Apple II Bits

Hot on the heels of Juiced.GS‘s March cover story on Kickstarter, Apple II franchises are crawling out of the woodwork to seek crowdfunded revivals. Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert will be delivering a Maniac Mansion-style adventure game in October 2012, while exactly a year later, Brian Fargo will publish a sequel to the role-playing game Wasteland. What’s next?

It’s a return to the land of the lounge lizards with Leisure Suit Larry, the sexy, seedy adventure games featuring pickup artist Larry Laffer and his quest to become better acquainted with the opposite gender. The series was a contemporary of adventure games Space Quest, King’s Quest, and Police Quest and featured the point-and-click interface endemic of Sierra Online titles.

Franchise creator Al Lowe is asking for a cool half-mil to apply a graphical overhaul to the original 1987 game, add voice acting, and port it to "XBLA, PSN, Android, iPads, iPhones, Windows Phones, Kindle, Linux and of course, Mac!"

The best part of Lowe’s pitch is the video that prominently features an Apple II, both in the opening shot and around three minutes in:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leisuresuitlarry/make-leisure-suit-larry-come-again

In addition to the aforementioned features, I’m hopeful that, like the recent special edition of The Secret of Monkey Island, we’ll be able to switch between the original and updated graphics on the fly. We’ll find out upon the remake’s release this October.

(Retrogamers may also be interested in backing an original Shadowrun game)

(Hat tip to Kay Savetz; consultation by Steve Weyhrich)