Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies
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Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies is a never-made fourth installment of the Leisure Suit Larry franchise. The name has been used by official sources and fans. It refers to gossip implying the original production floppies of the game were lost and the team would not remake it from scratch. Others claimed it was an internal office prank.[1] The actual fourth installment was Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work.
Official reasons
The two main reasons that Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies was never made were given by Al Lowe at separate points. One point was that at the time Sierra had begun work on a multiplayer installment of Leisure Suit Larry that was to be played out over The Sierra Network. This failed, due largely to technical reasons, and the planned multi-player Larry game was shelved. The other reason was that the ending of Larry 3 was very definite and somehow metafictional, since it was showing Larry and Patti coming to the Sierra studios and making games based on their adventures, as well as living happily in a mountain cabin in Coarsegold. This completed a relatively cohesive trilogy with no sequel planned; Al Lowe was in a dead-end because he couldn't find a way to start it since the scenario had completed the story arc.
On April 27, 2012 Al Lowe revealed exactly what happened to the 4th installment in a video made for his then Kickstarter project:[2]
I went to do Larry 4. Was working on that and I was really stuck, I mean, it was just horrible because I had ended up with, you know, he was in love with his girlfriend and everything was- they were married and they were happily ensconced on this, you know, beautiful setting and everything was good and it was like 'Oh my god. How am I going to go from here? There's nowhere to go.'. So, I was really having trouble and I sat and thought, took notes and did everything, but nothing came.
One day I was up at the office and I ran into a woman, Liz Jacobson, in the hallway and she said 'What are you working on now Al? Larry 4?' and, like a smartass, I said 'No, Larry 5. Yeah, of course Larry Fiv-' and it was like 'Oh my god! That's the answer! I don't.. Who says I have to do a mid-sequence? Why do I have to do 4 now? I can skip that completely, Do Larry 5 and then refer to 4 throughou-' and it was just like a big insight that happened because of a smart ass remark. It became a real godsend because suddenly with, you know, things were wide open. He could be anywhere, do anything and I had the honor of the, you know, this lever of being able to say '.. and you remember back during Larry 4 how this was..' you know. It didn't dawn on me at the time, for me it was a way out of a hole that I had dug for myself, but it became a real marketing coup too because when the sales people went out to sell Larry 5. The universal question from the buyers was 'Wait, Larry 5, what happened to Larry 4?' and we immediately got mindshare, which is half of making a sale. So, the sales of Larry 5 were just great because of that and plus it became one of software's big jokes. It's a fun thing to say.
Leisure Suit Larry 5
Al Lowe skipped the fourth part altogether in order to surpass the problems of continuing the definite finale of Larry 3. This allowed him to introduce (intentionally) some grey plot points and begin freely a whole new adventure with Larry 5.
According to production notes (given by Lowe himself) the following events must be assumed to have happened between Larry 3 and Larry 5 in order to logically connect the two games:
- Larry and Patti plan to marry.
- Patti leaves him at a Yosemite church to pursue her career, but Larry is gone when she returns.
- The villain of Larry 5, Julius Biggs, somehow steals the game disks and Larry suffers amnesia.
The absence of the floppy disks was a plot element in the sequel since this is the explanation why Larry, as a computer generated character, came to suffer from amnesia.
Appearance in other sources
Leisure Suit Larry franchise
In Magna Cum Laude, if you look on the computer in Larry's room, you can see Leisure Suit Larry 4 playing. If you use the "look" option, Larry will say, "Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies is widely considered the greatest video game ever made."
The Laffer Utilities and the Leisure Suit Larry 1 VGA remake are each sometimes unofficially credited as Larry 4, as the first was the fourth ever Larry production, and the latter, the fourth game to be made.[citation needed] However, similar VGA remakes of Space Quest I, Police Quest I, and Quest for Glory I were not given new numerical titles. Ken Williams appears in a scene in LSL1 remake and mentions that the Missing Floppies are still missing.
Space Quest IV
Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers, another Sierra game, played with the idea extensively. Unbeknownst to the employees of Sierra On-Line, the disks were here apparently stolen by an agent of Sludge Vohaul, who used them to store his consciousness upon his demise in Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge.
Later, the floppies were found floating in space by scientists from the Xenon Super Computer Project. When the game was installed on the computer, Vohaul's consciousness was unleashed on the planet, and the events leading up to the fictional, future sequel Space Quest XII: Vohaul's Revenge II began. In Space Quest IV, Roger can erase the game off the supercomputer when he accesses its mainframe, but this is not mandatory to complete the game.
Other media
MAD Magazine had proposed what Leisure Suit Larry 4 might have looked like in a 1990 issue spoofing video games. Their idea was "the after effect of Larry's screwing around with the time coming for Larry having to pay the piper". They proposed the idea of Larry in a maze game similar to Berzerk, where he must steer clear of out-of-wedlock pregnancies he has caused, as well as private investigators, case workers, and angry fathers wielding shotguns, making it extremely difficult for Larry to continue his infamous carefree attitude towards casual sex.
On April 1, 2009 the Abandonware site Abandonia.com released an alleged "leaked copy" for download. This turned out to in fact be an elaborate April Fools Day prank: the screenshots were fakes, the review - fictional and the "game" archive actually contained 55 identical copies of scanned front casing of Xbox 360 version of Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.
References
- ^ "Hardcore Gaming 101: Leisure Suit Larry". Hardcore Gaming 101. Retrieved 2010-02-02.
- ^ Lowe, Al (April 27, 2012). "Fireside Chat, Part 3". Replay Games Inc. on YouTube. Retrieved April 28, 2012.