Yep, over at rockpapershotgun, they have up an interview with Al Lowe, famous (or infamous) for the Leisure Suit Larry series.
I wasn’t much of a fan of LSL. I liked the first game, which was actually a renovation of Softporn, the only text adventure Sierra ever published. After that, I thought the humor wore out.
There’s only so much one can really find funny about a loser trying to make it and never reaching “home base”. Then again, I don’t especially care to play losers in the first place.
But hey, the series did have popularity in its time. Even though, in the case of the first Larry, sales were intially poor and only picked up after awhile.
So is Al doing anything in the game line these days? Nope. You’ll have to read the piece to find out why not ;)
I enjoyed his discussion of creative freedom – and how it’s lacking these days. He’s spot-on, too, IMO. Part of that was because Sierra was flush with money back then, and as he said – LSL1 was something like six months of his time.
So I’m looking at the MobyGames credits, and there were really only three people working on the game – and Al was working for free. Still, he probably cost a bit in office space, equipment, free pizza, and whatever.
So… you figure three guys working for six months, plus a couple of people working on the docs for two weeks, probably cost about $100,000 in salary, benefits, equipment, overhead, and pizza. And probably alcohol, knowing Sierra back in 1987. Maybe double that for marketing.
I *think* the game was selling for about $50 back then. Since Sierra was the publisher, they probably kept at least $25 of every sale after COGs and the distributor and stores got their cut.
So…. $200,000 in total cost, divided by $25 a box… comes out to… hmmm…. about 8,000 units sold to break even.
Wow, even in 1987 (and even on the PC), that was a pretty reasonable figure (though at first, it sounded like they wouldn’t hit that).
I can SEE why Sierra would be willing to give him some creative freedom back then, especially when he wasn’t drawing a salary. And especially after his games started really selling. A “hit game” back then was about 100,000 copies, so even moderate sales would keep the lights on nicely.
Fast forward to today. Due to inflation, larger teams, and so forth, even a MODEST mainstream game budget is about $6 million. Plus figure another million in marketing.
Assume the publisher is probably still only making $25 a unit, though, as those prices haven’t changed.
And one of the reason mainstream PC games have dried up is that, while hit games still break away into the hundreds of thousands, many top-ten games still sell around 300,000 or less at retail.
So… seven million divided by $25 comes out to… uh… 280,000 units sold. Just To Break Even.
That’s how many units the ninth hottest selling PC game of 2007, MS Flight Simulator, sold. #8, Sim City 4, only sold 294,000 units. Shoot, even on consoles, a quarter-million units sold isn’t too shabby.
I think I see why nobody’s allowed to go off and do cool, creative things anymore with games.
Yeah Coyote, it’s what we’ve been saying for so long: games are just too expensive to make for the big companies to take risks most of the time.
And why indies have a chance now to step into the creative gap.
Funny, I was just behind a car with a ALOWE personal license plate on the interstate today. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Al Lowe because I remember reading in the past he was from the West Coast.
Heh. Now there’s coincidence for you. Of course, there are plenty of people around with the last name of Lowe, and I’ll bet some of them have a first name beginning with “A”.
Yeah, I think he’s still out there in California. So unless that was a CA plate, likely that wasn’t him.