![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jaybot7.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/AL-1992.jpg\" "\\"AL-1992\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nI just had the amazing chance to interview an absolute legend in game design, story writing, humor, coding, music, audio… everything! Mr. Al Lowe.<\/p>\n
Yes, that Al Lowe.<\/p>\n If you’re not familiar with him, Al Lowe was the designer and writer for the Leisure Suit Larry <\/em>series, Freddy Pharkas<\/em>, and Torin’s Passage<\/em> games. In addition, Al Lowe also worked on most of the King’s Quest<\/em> and Police Quest<\/em> games.<\/p>\n As I said, he’s a legend in the field and one of my personal heroes. So I’m ecstatic to speak with him!<\/p>\n To hear<\/em> the full, hour-long interview Podcast<\/strong> (do they still call them that?) with Al Lowe (in super-high quality!), download the file: here<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n I really enjoyed picking Al’s brain and listening to his stories about Game Development. Topics range from programming on every platform possible, writing and recording music, holiday barbecues (with hot sauce!), Casual Games, Monkey Island, First Person Shooters, and talking wine-shelves! And that’s a small sampling \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n Below is the full<\/em> transcript of the interview (complete with notes, links, pics of scantily clad women<\/em>, and explanations):<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Jason, it’s Al Lowe!<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Hello, Al Lowe!<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: How are you?<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Excellent. Good evening (good afternoon?)<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: This is an amazing technology! Isn’t it?<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: This… internet stuff is crazy!<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: It’s Crazy!<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: So, first of all, thank you for allowing me to ask you (too many) questions. I’m truly humbled by your presence.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: (laughs) Well, my wife tells me that we’re going to have dinner about 6. So, we only have 1 hour.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Only one hour! I’ll make it quick!<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Okay.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: First, let’s plug your humor site: www.allowe.com<\/a> and the CyberJoke 3000<\/a>.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: I’ve heard of those!<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: So everyone can go there, laugh at something funny, and then come back to this really exciting interview.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Yeah! My guarantee is that it’s worth the price they pay, or double their money back!<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: (laughs) it’s… Free, I’m pretty sure…<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Oh yeah! That’s how it works!<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Let’s do a little bit of intro and talk about your life before your brave expedition into becoming a game designer for Sierra Online.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Sure.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: You majored in Music at University. Correct?<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: I did.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: And Saxophone was your major instrument?<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Yes.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: And you can’t make money in the real world<\/em> by playing music, right?<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: (laughs) Well, some… few people here and there can. I cannot. So… (laughs)<\/p>\n No, my goal when I went to college, I thought I wanted to be a professional musician. But, I quickly saw reality and decided that I wanted to teach.<\/p>\n I’d always been interested in teaching. In fact, I had been president of the future teachers club when I was in high school. So I always thought teaching was a good career for me. It was always in the back of my mind.<\/p>\n Then when I realized ‘Yeah, you might make it in music, but you’ll probably just starve.’ Then teaching was the obvious thing.<\/p>\n So I went on to become a High School Band Director and did that for 10 years, then became a school administrator in music. I was in charge of all the instrumental music in a large suburban school district in California.<\/p>\n I did that for 5 years and I looked around one day and I was at the top of the salary schedule, and I had another 20 years to go before even early retirement!<\/p>\n And it was like, ‘Wait a minute! Am I gonna do this the rest of my life?’<\/p>\n Well, at about that time, I had gotten interested in computers, that was when the Apple II first came out. And the school had gotten a few, I mean literally a few <\/em>like 3, I think, in the whole district. Apple II, this is before the Apple II + even. I mean, this is way back in the early days.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Before the [Apple] II C. That’s the first one I picked up.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Oh, long before the II C. That was very, very modern. (laughs)<\/p>\n So, I grabbed one of those machines and took it home one Easter Vacation and started playing around with it and… Actually, I became a hacker in the old <\/em>sense of the word. As opposed to a cracker or, you know, a vile, obscene, kind of nasty person who does things.<\/p>\n In the old days, a hacker was a complimentary term. It was a guy who kind of worked on his out clever things…<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Put things together all on his own. You figured it out.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Yeah! But the bad guys have kind of taken over that term now. So, I hesitate to say that I was a hacker. But that’s what I did. I sat at home, farted around with this machine and just made it do cool things and…<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: You improvised!<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: I did!<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: You were a Jazz Programmer!<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: You know, I didn’t think of it that way at the time, but that’s exactly right! Taking it through my whole career, those themes keep re-occurring that I have this combination left-side\/right-side brain. That I have a certain amount of logic and organization skills. But then I have this creative side. I’m not ultra-creative like a lot of the artists that we used to hire at Sierra who, couldn’t back up a floppy disk if they had to…<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: (laughs)<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: …Because they would just assume… Well, I remember one time, a guy had worked for <\/span>hours <\/em>on this one graphic.<\/p>\n So I said, ‘Well, how many versions of this have you saved?’<\/p>\n He said, ‘I haven’t saved any yet, it’s not finished!’<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Oh god…<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: (laughs) So I’m not that <\/em>side of the creativity part. On the other hand, I was more creative than most of the Math Majors and stuff that turned out to be programmers back then.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: So you were able to take a logical approach to both sides of the brain.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Yeah, I guess so. I had that kind of split-thing going, I guess. Where I’m not good at either one, so I’m pretty good at both so I can get by. I guess, I don’t know (laughs)<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: You’re a ‘Jack of All Trades’ or ‘Renaissance Man’ that’s what it’s called.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Well, you know, in a certain sense I guess that’s true. Because I thought that I was late getting into programming. I remember thinking ‘God, I don’t have the math background, I don’t have a lot of college courses in programming…’ And of course, back then, I don’t even know that there were…<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: You Majored in Music, you can count to Four!<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Exactly! Well, hey we were doing 7\/8 [time signature] (an odd-metered tempo<\/a> used mostly in Jazz, Classical and Prog Rock.) so yeah, there you go!<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: That’s right, Jazz. Of course.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: So it was an interesting combination, I guess.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Not to draw any weird parallels, but I majored as a sax player as well in University…<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Oh no! Is that right?<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: (laughs) Yeah. Completely by accident, I uh… wasn’t following you and saying, ‘Okay, and now <\/em>I’m gonna teach High School band!’<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: (laughs) Later on, we’ll trade serial numbers.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Actually, I find it really interesting that you started out your job as sort of a lone wolf. Where you did all of the programming, writing, graphics, sound, music, and even the package design (in some cases)!<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Well, that’s what everybody did back then. That’s how… We didn’t know what to do!<\/p>\n You know, it’s funny because I talk to people now, and they say, ‘What career path did you follow?’ Hell, we didn’t even have a path! There was no path! We were kinda hacking our way through jungle.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: You blazed the path.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Yeah, we didn’t know what we were doing. And a lot of the code…<\/p>\n They’ll say, ‘Well, why did you code this way?’<\/p>\n And I would respond, ‘Because I didn’t know what I was doing!’<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Because it worked!<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: I didn’t know what to do!<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: But as you progressed and became better, you ended up doing less and less… and near the end, you mostly came up with writing the humor, story, and overseeing the design.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: You know, that’s an amazing aspect about software. The better you get at it, the less work you do.<\/p>\n The last few games, I only did the design. Well, I shouldn’t say only the design. I did the design and the writing. So I was the creator, the screenwriter. I also was the director, because I was in charge of the look and feel of the game. So I had day-to-day oversight of the guys who were producing the graphics and sounds and so forth.<\/p>\n So I guess in the film world, I would’ve been a screenwriter\/director. In the early days, I was also the producer. But fortunately, towards the end I got to get away from that. I didn’t have to deal with the spreadsheets and the dollars anymore.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: So you’ve used everything from coding in assembly on the Apple II, to state-of-the art, proprietary design software for Larry 7.<\/p>\n Al Lowe<\/span>: Exactly.<\/p>\n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: I can only imagine that using the top-of-the-line stuff is a lot easier to use.<\/p>\n \n Al Lowe<\/span>: Well, it is easier to use. But more than being easy, what it did was enable us to do more. Because we developed that engine and it was really good at that limited subset of the things that we did.<\/p>\n \n We got really good at being able to do games in that style. The same way that everybody that buys the Quake Engine today ends up… it’s pretty easy to turn out a game that looks like Quake. It’s really hard to turn out a game that doesn’t <\/em>look like Quake!<\/p>\n \n We did some of that. We did some games that didn’t look at all like an adventure game. But eventually, that language became sort of a mixed blessing, in that it was -besides being easy- it was also easy to slip into those handcuffs.<\/p>\n \n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Right.<\/p>\n \n Al Lowe<\/span>: So, therefore a lot of the Sierra games ended up looking a lot like the other Sierra games.<\/p>\n \n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: Pretty similar.<\/p>\n \n Al Lowe<\/span>: Yeah!<\/p>\n \n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: I think Torin’s Passage<\/em> actually looked a bit different though. The style of the thing…<\/p>\n \n Al Lowe<\/span>: Well, that was a great deal due to the art style. The art director on that, a guy named Jim Murphy, who left me<\/em> -I’m proud to say-, went straight to Pixar, and has had real big success at Pixar. Every time I see one of the Pixar movies, his name is higher up in the credits. He’s doing great stuff there.<\/p>\n \n But, I owe a lot of that to Jim, because he really had a true vision for making that game unique.<\/p>\n \n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: In that vein, what do you think of easily accessible, affordable game engines, which focus less on coding, and more on design and scripting. Such as (I don’t know if you’re familiar with) Torque<\/a> or Unity<\/a>, you know Garage Games…<\/p>\n \n Al Lowe<\/span>: Oh sure! Well, Torque came from the Dynamix<\/a><\/a> guys, which was part of Sierra. So, sure I know all those guys. But yeah…<\/p>\n \n I’m all in favor of people using the best tools available. And I follow that through in my woodworking and my other kinds of activities too. I’m a big believer in building tools.<\/p>\n \n To the extent that, that was a lot of my time spent developing software. I built the tool that Sierra used, everybody<\/em> at Sierra used, to develop games for many years. Simply because I was real lazy! I got tired!<\/p>\n \n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: (laughs) You didn’t want to keep doing the same things.<\/p>\n \n Al Lowe<\/span>: Doing the same thing over and over again. So what I did, was I built a small game (a game that would fit on a floppy) and it had almost no resources but it enabled you to load any resources. So…<\/p>\n \n Excuse me a second, I gotta cough.<\/p>\n \n (silence)<\/p>\n \n Al Lowe<\/span>: Did you hear that?<\/p>\n \n Jason<\/span> Surguine<\/span>: I didn’t hear that.<\/p>\n \n Al Lowe<\/span>: Oh good! My button works! I have a cough button!<\/p>\n \n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n