Al Lowy has posted his source code collection for Sierra products on eBay
Al Lowy is one of the most famous developers of old school games. He began his programming career in 1982, despite the fact that he had worked as a music teacher at school for 15 years. Al's first games were "Dragon's Keep", "Bop-A-Bet", and "Troll's Tale" for Apple II. A year later, Sierra Entertainment bought these games, and also invited Al to work. Lowy has been creating games as an employee of this company for 16 years.
He was the lead developer of King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human (third part of the Royal Quest) and Police Quest (first part of the Police Quest). The profession of musician allowed him to compose music for the games of his company. Without a doubt, the most famous game created by Louie is the quests for Larry (Leisure Suit Larry). The other day, Loey laid out the media with the source code of this game on eBay.
As it turned out, for 30 years, Lowy kept the source codes of many Sierra products, and he is sure that no one else has them - other company employees have not created backups. Now, according to the developer, it's time to get rid of all this "junk".
Lowey says that he is already 72 years old, and no one of his children needs “trash” - he made such a statement in an interview with YouTube-blogger MetalJesusRocks. The video from the interview is posted below.
As for the source auction, it can be found at this link . At the time of this writing, the stakes on some lots exceeded $ 10,000.
Over time, he plans to lay out source codes for other games, including Leisure Suit Larry games, King's Quest III, Police Quest I, as well as the Disney franchise series “Winnie The Pooh and Black Cauldron.
Louie has backups of various Sierra software products used by the developers.
It is worth noting that Lowy sells the source on floppy disks, including the most "ancient." The problem is that he did not test them - did not check the performance. And the chances that the recorded data did not suffer during these 30 years are unusually small. In addition, Lowy emphasizes that the purchase of source does not mean that the buyer receives the rights to commercial use of the product.
"I emphasize - if you own the source year for my products, including Larry 1, this does not mean that you have the right to intellectual property, as regards both the game and its code, graphics and other things," says El. In addition, he himself is not the copyright holder - the rights to various games were sold and resold. Now they belong to some German company.
In addition to the source code, the buyer receives a rare copy of "A Gelfling Adventure, his Dark Crystal". Also on eBay, the original Softporn game diskette is exhibited - it was she who gave Louie the idea to write a game about Larry. The developer received the game from the co-founder of Sierra, since Lowy had a pirate, and his colleague gave him the original. True, there are no boxes for the game - only a floppy disk (which, as mentioned above, has not been tested).
If you want to play any of the games that Louie put up for sale, then this is easy to do - there is a depository of games from Sierra , created by Louie and his colleagues, plus there is a collection of files from Louie right here .
It is worth noting that the game Sierra of Larry has become one of the most popular among all other games of the heyday of quests and games of the genre adventure. Perhaps everything is explained by the well-known elements of eroticism - there were almost no such games, and a whole series of adventures of Larry captured the players. In fairness, you need to remember that Larry almost never succeeded, despite his manner of presenting himself a la James Bond.
The erotic subtext of the games even caused Sierra to introduce player age tests. These were questions about culture and politics, which, according to the developers, young gamers will not be able to answer. But the real problem was that the questions were about the United States, and players from other countries could not cope with them.
The last game of the series was "Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude", released in 2004. It was the most uncanonical and unsuccessful, from the point of view of the players, part. Perhaps the failure can be explained by the fact that it was created by a new team. Al and the developers who prepared the previous parts have nothing to do with it.