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Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work

Trivia

Leisure Suit Larry 5 was available in four packages: a 16 color version (supporting EGA, MCGA, VGA, Tandy/PCjr) with either 3.5" DD or 5.25" HD disks, and a 256 color version (supporting MCGA, VGA) with either 3.5" HD or 5.25" HD disks.

You thought product placement would only occur in the movies? Not quite. Sierra might well have been the first company to place an advertisement in a computer game. US-American telephone company Sprint paid to be featured in Leisure Suit Larry 5. Whenever Larry or Patti were making a phone call in the game (which happened quite a few times), the call would end with the line "Thank you for using U.S. Sprint!" and later in Space Quest V: The Next Mutation. See the screenshot section for graphic proof of the advertisement.

Wait a second… Larry 3, Larry 5… where’s the 4th episode? There’s never been one.

The Larry series was originally planned as a trilogy. If you saw the ending of the third game, you know that it’s well-rounded and final. When designer Al Lowe had finished Larry 3 in 1989, he was somewhat fed up with his creation, and announced that there’d “never be a Larry 4!”

At least not a “normal” adventure game. In 1989, Sierra had ambitious plans to build up an online gaming community. Nobody knew if this would work, but it was clear that it needed a “killer application”; an online adventure game with a score of players working together simultaneously. That’s what Larry 4 was supposed to be. However, the project turned out to be much more complicated than anyone had expected. As Al Lowe describes on his website:

"After a month or so, we knew we were in trouble. I decided to write a checkers game as a simple test case to see if we could actually move objects and communicate. It worked. But we were still a long way from making characters walk and communicate and interact.

So I wrote a backgammon game. Then chess. Still we had no system to support all the features needed for an adventure game. But we were having so much fun playing against each other, we decided to push what we had into a real product. It became The Sierra Network. TSN was quite successful in its day, especially considering the small numbers of players who also had modems.

Eventually, when TSN was losing 10 million dollars per year, Ken [Williams] sold half of it to AT&T for 50 million dollars. I laughingly said Sierra was the only company to make money in on-line gaming: by selling out! Later AT&T would pay another 50 mil for the other half. They then sat on it for about a year before giving up and selling the whole thing to America On-Line for 10 million. AOL announced big plans, but never carried through and the whole thing withered up and died without ever seeing the light of day.”

When Al Lowe finally decided that the Larry series needed to be continued, and started to work on the next off-line episode, he was reluctant to call it Larry 4. Hadn’t he exclaimed that there wouldn’t be a game with that name? He kept his promise. The next adventure was a "fifth" game.

Even though the 4th episode does not exist, it has an official name nevertheless: Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies’.