Classic games oftentimes get looked over in this day and age as the Fortnites, PUBGs and whatever else is flavorful on mobile devices rule the digital ecosystem. But the original creator of Leisure Suit Larry wants to bring people back to the old days of gaming by giving people access to the original source of the raunchy point-and-click adventure game.
Over on Ebay, there's a listing from the creator of Leisure Suit Larry, Al Lowe, for the source code of the 1987 release of the Sierra Interactive title. At the time of writing the article, the bids have already surpassed $10,000.
On the listing page, there's a description from Lowe about how he decided to keep a clean archive of the original source in case he ever needed to recreate the game. He copied all of the data to the old five-and-a-half inch floppy disks, where they've been sitting in a little black box for the last three decades.
Lowe explains that way back in the day, the developers were responsible for keeping track of their own resources, not Sierra. That's because back then a lot of developers were still independent and the battle over content rights weren't quite as strenuous and corporate as they are today.
Speaking of intellectual property rights, the listing page makes it known that while you'll have access to the source code (and you'll need the 5 ½ floppy drive to run the disks), you won't have access to the property rights. What this means is that if you take the content from the disks, design your own version of Leisure Suit Larry and attempt to sell it from a digital distributor such as Steam, you'll likely be sued by the current owners of the licensed property since the auction is just for the source code, not the distribution or licensing rights.
This not-so-little project from Al Lowe actually came about after a short documentary from Metal Jesus Rocks covering some of Lowe's background in game design, working on Winnie The Pooh games and even a licensed version of The Black Cauldron based on the Disney animation.
What's fascinating is that he goes over some of the utilities that were required to build the games, the master disks and a few of the never-before-seen games that Lowe worked on, such as The Gelfling Adventure, which was based on The Dark Crystal.
After the video went live on November 30, Lowe opened the auction page a day later on Ebay, where he has several one-of-a-kind gaming items up for grabs. Some of the items are bidding for as low as $300 at the time of writing this article, but the source code for the first two Leisure Suit Larry games is going for over $10,000 at this point.
Even if you did manage to get your hands on the source code, you would likely need to get your hands on the utilities to build out the game if you ever wanted to make something functional, or you would have to have the know-how to make the tools yourself. Either way, you can attempt to bid on a little bit of gaming history right now from over on Ebay.
