We talked with Chuck Benton about the forerunner to Leisure Suit Larry.
Chuck Benton is an american software developer who started making games in the early eighties. His first published game was Softporn Adventure, a text adventure for adults where the goal is simply to get laid three times. The game was hard to sell at first, but became a major success when Sierra On-Line licensed it and started selling it.
It later became the foundation for the massively successful adventure game Leisure Suit Larry, which was originally created as a graphical remake of Softporn Adventure.
We talked with Chuck Benton about his time working for Sierra, the old days of building and selling computer games, getting as much as possible out of limited hardware, piloting planes and designing tidal current based power generators – as well as many other things. Read on for our full interview:
Winter is coming
Chuck: Where in Sweden are you located?
Roar: Not in Sweden, actually, but in Norway. It’s basically the same. I live in a suburb about half an hour north of Oslo.
Chuck: Oh, okay. My son’s girlfriend lives in Kristianstad in Sweden, and he’s been trying to get permission to move over there.
Roar: I know that you live in the eastern USA, but I’m not exactly sure where?
Chuck: I live in the northernmost state on the eastern side, so on the border of Canada. Summer is officially over, it hasn’t snowed yet but it’s starting to get chilly.
Roar: Sounds like more or less the same weather as over here. There’s been some snow-sightings in the mornings, but nothing’s stayed put.
Chuck: Yeah, the mountain has snow here, but I’m down by the coast.
The old gang
Roar: I spoke with Al Lowe a couple of weeks ago. Do you still have any contact with him?
Chuck: No, I don’t have any contact with the old Sierra gang, except occasionally mails with Ken Williams. But the last one of those was probably ten years ago.
Roar: So no reunions or…?
Chuck: No. I was never actually an employee of Sierra Online. At the time, I was an independent contractor and worked out of Maine, and every couple of months I’d fly out and deliver the next product.
Roar: I guess that explains why you have created games for a number of different companies?
Chuck: Yeah, but for the most part everything was Sierra Online, and then there were a couple of others that were stop-gap.
Roar: How old were you when you started writing code?
Chuck: I’m making a guess, but I’m thinking 28 or so.
Roar: And then you started with Apple BASIC?
Chuck: I had actually done a little bit of coding on an IBM 360 back in my failed college attempt. And then I worked as a field engineer for another company, working with card reader stuff.
Softporn Adventure, On-Line Systems and later, Sierra Online
Roar: What were your first experiences with the adventure genre?
Chuck: My first experience with a text adventure games was Scott Adams Pirate Adventure. I ended up playing just about all of his text adventures. I liked that they weren’t eye/hand coordination type games, but more mind teasers.
Roar: Were there any that stood out and inspired you when you created Softporn Adventure?
Chuck: None in particular, except for Scott’s screen layout and the two word parsing. That was a format I followed.
Roar: Were there any typical adventure features that you didn’t like, and wanted to avoid?
Chuck: One thing I didn’t like were games that had an endless number of empty rooms and scenes. My goal was to make every space have multiple features and ideally to make the game lean toward being an interactive story as opposed to a puzzle. Whether I achieved that is open to interpretation, but it was a motivation I tried to follow.
Roar: How did you get involved with Sierra, and what was working with the Williamses like?
Chuck: It was good! It was interesting, because I’d started my first game, Softporn Adventure, as I was working as a field engineer for a flight simulator company. I also trained as a pilot and picked up my mechanics licenses and flight electronics there. It was one of those jobs that was 80% boredom and 20% high pressure – when you’d fly to wherever the simulator was and fix it. But I talked the company into buying me an Apple, saying I’d write software that would automate all the paperwork that I had to manage.
And so they did that, and I ended up writing Softporn Adventure as an exercise in learning how to do coding, database management and so forth. Being a single 27 year old male, I decided to make the objective to get laid three times. Creating it was a fun exercise, was a great outlet for my twisted sense of juvenile humor, and I did learn a lot. I’d shared it with friends and it became obvious I’d created something with commercial potential. So I started my own company, Blue Sky Software, and was trying to sell it, but I couldn’t get advertising anywhere because none of the magazines wanted to have something with that title.
Then I met Ken Williams at a trade show where I had a booth and was selling Softporn Adventure in little baggies, including an instruction pamphlet, and he took it back to California. It went like wildfire around the shop, and he called me up and said: «Can I license it?». This turned out to be a good thing, as On-Line Systems was a major source of revenue for all the magazines, and he basically said «if you want me to keep buying the back pages and the inside covers for advertising, it’s all or nothing. All our product line or none.»
On-Line Systems had a huge presence in advertising. They typically bought the rear page, both cover and rear inside pages, and centerfold space. Basically eclipsing the entire balance of advertising revenue for a magazine. Nobody could turn them down if they added Softporn Adventure to the monthly advertising package.
As a young teen, I’d buy a Playboy magazine, acting casually, also buying a fishing magazine, an auto magazine, and a trains magazine… all trying to avoid making it look like my only interest was in the Playboy. It was the same with Softporn Adventure. On-Line Systems sales skyrocketed. Folks came in and bought multiples of their product line, to hide the fact that they only wanted Softporn Adventure. Ken said the game helped boost their market presence and paid for itself well beyond expectations.
So yeah, he was good to work with.
Roar: So you licensed Softporn Adventure to Sierra – that means you got royalties?
Chuck: Yes, I got royalties for Softporn Adventure.
After this, I started making a female oriented version of Softporn Adventure, but it kind of died on the vine. And then Ken asked me to do a new version of Frogger on the Atari 8-bit. So I did that while living in California.
Roar: That’s impressive, because there’s a big step between Apple BASIC and creating arcade games on the Atari.
Chuck: Yeah, though I knew assembly language already. So I just had to learn my way around the Atari. It was actually a pretty cool machine. After doing the Atari version, I did the version of the game for the Commodore 64. And that was before the Commodore 64 had been released, so my manual was a dot matrix printout of the draft of the manual from the engineers at Commodore. I got to do one of the first games ever on the Commodore 64.
The Commodore was an extremely impressive piece of hardware with multiple processors in it and whatnot. You could make it do things that Atari wouldn’t dream of doing. But the software for the Commodore 64 was really … in the opposite direction. It was pretty pathetic. [editor’s note: Benton is most likely referring to the OS routines, BASIC, et.c., not third party software]
Other games
Roar: You also worked on some other games. Like a couple based on Johnny Hart’s comics, like BC’s Quest for Tires and The Wizard of ID.
Chuck: Yeah, Quest for Tires actually won some magazine’s «bug of the month» award. On the Atari, you could direct what part of memory was going to be your screen memory and what part was for your code. In one particular spot in the game you’d be going town a hill and had to jump over a river, and if you hit it just right, your character would actually land in the code as opposed to on the screen. Then the game would just start crashing in totally unpredictable ways.
Roar: I guess you couldn’t just push out a patch?
Chuck: No, it’s still in there. I never found it and On-Line would literally have people play eight hours a day for two weeks before it entered production, and it made it through all those hoops without anybody finding it.
Roar: I played that game a lot myself on the Commodore 64. I didn’t know it was based on a comic strip at that time, though. A friend of mine was a big fan of one of you other games: Crossfire.
Chuck: I didn’t do the original version of that, I did the Commodore 64 and Atari versions I believe. But I was pretty addicted to that game myself, it just requires a trance-like concentration.
The last game I did for Sierra was a Disney product – Donald Duck’s Playground. And that … back when I started with Frogger, I did everything. All the graphics, all the coding, figuring out how to do the music and programming the chips in hexadecimal numbers and so on. And when I did Donald Duck’s Playground, I had a panel of seven Disney child psychologists that would tell me how I should be making the game. And they would send me pictures that were drawn on an 8.5 x 11 paper page which was in a different format than the computer screen, and they wanted me to do things which there wasn’t enough screen resolution to do.
There were probably about fifteen people assigned to me in total, with two graphics artists, and I was spending as much time managing the team as I was doing what I liked to do, which was to program.
Roar: Which versions of Donald did you do?
Chuck: I think it was for the Atari and the Apple, but I’m not sure – it’s over 40 years ago. But that was the last game I did for Sierra.
Larry and royalties
Roar: In a previous interview, you mentioned that you got more money in royalties for Softporn Adventure than you did in salary…
Chuck: Yeah, that was when I worked for the flight simulator company. It’s actually how we ended up in Maine, I was living down in Massachusetts at the time but the royalties gave me enough money to have a down payment on the house.
Three years after the release of Softporn Adventure it had had run it’s course and was discontinued. Online Systems was always a graphics based game company, with my game being the only text adventure ever in their line up, Ken called and asked if he could license the story to create Leisure Suit Larry. He basically said «I’ll give you a one percent royalty on it or write you a check for 5000 dollars.»
I had tax bill for around 4000 dollars that I didn’t have money for, so I took the five grand. We never negotiated whether I would have had a one percent royalty for the entire product line as opposed to the first game, but there were years where it was doing like 35 million a year, so I could have been living on a boat in the Caribbean if I’d taken the one percent.
Roar: That would have been something! What did you think about the game?
Chuck: I think they did a good job with Larry and bringing it to life in graphic form.
I also retained the copyright for Softporn Adventure. I know Al Lowe had tried to sell original source code, notes and stuff like that from when he was writing the Larry games, and then the owners of Sierra said «no, that’s not yours.» But I have a letter from Ken Williams saying Softporn is all mine. I actually tried to get that stuff into a major auction house, basically because Softporn Adventure was the first commercially successful adult software in the world.
*at this point Chuck gets up from his chair and swivels the camera*
Chuck: In fact, here’s the Apple that it was written on!
Roar: So cool! Does it still run?
Chuck: No, I’d have to send it off to a repair shop or spend time trying to figure out myself. But I’m probably going to put all of that up for auction or donate it to a museum.
Later projects
Chuck: I went on to do consulting before starting Technology Systems Inc. (TSI), which is the company I’ve had since then.
Roar: You created simulators?
Chuck: It was a mix of things, but my primary customer was the military. It started out with training systems, and that was simulators. Then eventually I did the first large-scale voice over IP implementation, and that was a class five project. It was in thirteen different countries and fully encrypted, and the military was using it for training purposes. And ultimately I ended up doing a lot of work with the navy, in navigation systems and finally through navy special ops folks.
Roar: Did you write code yourself during these years?
Chuck: For the first five years I did, and after that I jokingly referred to it that I programmed in Powerpoint. I was actually able to replace myself in all regards except doing sales work. So I was the one who went around and drummed up business. We bounced between ten and twenty people over the years.
Working with limited hardware
Roar: Do you still play computer games?
Chuck: I kind of stopped playing video games 40 years ago.
Roar: Including simulator games?
Chuck: I played simulator games probably up to about 1990. And then just sort of moved on to other things. It’s just one of those things, you get to a certain point and it’s just «been there, done that» – it just all starts to seem a little too familiar.
Roar: Because today, these simulator games have gotten really good.
Chuck: Yeah. After having stopped doing videogames, one of the projects I did was to do a visual simulator for the simulator company I worked for before. I wrote it all in C, but it wasn’t fast enough, so I ended up compiling it by hand in assembler. It was a totally different beast to how you do graphics nowadays.
There was a game I did for another company. I can’t remember the guy’s…
Roar: Jump Jet?
Chuck: Yeah, Jump Jet, that was one that I authored that myself. And then licensed it to another company that I met through Apple Fest.
Roar: Did you enjoy the process of squeezing out as much performance as possible from the limited hardware?
Chuck: Yeah. I worked on a sail boat simulator originally done on the Apple II, and I ended up doing it on the PC. This was before the PC had a math co-processor, so I ended up having to write a floating point mathematics library from scratch. And that was a fun challenge.
Roar: I can almost imagine you sitting there thinking «I have six frames per second now, I should be able to get seven if I just compile this thing by hand…»
Chuck: Yeah, it was an interesting project. I had to do a bunch of other tricks, and actually that was part of the reason the military contracted me. I had proposed something, and during the kickoff meeting they gave me a contract and said: We know you said you wanted to do this, but we brought you in because we want you to do that. And it was basically taking a million dollar simulator and creating a PC version of it.
Time Magazine
Roar: You were featured in Time Magazine in … eighty one? «Software for the Masses». Do you have that issue?
Chuck: Yeah, I have a stack of them! My mother was liberal politically, but conservative as far as moral values went, and when that article came out she hung her head in shame and said «oh, now everybody knows…»
Roar: It’s a feisty cover, though since the game is text only it would be safe for work…
Chuck: At one point, when there were about fifty thousand Apple users in total, or fifty thousand Apples sold, On-Line had actually sold more copies of the game than Apple computers existed. And I know that the flight simulator company I worked for lost a week of work from pretty much everybody because they were all playing it. So I understand it was a … distraction … at a lot of workplaces.
It’s funny because towards the tail end of my time owning TSI, I’d end up at conferences giving technical talks. And one of the last ones had to do with marine navigation and situational awareness and all that sort of stuff, but I was introduced as having written Softporn Adventure and Frogger and stuff. So afterwards I’m being mobbed by all these people wanting to take their pictures with me and stuff, and it’s because something I did in the early eighties!
Education and piloting planes
Roar: You mentioned you were a dropout. What did you study?
Chuck: The thing that I was lucky with is that I was in private school from nursery school to high school, and I was born with an aptitude for math. In ninth grade I was taking French, Latin and English, and having to write a ten page typed paper was considered the norm, and it basically trained me as if I’d been going to college.
Then I went to another school, and frankly I didn’t do my homework, I partied all the time, and I still ended up on a roll. Then I went off to college, the same place in the midwest that my older brothers went to, and six weeks into it it was just … «I can’t do this!»
I withdrew and hitchhiked out to Colorado where a girlfriend from high school was going to college, and I bummed around for three years before deciding to go back to school and getting my pilot’s license. My parents were trying to figure out how to get me to go back to school, because everyone else in my family had PhDs. So I went out and spent two years at the University of Illinois studying aviation, and that’s how I got my pilot’s license. Then I worked as a car mechanic for a year, before going to work at another company which in turn led me to the flight simulator company where I worked for two and a half years before deciding to go full time on video games. And I’ve been self-employed ever since.
Roar: Have you ever owned your own plane?
Chuck: Yeah. I had a little four-seater Mooney. By commercial flight, Maine to Washington D.C. is typically a six hour process, and you’d have to live by the airlines’ schedule. Whereas I could be in my office and someone would ask me to come down and meet, and it was three hours door to door. But it was a single engine plane, and flying around New England in the winter, in icing conditions … and then it got to the point where I really needed to get a fancy twin engine plane – and I just wasn’t flying enough hours to justify that, so I ended up selling it.
Roar: I have a brother in law who also owns a plane, and he sometimes uses it to fly to work, but his main problem is that his place of work is too far from the nearest airport for him to really save much time.
Chuck: Yeah, and that was one of my main problems as well. I was instrument rated, so I could fly in bad weather, but the airport I kept the plane at had an 800 foot ceiling limitation. So if the fog came in I had to go to Portland International Airport which was another hour away from me, rent a car and so on.
Writing books
Roar: Do you have anything else that you have never told anyone?
Chuck: When COVID struck, I was just getting bored. You see, I’m an avid reader, just fun fiction stuff, and I was on the pre-release list of one of the authors I read, called Russel Evans. He’ll send me the scripts and I’ll go through them and tell him where I see mistakes. So anyway, I contacted him and told him I was bored and asked if he was interested in co-authoring.
And basically, I ended up doing three books during COVID where I did like 90% of them, but it was co-authored and he had the following so they ended up selling. And one of them is currently getting a draft movie script.
The first one is called Acadia Enigma. Acadia is the national park here in Maine. I skippered a schooner for a while and am a licensed captain, so it’s set in all the waters that I know and is about a spoiled rich guy who goes on a killing spree.
It’s the second one that’s a candidate for being made into a film. It’s called Cape Cod Enigma, and that takes place down in Massachusetts and has to do with a terrorist attack on Boston.
And the third one is called The Liberty Enigma, and that takes place in New York – on the Hudson River, in New York City and Long Island, and once again there’s a lot of water.
Current activities
Chuck: Now I’m a lead systems engineer for an underwater power generator that works on tidal currents. For me it’s fun because the guy who started the company is a naval engineer who’s designed what you can think of as a ten feet long, seven feet in diameter, jet engine that instead of creating power from water passing through uses a rotor that turn and generate power.
Roar: Sounds like how a general hydroelectric dam works?
Chuck: Yeah, except this is much smaller and more portable, and more fish-friendly. I get to use some mechanical engineering, both the electrical end of it and the electronics end of it. I put together all the computer stuff and write all the code, so every day is a different thing.
Roar: Interesting. We actually have a lot of hydroelectric power plants here in Norway.
Chuck: Yeah, actually we have a Swedish partner who, once we get the European patents in place, will probably license the technology and build it over there.
Roar: But you are retired now?
Chuck: Pseudo-retired. I’m retired, but I’m going to work ’till I drop dead.
Roar: I will let you go now. It has been a blast.
Chuck: I have also enjoyed it and look forward to seeing what ends up coming out of it.
We’d like to thank Chuck Benton for answering our questions!
For more content like this, including a forthcoming interview with Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe, check our English language portal.
We’d also like to thank Victoria from Soco for helping us get in touch with Chuck Benton.