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Comment by dec0dedab0de | Hacker News Reader

I was about 9 years old when I first played Leisure Suit Larry at my friends house in the 80s. We were like ninjas with a lookout and everything, most of the time failing to guess the age test questions.

I recently played all the way through for the first time ever, and I thought it was a great game. I giggled at some of the jokes that my younger self didnt get, and the exploratory nature of the text parser really holds up. I could see how the updated versions would ruin it... Now I want to make a game in this style.

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You can make a game exactly in this style, please google "AGI interpreter"; basically, all these Sierra games run over a runtime called "AGI" (Adventure Game Interpreter), and currently there are many tools that allow you to design a similar game, with the same graphics and gameplay.

In later versions of Leisure Suit Larry, they use SCI ( "Script Code Interpreter" and later "Sierra's Creative Interpreter")[1]. If people like adventure games then I strongly recommend ScummVM: a collection of reimplantation of adventure game engines [2].

[1] http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/SCI

[2] http://www.scummvm.org

The trick I figured out was to select age 99(the oldest permitted). The reason why is that the questions for that age bordered on historical facts. Empire State Building and whatnot.

The questions would have been written by middle aged men who were as unfamiliar with the pop-culture lives of 99 year olds as I was with theirs. So the questions were really low ball, and in a pinch, an encyclopedia could provide the answer instead of mom.

It would have been funny if they adapted the rest of the gameplay to your given age.

Yeah, that would have been great.

we had them all memorized as kids, until we realized there was a key combo that skipped it.

I lost a lot of time in the age test too. I was about 8 years old and we just started to learn English in school (am a native Dutch speaker). I remember keeping a list of correct and wrong answers so I could get in more easily.

Great times and awese game back then. I agree with the article though, the remake of the game is nothing like the experience of playing the original.

Same for me. At that time, the 'drm' of games often consisted of a physical thing that let you solve some sort of puzzle at startup. For example, for monkey island, there were two discs you had to rotate to a certain position and then enter a certain symbol it would produce.

Anyway, for many years, I just assumed that it was the same for leisure suit larry; and that I was just missing the papers. Many of the questions didn't make sense to my (Belgian/Dutch) parents. At some point, they started questioning why we were asking all these questions, so we had to find another way to figure them out.

That is exactly what I did too. My friend had a much older brother though and he totally helped us out. Bless him!

Same for me. I remember discovering that it was a very limited number of questions and that brute forcing them was feasible.

There's a whole genre of "Interactive Novel" players and creators out there. In percent it's a small community, but I bet as with everything of old times, the sum of all people in there might be bigger than the whole amount of computer users in 1987.

You'll enjoy it. They have game creation engines, standardized grammar for dialogues, compilers that build your game even for smart phones and all operating systems.

A subset of "Interactive Fiction".

The latest in language: http://inform7.com/

"Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics and by the practical experience of some of the world's best-known writers of IF."

I also played this in its early days, and recently played it through in DOSBOX. The thing I've found is that, humour and text parser aside, these games really aren't that playable in 2017 because you follow this pattern.

Play for a bit. Look up solution to problem. Continue. Even if you swear you'll only use a walkthrough when you're really really stuck, you end up finishing the game in 45 minutes.

And it really made me really, we sank weeks into this, and never got past the first few screens in those days.

Playing games was different back then (for me at least). I would visit different places in the game as some kind of “virtual tourist” to explore and just enjoy myself. It’s not like there was anything else to do with a computer that wasn’t totally boring.

It was quite nice watching the vector backgrounds being drawn and filled in one polygon at a time too.

I had an instance a few years ago where I had to use an emergency/backup computer that I couldn't network in any way (very old laptop (AMD K6-2 :D) that only had a USB port, my modem's Wi-Fi was broken and I had no USB Ethernet adapters).

And... using that thing was really really nice. Getting data into it was enough of a small chore that it was remarkably focusing.

At one point, the only bootable CDs for i586 in the house were a couple old half-scratched Slackware discs. A lot of things refused to install, but sed did... um.

I can't remember why but I ended up reinstalling quite a bit (I think from "no I don't like this partition table layout") and so I wanted a simple package selector/installer. So I tried writing one using bash and way, way too many regular expressions. I started getting a (literal) headache after staring at screenfuls of modem line noise for about a week and had to give up. But I know how to left- and right-justify text using sed now (and I frequently use sed's full command set), which is kind of cool.

It's quite sad that our brains are so easy to distract with "and through this door we have A PURE STREAM OF ALL THE WORLD'S INFORMATION". It's sad because we live in a hyper-connected age, and yet we just can't mentally scale to cope with it.

I just dont look at the walkthrough. Unless I already beat it, and I'm going for maximum points

I was maybe 10, and I remember that I was so pissed off by the age test that I found the way to bypass it simply using CTRL-Z. After that point I wasn't really much interested to the game because I didn't know what the hell to write and what to do. But at least cracking the age test was fun.

I actually remember the (impossible!) age test a lot more than I remember the gameplay, though I think my friend and I played it quite a bit on his dad's 3-foot-tall 486 tower. I think we were ~5th grade at the time. We also kept a list of correct age test answers.

Such a great article. I absolutely loved all the original Sierra games. There was something magical about them and this is the best explanation of this that I've ever seen. I was 8-9 when I started playing the first Police Quest, such a great game. I went back and bought the remake on Gog a few years back and it just didn't have the same play ability and uniqueness. I remember I always loved knocking over all the motorcycles outside the bar.

Your comment reminded me of how my friend and I would play that game. It felt so mischievous and exciting. It's nice to hear about it again and I agree, a similar game would be a blast.

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