The Man in the Leisure Suit

I agree. The attitude today - and I can't blame the publishers for this, because if it was $10 million of my money, I wouldn't want to throw it up into the air and say: "Yeah, do something really weird - do something nobody's ever seen before, and I'm sure it'll catch on!"

When the stakes are that high, you can't take chances with your investment - so that said, Sierra had a similar problem in that a lot of our games looked and played the same. That was because we had one engine that we'd developed - painfully - over a ten-year period, and we had no choice of other engines.

LucasArts was the same way - their games tended to look and play alike because they had the SCUMM engine. And the same holds true for a lot of games today - but I think the casual games market is where you can see the innovation, because it's a programmer on something for a month, and you see if it sticks.

If it does, you can build something out of it - and the only change is that the games are not being sold in boxes in stores, and they're not being promoted by major publishers. They've found a different way to sell, and that's a good thing.

Getting to the right audience is really a problem today. I don't know if you've looked around the Apple Store, but there's so much stuff on there, it's difficult to find what you want - and even if you know that there's a game out there, you have to be able to find it. Getting noticed is really difficult.

And Space Quest was another series - they were hilarious. I loved Monkey Island, and Sam & Max - there was humour in those days, but it seems to be very few and far between today. I think part of the reason is that it's just damned hard, especially when you're trying to develop a game based on an engine, where you want to have extended gameplay - not a single run through the plot.

Those things don't go together with comedy - the second time you hear a joke it's not as funny, and therefore I think the format of games stifles the execution of comedy. We did a lot of humour in Larry that was one-off stuff - you saw it once and you moved on.

But a lot of it also came about by the fact that we had a lot of extended gameplay by flushing out the environment, so that there were a lot of things to see and do, and people to talk with. Today players are much more interested in action, than in contemplative and thoughtful puzzle-solving games.

Well, I tried five years ago, and I couldn't do it - so I don't know. We came up with an idea for a game, we started a game company, and we took the prototype around to every major publisher - but we were going at it from the perspective of making a triple-A title, and that was just too much for publishers to buy.

They couldn't bite off on the fact that there were no comparables - that was the big issue. I showed the prototype to a lot of people, and they said they loved my games, that they were in the industry because they played my games... and then we finished the demo and they'd say it was the first game in months they'd actually play themselves - which is a sad thing to hear.

But then the giant-killer line would always be: What are the comparables? I'd say that it was an action comedy, and they'd look at me as if they had no idea what I was talking about. Of course, there were no comparables, because nobody's done an action comedy lately. Therefore we'd get the call back that they loved the game, but they didn't think they could fund it.

Right now I'm happily retired, and have been for ten years. It's highly underrated - people ask me if I get bored. My reply is to ask if they get bored on Saturdays... because every day is Saturday when you're retired.

So no, I'm happy where I am and I intend to stay that way.

I run a humour website - www.allowe.com - and with that site I promote Cyber Joke 3000, which is my daily joke email. For the last 11 years I've produced two jokes per day in a free email, which is great for opening the day with a smile. At least one of the jokes is clean...