Remember when a new Leisure Suit Larry popped up on Steam earlier this year? Well, here's a reminder: a new Leisure Suit Larry popped up on Steam earlier this year. It's called (brace yourself) Wet Dreams Won't Dry, and publisher Assemble Entertainment says it's legit. Larry is back, against all odds, and his titles are still groan-worthy. That said, the art on this one actually doesn't look half-bad. And with a new-age Larry on the horizon, now's as good a time as any to look back on the history of the cult-classic adventure games, as MEL Magazine did in their excellent write-up on the series' origins—and its unexpected role in a banking disaster. 

Larry Laffer, the face of the game, was created by designer Al Lowe. As Lowe explained to MEL, Larry's design was partly inspired by the hustlers he'd seen at bars in his time as a musician, and also by an insufferable coworker at Sierra Entertainment who loved to brag "about all the different women he had laid on his sales trips." As for the iconic leisure suit: that came from a joke Lowe made at a pitch meeting. "This game is so out of touch, it should be wearing a leisure suit," Lowe said, referring to Softporn Adventure, the primitive text adventure that the Larry series is based on. No, really: 

Perhaps because people didn't want to be caught buying it, the original Leisure Suit Larry was widely pirated—so much so that Lowe says "at one point we sold more hint books than copies of the game. The popularity of bootleg copies made them perfect vehicles for computer viruses, so infected Larry bootlegs spread far and wide, and even made it into the European banking system. 

As the Financial Times reported in 1988, several banks in Switzerland, Germany and England lost swathes of data to viruses after hapless employees tried to play infected bootlegs on company computers. This was so common that Activision, who distributed Leisure Suit Larry, sent out a statement affirming that the game itself didn't contain a virus, and that the best way to avoid infected copies was to go out and actually buy the damn game ya thieving bilge rats (I'm paraphrasing a bit there.)

Read MEL's full piece here. Thanks to AV News for spotting it.  

Update: Publisher Assemble Entertainment has confirmed that Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Won't Dry is in development and expected to be out this year. The new game will take Larry directly from the end of the '80s to the 21st century, which sounds like it could be a setup for a smart, self-aware fish-out-of-water tale about learning not to be such a greasy douchebag. But the Steam listing says Larry's worldview will collide with modern reality "harder than the breasts of a lusciously-stacked blonde jogging along a beach," and let's just say that doesn't exactly inspire optimism. The graphics don't look bad, though. 

The original story follows the screens. 

Original story:

The most recent Leisure Suit Larry game, a remake of the 1987 original, was released in 2013; prior to that he had the presciently-named Box Office Bust in 2009, and Magna Cum Laude (sigh) in 2004. So it's safe to say that the last thing the world needs, or wants, is a new Leisure Suit Larry release. We might be getting one anyway. 

A listing for something called Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry (presumably a "clever" take on D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die) appeared briefly over the weekend on Steam. It was quickly taken down but not before being noticed by sites like DSOGaming, and of course it was all captured for posterity by Google Cache.

In this instance, "all" doesn't amount to much: The package includes a $30 price and a release date of October 24, but the developer and publisher aren't listed. There may be nothing to it, in other words—just somebody having a little fun. (More fun than anyone had playing Box Office Bust, most likely.) But Leisure Suit Larry does have the benefit of name recognition, if nothing else, and in the hands of the right developer it could be turned into something genuinely clever. It's a long shot, yes, but anything is possible.