anyone got anything done at all.
I remember discussing with Ken Williams (founder of Sierra, the leading publisher of such games) about how great it would be when 10 percent of homes had a computer powerful enough to play our games. But when the majority finally had computers, they ran Windows. They didn’t have to solve operating system puzzles, or couldn’t. And they didn’t want to solve game puzzles either.
Sadly, this was widely interpreted that new gamers preferred action and 3-D environments instead of contemplation and humor. Within a year, most major adventure-game development was shut down. And with it went humor. Since then, we’ve had 15 years of violence or detail manipulation or hacking and slashing. What we haven’t had is smiles or chuckles or laughs.
Humor can be sophomoric and still respect your intelligence. A turn of phrase that teases you to think is more satisfying than an obvious gross-out reference that beats you over the head. I love PG-13 sex comedies. My games strived for innuendo, witty references and embarrassing situations without a steaming pile of profanity, gratuitous nudity, and sex. That always seemed too obvious. I wanted people to laugh at my ideas, twisted characters, and an anti-hero who tried often but mostly failed. That way, when he finally succeeded because of your puzzle solving, your hard effort, and your intelligence, it was immensely rewarding.
It’s time for a change, and I see one coming, thanks to the “Kickstarter Spring.”
Two of my favorite game designers, Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, led the way, announcing they wanted to do a new humorous game. But, instead of begging publishers to fund their game’s development, they turned to Kickstarter, asking their fans to pre-buy the game. They received a flood of pledges, vastly exceeding their original, modest goal. The result did not go unnoticed.
I’m now in the midst of a campaign to revive my creation, Leisure Suit Larry. As of this writing, nearly 10,000 fans have pledged money to help Replay Games revive Larry. We plan to create completely new beautiful hand-painted backgrounds, animations, music, voiceovers, and a user interface for touch devices, while retaining the humor of one of the best-selling computer games of all time.
Earlier this month, Scott Murphy & Mark Crowe, Space Quest’s Two Guys from Andromeda, announced a new project that promises to be hilarious. And I bet there are other projects yet unannounced.
The pendulum has swung as far as it can. It’s time for a resurgence of comedy in video games. And not a moment too soon!
