I will be posting this elsewhere as well, maybe in a somewhat refined format, maybe not. But I might as well toss this up for now. Somebody uploaded a walkthrough in five parts, and though it obviously misses out on a lot of the description-window jokes, it hits enough of them that I thought I'd write this up for anyone who might be at all interested.
0:02
The voice: Though it's practically identical to the Monty Python "Gumby" voice (any dis-similarity is down to my utter lack of skill as a voice actor), the voice is actually an in-joke with some friends of mine. It's based on a boy we went to school with, who actually sounded very little like that, but such is the nature of schoolyard harassment. I don't mean to make it sound as though our impersonations of him were relentlessly cruel; it was light-hearted and I never heard him complain or get too upset. It's just that, at some point, we decided that every single sentence in the world would be funnier if spoken in that voice. If you disagree--and you probably do--then you should thank your lucky stars that you didn't know me in person 10 years ago. The misreading of the title cards is a separate, unrelated joke, and one that I quite like.
The icons: The graphical cursors are enormous, unwieldy, and ugly. You wouldn't know it to look at them, but I modeled them on the cursors from Space Quest 6, which I thought were an absolutely perfect design for what they were supposed to do. Somehow I ended up with something almost entirely different; as though I intended to single-handedly duplicate the recipe for Coca-Cola, but didn't get any further than making sure the can was red.
The score: A Hitch-hiker's Guide reference, though I doubt anyone out there didn't know that already. There are a few too many 42s sprinkled throughout this game and its sequel. I apologize belatedly for the reliance on this non-joke. I'm sure the me of 2000 has a good reason for thinking it was so funny, but the me of 2010 certainly doesn't. Also, you will exceed the maximum score by the end of the game. This is a little funnier. A little.
References: "Bladerun Like Hell" is a reference to Bladerunner, of course, a film with which the game's plot shares a similarity. If I had gone with my original plot idea (read on) the parallels would have likely been much stronger. It's also a reference to Run Like Hell, a song by Pink Floyd off of their album The Wall. It's the first of a few Pink Floyd references, which is somewhat surprising to me now as I didn't become a genuine fan of theirs until a few years later. (At this point I was mainly into Bob Dylan and The Who.) The alternate title is a reference to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which is the Philip K. Dick novel that inspired Bladerunner, and is thus one of the few jokes in this game that doesn't feel shoe-horned in beyond any respect for natural enjoyment or cohesiveness. Enjoy it while you can!
0:16
The music: Sultans of Swing, by the Dire Straits. Not a huge Straits fan, but they've got some excellent stuff. My process for scoring this game consisted of visiting this enormous archive of MIDI classic-rock songs. Sometimes I'd think a song would be perfect for a certain scene, so I'd download the MIDI and realize how much different it sounded than what I heard on the radio. (Go figure!) Eventually I just downloaded masses of songs that I knew by name, and listened to them all separately from how they were "supposed" to sound. This means that my selections were made based upon the quality of the MIDI's sound, rather than upon any particular fondness I might have had for the actual song. I wish I could remember what some of my original song choices were, but that information is long forgotten.
The scene: I drew this? It's hideous. The color scheme isn't bad. The walls, floor and door are, at least, not offensive to the eye (in terms of hue, that is), but everything about this is wrong. I'm not a much better artist now than I was then, but Jesus goodness, how was I able to face myself in the mirror after drawing this mess? Some elements of the scene have black borders, most have none. The doorknob is the size of Semprini's head and if you held one end of that telephone to your ear, the other end would bash you in the penis. The desk is gigantic, and Commissioner Fishbian is, for some reason, dangling his arms over the side rather than resting them on the top, which I'm sure is what I was going for. This is horrible stuff.
The cut scene: Also, what you're witnessing is an introductory cut scene, which, as you can tell by the floating wrist-watch, is unskippable. I'm pretty sure that the only way to NOT watch this cut scene is to load a saved game from the "Bladerun Like Hell" title card. Nowhere are you told this in the game. It's poor design, but, I can say honestly, it was at least intentional. I enabled the action cursor on the title card for just such a reason. I can't remember why I DIDN'T enable it here, but I think it had something to do with the music or the dialogue going screwy if someone accessed the toolbar during this long conversation. There were better ways of handling this; I used none of them.
Professor Semprini: Semprini is a reference to an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which the word "semprini" is said to be very naughty indeed, though we never find out what it's meant to mean. I wish the joke were any deeper than that, but considering some of the other crap I expected you to laugh at back then, maybe it's good that it's not.
Commissioner Fishbian: The name Fishbian comes from my final year of high school, when I was a co-anchor for the school-based local news. We'd put together a show every week, and it'd air relentlessly through the next week on the local information network. It was a great deal of fun, and some of my best memories come from that class. Anyway, a new student arrived in the class at some point during the school year, when all of the positions were filled. We invented a new position just for him: he'd read out the birthdays for that coming week. One week he had to read out the name "Mr. Fishbein," which was pronounced "Fish Bine." But whenever he got to the name, he'd read it as fish-be-in. It was one of those moments where one person's laughter causes everyone else to start laughing, and each time we did another take (I'm sure we did a dozen), it took longer for us to stop laughing. There was something tremendously funny about the idea of a Fishbian. Ultimately, we just didn't air birthdays for that week. Such is the curse of having a name that makes it sound like you sleep with fish.
0:27
The caption: Whoever made this video inserted the following caption: "The art might look a bit raw to put it gently, but the creator is a writer, not a cartoonist." I think him for this (accurate) acknowledgment of the reason for the art's limitations. Unfortunately, this leaves me with no defense at all for the poor quality of the writing.
0:37
"...": It still bothers me to this day that the characters use their speaking-animations whenever they say "..." All I wanted to do was get them to pause for a beat for the purposes of comic timing, and I couldn't figure out how to do that. So instead I have them say "...", which would be kind of like instructing the actors in your stage production to say, "I'm pausing for thought" instead of just pausing for thought. I hate it. It probably has something to do with the fact that I programmed the entire game with the graphical editor instead of using any actual coding, but...it's just an excuse either way.
0:45
The Lovely Rita 4200 Parking Enforcement Cyborg: Another 42, another lazy song reference in place of a joke (Beatles this time), and the revelation that I didn't actually know what a "cyborg" was. Oh well. At least I got the "Parking Enforcement" thing right.
1:34
Mr. Barkwoof: I'm surprised I never ended up showing Mr. Barkwoof as a character. In fact, I wasn't even planning it for LVIII, in which the K-9 patrol was going to play a substantial role. I guess I just forgot about him. The "Mr. Barkwoof" name is a pretty standard "funny dog name" joke, so it works simply because I can't be blamed for it, but it's also based on Mr. Barky, who was an actual K-9 patrol-pooch in my hometown. He almost attacked a friend of mine when the cops arrived after he crashed into a tree. I guess Mr. Barky had already claimed that tree as his own.
1:40
"You might as well send a pudding.": I didn't know what a pudding was, either. One of a few Britishisms that made their way into this game. I sometimes wonder if I had any capacity for language whatsoever, or if I just strung together pieces of other people's sentences and hoped for the best.
1:47
Sideburns: For whatever reason, sideburns get a big reaction out of people. No idea why. I had them at the time I made this game (and for a year or two before), and people would always, without fail, comment on them. Sometimes to make fun of them...sometimes to stare in vague mystification. Once I had a Wal-Mart employee tail me for a few minutes. When I turned around to see her, she asked me, "How did you GROW those?" I shrugged and told her I just didn't shave there. I don't know why sideburns seem so alien to people, but being as Larry's sideburns are remembered so particularly by those who played this game, I think it's something universal. They're funny, but damned if I know why.
1:55
"A talking monkey?": I've never seen Any Which Way But Loose, but for some reason I assumed Clyde could talk.
2:02
"A dead guy who gooses people?": I've never seen Weekend At Bernie's, but for some reason I assumed Bernie would goose people.
2:07
"Webster?": A pre-Family Guy reliance on the recognition of somebody else's creation in order the generate a chuckle of familiarity. I really liked jokes at that point in my life; I just wish I actually wrote a few.
2:09
"Lounge-lizard type": I had no idea what a "lounge lizard" was. Are you noticing a pattern here?
2:18
The music: "Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" by Bachman Turner Overdrive
The badge: Our third 42, and the game hasn't even started.
Pitchfork Productions: A production "company" I shared with two friends, Joe O'Sullivan and Justin Leary. Whatever we produced at that time (usually individually) bore the Pitchfork Productions stamp. At some point we really did want to build Pitchfork into something meaningful, a company along the lines of Apple Corp. that would have helped other young artists get off the ground. Of course, you can't help people off the ground if you yourself haven't left the ground, so it went nowhere.
Philip J Reed, VSc: Blame Harry S Truman for the missing period after my middle initial, and Red Dwarf for the VSc distinction. (For the record, it stands for Video Scholarship, which I earned at the end of the school year for co-hosting the local news. I think it was a check for $25.)
Larry Vales: Nothing particularly funny about the name, and I have no idea how or why it occurred to me. It's a GOOD name, of course, unlike most of the others in this game. It's believable, but slightly off. I probably should have changed it to Harry or something, as there was already a very popular Larry series in adventure gaming, but I was stubborn that way. Larry Vales was actually first used as a minor character in a novel I was writing when I was around 15, as a traffic patrolman, but he wasn't created specifically for that novel...
Traffic Division: I had an idea many, many years ago for a game called Larry Vales: Traffic Division. It was to be an adventure game, just like this, and it was to feature Larry traveling to various locations all over the country to track down and deactivate these berserk police robots. Each area would function independently, with its own puzzles and things to do, allowing the player to finish the game in whatever sequence he or she preferred. One of the locations was to be an enormous tourist trap called South of the Interstate, which is a much funnier name and concept than The Jolly Parasite Motor Estates turned out to be. It was going to be the same type of game, only much, much better. When I ended up making Larry Vales: Traffic Division, I didn't even bother to attempt the multiple locations. This is for the best; there's no way I ever would have finished such a massive game, especially my first time designing one. I gave Larry a single location, and did my best to craft a round, rich experience from there, based mainly upon the single-location elasticity of Leisure Suit Larry 6 or Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist. (The latter of which is still my all-time favorite adventure game, and the ideal model, I feel, for anybody looking to design on.)
2:35
The Jolly Parasite: Probably the result me trying to think of a funny name, failing, deciding I'd figure one out later, and never getting around to it. I'm not even sure what's MEANT to be funny about it. I did want to give the little green bug a tophat, and have him take it off and put it back on again repeatedly, and I don't remember why I didn't do it. All of my animation was actually done by assigning several backgrounds to a single screen, and cycling through them. I was just that good. The idea for staging all of the action around a hotel probably came from LSL 6, which I mentioned above. Great game, and the hotel setting really proved that you can accomplish more with a character in isolation than one who is given free reign over the entire planet. (Compare LSL 6 to LSL 2 for evidence of that.) I don't think I INTENTIONALLY thought I'd use a hotel because that's what the other Larry used, but I'm willing to believe it was indirectly responsible for my decision. Again, Freddy Pharkas was my main inspiration, so I'm going to chalk up the hotel setting as a semi-coincidence.
2:54
I'm surprised this player even visited this screen, but I'm glad he did, as it's worth talking about. I had big plans for the "mystery" element here. The idea was that you'd be able to see everybody's vehicles at the beginning of the game (all in violation of parking laws in some way or another), and, as you progressed in the game, the Lovely Rita would kill off those characters. You'd always be one step (at least) behind the murderer, so the farther you got in the game, the fewer folks would be left to interact with. I think I DID actually do this somewhere, with the lifeguard I think (I'll have to check again when we get there), but the plans to create a tense, cohesive thriller built around parking enforcement just didn't pan out. Also, you were going to be able to search the cars for useful items. This was basically an important screen in my head. Then I made the game, and it was actually totally unnecessary. I do feel the game is poorer for my not having included the gradual murders, though...and the existence of this screen is just a reminder of what probably should have been.
2:56
The walk: Man, check out that walking animation on Larry. Good stuff, huh? He glides along as though on ice, bolt-stiff like he's paralyzed from the waist up. This is horrible stuff. It's the one thing all of the reviews focused on at the time, and I can't blame them. Even the best reviews (and, shockingly, this game got more than its fair share of them) had to point out how awful the walk cycle was. Maybe I got lucky, in that way...the awfulness of the walking animation distracted them from the weakness of the writing.
2:59
So Charlie Striker (your partner) must have entered the hotel without you. Don't know why I didn't show that as a cut scene, or make any direct, unavoidable reference to it. As it stands, you don't even SEE your partner until halfway through the game, even though he's "meant" to be there all along. Very poor design choice, and not really excusable at all. Also: Charlie's surnamesake is Ted Striker, from the movie Airplane! They have nothing in common; it's just a great movie, and was one of my favorites growing up.
3:03
Music: Give Me Some Loving, by the Spencer Davis Group. This is one of those songs that fools me into thinking I'm having a good day whenever it comes on the radio. Also, the MIDI soundtrack was somewhat appropriate for the feel of this hotel. I remember, as a child, staying in a hotel in Florida with my parents. I took a walk alone to the gym, or the pool or something, and, in the elevator, something clicked, and I realized that the crappy muzak I had been hearing the whole time we were there was actually crappy muzak versions of popular songs, rather than non-descript session-musician noodling. Specifically, the song that clicked with me was So. Central Rain, by REM. Hearing the flute-and-castanet version of that in the elevator stuck with me, for some reason. Just this bizarre sort of artless approximation of a great song. (Is there really any reason hotel elevators can't play the ACTUAL songs?)
3:13
Dodge Vipon: Oh wow. Vipon was the subject of a comedy routine I remember Norm MacDonald doing...it was about a child he went to school with who was developmentally disabled. If I shared anything else I remembered about this routine with you, you'd think I was a genuinely horrible human being for remembering it so fondly. So I won't. But that's where it comes from. An absolutely tasteless--but thoroughly enjoyed by myself from a much crueler point in history--monologue by Norm MacDonald.
3:23
Mercedes, Bend: A sex joke, of course. I can't remember if it's actually mine. I get the feeling it's something I read somewhere...the punchline of some other joke that's been told a thousand times...but Google isn't helping me, so I have no evidence. It's possibly my joke. I'm not going to fight anybody else who'd prefer the credit, however.
3:58
Sandy: There was a reason I named the receptionist Sandy. I just wish I could remember what it was. Somehow I think I'll realize it was some lame-ass pun whenever her last name is revealed.
4:03
Message board: Quartet of Skokie really does make corkboards, as you probably know, but this was meant as a reference to The Usual Suspects.
4:07
Shitzu: ha ha ha
4:10
Wow, what a clue! You'd think that with all the truly great adventure games I grew up playing, I would have been a little better at designing the puzzles for this one.
4:21
The electricity bills are so high because the Lovely Rita has been recharging herself in the maintenance shed. Not that anyone cares, but there it is, as I'm not sure I made this connection clear enough in-game.
4:39
I love it when the back of Larry's head faces the person he's ostensibly talking to. Did I mention how humiliating it is to watch this again?
5:02
The Underwater Macarena: A comedy sketch a friend of mine wrote when we were in high school. Well, he didn't get any further than the title, but I'm sure that would have been the best part anyway.
5:24
Larry's speech pattern: He sure peppers his dialogue with a lot of "Why yes," "How odd," "But of course..." and shit like that. You can build up a certain type of character by having him or her talk this way, but, for me, I'm sure it just happened because I wasn't paying any regard to how any of this would sound in real life, coming out of an actual person. As such, Larry comes across as sort of a blue-blooded English gentleman with a serious concussion.
5:50
"I AM the law.": Oh good, I was hoping that 20-year-old Phil would make a Judge Dredd reference.
6:22
"For some reason the transitions take very long in this game.": I can't explain that. I don't remember them taking particularly long back when the game was new, but computers have come a long way in 10 years, and it's fully possible that the game data isn't being processed the same way that it was back then. It's also possible that because computers were so much slower back then anyway, there was no reason to single out the transition time between screens of Larry Vales: Traffic Division.
6:39
Room 142: Man, I sure am glad that 42 thing gets funnier every time I use it.
6:44
Lust For Vice: I do remember having a lot of fun hiding the titles of the other Larry Vales games in this one. They didn't exist, of course...but it was fun coming up with them. I think that's something else I borrowed from Leisure Suit Larry. Or possibly Space Quest. But I'm sure it's somebody else's joke.
7:21
So Charlie is in the shower. It's a serious problem in this game that you don't even get to see your partner until so much later. It prevents him from becoming much of a character. I honestly don't know why I didn't just have him arrive later in the game, or something...or be off in some inaccessible room. It's pointless to have him scamper into the hotel before you see him, then be out of frame in the shower as you walk around the room...it's like trying to hide Snuffleupagus from the adults in order to maintain the possibility that he might be imaginary. Eventually you realize you don't need to bother with this crap, and I should have realized that much sooner. As it stands, Charlie Striker might as well be Larry's Harvey.
Shake Your Groove Thing: I think this was meant to indicate that Charlie has laughable taste in music. Of course, EVERYONE in this game has the same taste in music, so the joke is kind of...unnecessary.
7:24
The music: Stuck in the Middle With You, by Steelers Wheel. God. Watching this is like one of those dreams you have where you're suddenly naked in the middle of school, and you try to run out of the building before anybody notices. Only instead of a dream, it's hidden-camera security footage that you're watching with your mother.
8:00
"Points! Ka-ching!!": Freddy Pharkas had a voice clip every time you earned a point. Blame that game for this one.
The candy: Why the hell didn't I just draw the candy? I might have had trouble with the object appearing "behind" the bed, rendering it inaccessible. No idea, but it's likely.
The room: This room was meant to serve as a sort of hub-point for Larry's adventure. He'd have to return several times for reasons I was never able to figure out...and so he never needed to return. You just need to visit it once and loot the place, I think. A definite missed opportunity to create a sort of "homey" feeling safe zone.
8:10
The fire evacuation map is 100% accurate.
8:26
The player here seems to have trouble leaving the room. I did, too. I never could figure out why it was so difficult to get Larry out of this room. Something to do with where/how I defined the exit area, I'm sure, but I do remember spending a lot of time trying to clear up the issue, and never succeeding.
8:44
Vomitorium: I don't think it's actually a word; just something I remembered someone saying on Seinfeld.
9:23
A Teddy Bears Picnic reference? Jesus Christ, I sure was casting the net wide, wasn't I?
9:33
1984, by George Orwell. Room 101 is the room O'Brien uses to break and brainwash the protagonist Winston Smith.
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