You know he did other things than Larry, right?
We talked with Al Lowe about Leisure Suit Larry, but mostly other stuff. This was Roar’s first interview and he ran out of time before he could dive into what Al is mostly known for.
Al Lowe is an American software developer who started making games in the early eighties. His is mostly known for the Leisure Suit Larry games, created with Sierra, but he is also a musical man who loves playing his sax and still plays with his model trains. He has also created lots of other games for Sierra, not only the Larry series.
If you think Al is great, but you already know all you need to know about Larry, then this is the article for you. And it is pretty long. Get your coffee now, before continuing…
Roar: Have you ever been to Norway?
Al: Oh yeah, sure. I have this eyeball right here. It works because I spent a week recuperating in the Department of Ophthalmology at Oslo University Hospital. I had a detached retina when we were flying into Oslo, and went to an ophthalmologist, and she said to get to the hospital right now. The next morning a bunch of Norwegian women started poking around in my eye and fixed it.
Of course, I was blind in that eye for the next week, and I was already blind in the other eye, so I wandered around in the dark while my wife went sightseeing. I went with her, but I didn’t see any sights.
Roar: So you have felt and smelt the beautiful fjords, but never seen them.
Al: Well, on an earlier trip, we did take the railroad to Bergen. Over the mountain plateau [Hardangervidda]. So we spent some time there, and that was fun.
Roar: I’ve never actually taken that trip myself, but I heard it’s wonderful.
Al: It was not for us. We got to the top, up in the top of the mountains. And the electricity went off. And so, we parked in the middle of this beautiful snowy scene for three hours, before they finally got the power back on. Then we went on our journey but we had already missed the connecting rides. We had booked a trip on a boat through the fjords, and a trip on the cog railway. We missed all of them. So be sure you go when there is electricity.
Roar: Yeah, we like to joke about that in Norway, the richest country in the world and the lousiest trains. I guess that is a good segue, because you do like trains, don’t you? At least model trains?
Al: Yes, I do. I’ve been a model railroader for most of my life. I got my first model train when I was 2 years old, and my dad wouldn’t let me play with it. So he ran it around the Christmas tree and I had to watch. But eventually, when I was 9 or 10, I got interested in HO size trains, and built a layout in our basement. Completely by myself, I had no idea what I was doing or anything, but I just learned as I went, piddled around and figured it out. I went to the hobby shop sometime and would say stuff like: How do you glue this stuff to this stuff? And they’d give me some special glue and and teach me how.
So, it was fun. I learned a lot, and I proved that I could do things with my hands. I ended up learning a lot about wiring and electricity. And scenery, I did stuff with papier-mâché. I took old tomato sticks from our garden, cut them in different heights. I wrapped old screen door wire over the top of them and coated that with plaster to make mountains and stuff. So I did a lot of stuff, mostly things I’d read about in magazines, but I think it helped me understand that I could learn something if I didn’t already know it.
Roar: Did you add any miniature figures or models and stuff like that in the scenery as well?
Al: Sure, yeah, lots of stuff. In fact, I built buildings out of balsa wood. And I read an article in a magazine that said if you hold your X-Acto knife at just the right angle and drag it across the balsa wood, you can make clapboard siding, you know, where the siding overlaps. I also built doors from scraps of wood.
Anyway, it was fun. It’s a fun hobby, and it served me for ten years at first. Then I went to college and started playing music, and I forgot about it. But then when my son was 10 years old I thought: I liked doing this when I was 10, maybe he will. So we went to the hobby shop and bought a bunch of trains. Of course he wasn’t interested at all, but I got hooked again! So for the last 35 years I’ve been doing N-scale trains, where the locomotive is about five inches long.
Roar: So your son is 45, then?
Al: Yes!
Roar: Yes, then you could have been my dad, because I’m 46.
Al: Well, you’re the right age, then, I guess.
Model trains are not what they used to be
Roar: I was sent a link to the National Model Railroad Association where you are mentioned as a member of the board of directors of the 4th Division of the Pacific Northwest region.
Al: The Pacific Northwest Region of the NMRA, yeah. I did that for 10 years at least. Then I was assistant director for another 10 years so I worked at that organization for about 20 years. But recently I said: That’s enough, let some new blood come in. So we got new people now, and they’re much better, so I’m happy.
Roar: But you didn’t get any money for it?
Al: No, no, it’s a volunteer organization. At first we did a paper newsletter every month. We would print and fold and staple and stamp and address-label hundreds of newsletters. I did that for a couple years until I finally convinced everybody that we’ve got to go online. So then I made a PDF, posted it, and we sent out an email. That was much better, but we still had a few die-hard people that would download it and print it out every time. I was part of this for 24 years.
Roar: Are there any physical magazines about model trains today?
Al: Yes. Well, the man who ran one of the biggest ones just passed away and so his magazine’s gone now, but there’s still a magazine called N Scale, and it’s housed right here in the suburb of Seattle. It is distributed all over the world. And then there’s the National Model Railroad Association, which publishes a magazine every month, all over the world. And then there’s Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman. I know there’s one for each of the scales, for HO and S and O and G for garden railroads.
Al: It’s an old hobby. A weird hobby, in that it follows my path. Most people get interested in trains when they’re little kids. And then they grow out of it in high school. Then later in life, they realize: I got time and money now. I could get back in it, this is a good hobby. And it really is. It’s great socially, because the group that I’m in have a layout that’s portable and we can bring it to shows. So 6-8 times a year we pack everything up into a trailer, move it to a place, and set it up. And we run trains all weekend, we talk with the public and hundreds of people come by and see my work. Then we pack it up and put it back in the trailer and then wait for the next show. So it doesn’t get old because it’s so long between shows. It’s really fun.
Roar: I guess there’s not that much development in the field, so even though you haven’t done it for 20 years, it’s not that hard to just continue where you left off?
Al: Actually, it has changed completely with computers. So you couldn’t be more wrong! Actually, you were correct for 40 years at least. But in the 90s people started developing computerized means of running the trains. And in the mid-90s, the National Model Railroad Association set up standards and said: If you follow all these rules then your stuff can run on anybody’s system. And that’s when it really changed over.
About 2001 or 2002, we went from the old system, which was a rheostat that controlled the amount of voltage applied to the rails, just like a volume control. So we went from a potentiometer that changed the amount of power to the tracks to constantly powered tracks, with a computer chip inside each locomotive. It has a number address that you can set. Then on your remote control you can type in the number of the locomotive you want to drive, turn a knob, and it sends a radio signal through the air to a computer that’s permanently affixed to the layout. And that computer multiplexes a serial signal on top of the power, just kind of like your old phone modems where they overlaid a signal on top of the regular phone lines. It then tells the locomotive to go this fast, back up, or sound the whistle and so on.
Roar: I guess for you this was not a bad thing at all, because you love that kind of stuff.
Al: Oh, no, right? It was right up my the alley there.
Roar: I have some experience painting Warhammer miniature figures. Did you paint miniatures yourself?
Al: Yeah. The trouble with N Scale is that the people are very small. It’s a challenge to paint. We always tell everybody that the hard part is getting the eyelashes right.
Roar: And that’s at least one thing that does not get easier with age.
Al: No, no, that’s true. But I have lots of special tools for that. I have an optimizer that has LED lights built around it, so I can zoom right in on things and paint the tiny little stuff.
Roar: Pretending to be a cyborg.
Al: Yeah, well … getting the help I need.
Al Lowe and music
Roar: Music is very important to you. And people wouldn’t think about music when they hear your name. But for me, I got this mp3-file in the late 90s with the title: «Al Lowe – For Your Thighs Only». And that played the music from Leisure Suit Larry. So then I learned the name. And of course, I had played these games earlier, but never picked up on the name.
Al: I hope you paid me a royalty.
Roar: Yeah, of course! So for me you were a musician before I found out that you had also created these games.
Al: Well, I was involved with a lot of Sierra products in one way or another. I worked on their spelling program when they had a word processor. I worked on their assembler for Apple II. I worked on … God, just a lot of different stuff. 26 products in 16 years.
Oh, yeah, I should plug my website. Tell people, if they have gotten this far, they should visit my website. There’s lots more stuff there. If you enjoy this, you’ll enjoy that.
Roar: Yeah, I believe I will. Your kids, did they go for music, game developing, or anything else in their father’s footsteps?
Al: Of course not. They’re my kids.
Roar: Since you’re a saxophone player, I would guess that you can play a lot of other instruments as well?
Al: Well, I was a high school band director, so I had to learn to play every instrument somewhat. So, I can pick up a viola and play badly, and I can play a trombone or French horn, but my real instrument is the saxophone and also flute and clarinet.
Roar: So, what kind of music do you like?
Al: Big Band Jazz. But I play as much as I listen. I tend to watch films and read books, but I play music. I’m in two big bands, where I play lead alto sax. And they meet every week for a couple hours in the evening. And I’m in two saxophone quartets that meet a little less regularly, but we play classical saxophone music, and also some pop songs and things, but it’s just four saxophones, and so we get a lot of interesting work. That’s real fun.
Roar: I’ve been looking at this YouTube video, where you played in a band called The David Hasselhoff Big Band.
Al: Yes, the group is ironically named.
Roar: Metallica had been covered by a band of four cello players. Would it be possible to do something like that with saxophones?
Al: It would absolutely be possible, but the question is, why would you do that?
Roar: That is the better question. I guess being Norwegian, I don’t really feel like any music should be without some kind of growling.
Al Lowe and television
Roar: Do you watch any modern series on television?
Al: We watch a lot of Scandinavian noir shows. A lot of Danish and a couple of Norwegian shows. And we watch them in Norwegian with subtitles. We don’t want to use the English voiceover, because they are usually not very good.
Roar: No, I would guess not.
Al: It is easier and better just to listen to the Norwegian and not know what you’re saying, but be able to read the subtitles and get the gist. I can’t think of a title right now, but we’ve got a long list on Netflix.
Roar: Yeah. Today it’s very easy to consume whatever you want to consume. Even though you don’t necessarily own the stuff you watch.
Al: From very early on I didn’t want to own any movies or TV shows. We never bought anything. I always felt like I would rather just rent and see something new – see more stuff, instead of looking at the same thing over and over. And so, I didn’t build up a collection of VHS or DVDs. I was «streaming» when that was still analog. We got discs in the mail, you know. That was pretty advanced.
Roar: Yeah like Netflix, the original Netflix?
Al: Yeah.
Al Lowe and humor
Roar: What about humor? The modern humor scene versus the old humor scene. Some things that were acceptable to say back in the eighties are not any more, and so on, and we even rewrite old things to make them more «modern». Do you have any views about this issue, being an old humorist yourself?
Al: Well, I said and did things in the eighties’ games that I would never dream of doing now. Let’s put it that way. On the other hand, violence seems to be quite popular. I don’t understand it. We get scared of humor, but yet, you just can’t blow a person up any more than we do now. It is an odd situation isn’t it?
Roar: Yep. There has also been so much nudity in the last 10 years in all kinds of movies, and very explicit nudity.
Al: Yeah, which I enjoy. I have no problem with that.
Roar: Yeah, yeah, I won’t complain.
Al: Well, all in all, I guess my opinion is that things have gotten better. How long has it been since I wrote Larry 1? 35 years? No, 38 years. So in the 38 years since I wrote Larry 1, I think all of that stuff has gotten better, with the exception of violence. I’m not happy with that. I think we show too much, too often, and too strongly and too dramatically.
Roar: It’s very brutal now.
Al: But, you know, I think all these things are a pendulum, right? You know, it’s gonna swing over here, and then eventually it’s gonna swing back. Typical human behaviour.
Roar: Yes, that’s true.
Al: We’ll see what happens. Well, I won’t see what happens. You can see what happens.
Old Sierra games
Roar: Yes. Um, I guess I also have to talk to you about the old Sierra games. And these might not be the most original questions.
Al: Well, I only want original questions…..
Roar: You had, among other things, been working on the Dark Crystal Game: Gelfling Adventure.
Al: Yeah, I did.
Roar: And growing up when I did, I loved watching that old Dark Crystal movie. It was pretty scary when I was eight or nine, but man, what a wonderful movie.
Al: It was. Yeah, it sure was. And Roberta [Williams] was delighted when Jim Henson asked her to do a computer game based on Dark Crystal. And I was delighted, because after the artists had done all the backgrounds and things for Dark Crystal, Sierra asked me to spin off an educational version of it. We called it the Gelfling Adventure, and it wasn’t a big hit, but it was sure fun to work on.
Roar: I would guess if you could get it today, in a big box, it would be worth a fortune.
Al: I used to have a copy, but I think I sold it on eBay when I cleaned out my attic. I had an attic full of games, and finally I just put them on eBay and sold them off one at a time.
Roar: You did? Was it that collection Metal Jesus Rocks bought?
Al: Ah, no, that was not a game, that was stuff from Sierra. We should tell people what we’re referring to – there’s a YouTube channel called Metal Jesus Rocks. And he came over and did an interview one day at my house.
Roar: Yeah, I saw that, you showed him all your cool stuff. And that is gone now?
Al: He convinced me that I should put it up on eBay, and somebody would buy it. And I said, no, nobody would do that. Who would want such a silly thing?
And, it turned out that the current owner of Sierra, Activision [now owned my Microsoft] got mad and sent me a cease and desist letter: If you sell this, there might be something on those disks that we own. We don’t know what it is, you may not know what it is, and you may doubt that it’s there, but if there’s anything we’ll sue you. So I was like: oh, shit, what? Whatever I would get from selling it wouldn’t be nearly enough to pay a lawyer to defend me. So, I pulled it.
Al: So, it’s still up there, if you look. Let’s see if I can adjust the camera a little. *Shows boxes of stuff in the background* Right there, those black boxes.
Roar: Did you ever get to meet Jim Henson?
Al: I did not, no.
Roar: He was big back then.
Al: Yeah, my wife and I never missed an episode of The Muppet Show. It was one of the most creative and funny things. Just warm-hearted, good, kind spirited, and funny as hell. Just a great show. And the first movie was also great. Then the second Muppet movie was maybe a little less, and the third one was a little less, and so on.
Roar: I did like the movies too. More than I liked The Muppet Show, because I was too young to understand it.
Al: The Muppet Show had a lot humor that went over kids’ heads, you know?
Roar: And also, all those guests, I had no idea who they were.
Al: I knew every one of them.
Roar: That does help. But I have seen the episodes as an adult, and now I enjoy them, because now I know who these people are.
Al: Yeah, I highly recommended it. Still funny.
Leisure Suit Larry
Roar: That brings me to the first Leisure Suit Larry game. It had all these questions at the start that was usually based on American pop culture or politics.
In the end you just ended up writing down every question you could get. Then the answer you tried and whether it was correct or not.
Al: That’s how you did it? You know, all you had to do was press Alt-X.
Roar: Yes, we found that out after a while. But it was a very good way of learning English before that.
Al: And now you know who Spiro Agnew was.
Roar: Yeah, but that’s also because of the Futurama series. He was a recurring character there being Nixon’s vice president and helper. But knowing that was not normal as a 10-year-old kid in Norway in the late 80s.
| Who was not Vice-President of the United States in 1973-74? a. Gerald Ford b. Nelson Rockefeller c. Thomas Hayden d. Spiro Agnew |
Spiro Agnew is a. a form of social disease. b. a jazz-fusion rock band. c. a former Vice President. d. the first woman in Congress. |
The germ that transmits syphilis is a. Spiro Agnew. b. Spirochete. c. Spirograph. d. Barbarella. |
Who or what was Spiro Agnew? More of these on Als homepage.
Disney games
Roar: My first real computer was a Commodore 64. So my first love with your stuff, without even knowing it was you, was Donald Ducks Playground.
Al: Oh, yeah! I was very proud of that game. That won a bunch of educational awards over here, and was a successful product for Disney. Not as successful for Sierra and Al Lowe.
Roar: It was probably a cheap licence to get?
Al: They had no idea what any of the games or computers was about. They had a couple of women who worked for them, and did educational film strips, movie slideshows and, you know, educational workbooks and stuff like that they sold to schools. And so they told these two women: You take charge of this computer thing because it’s kind of like a movie projector or a slot film strips, and I think it’s got a screen, so you’re in charge.
Well, I quickly realised that I knew much more, and I knew Sierra knew much more than they did. A couple of the other products we did were Mickey’s Space Adventure and Goofy’s Word Factory (never released). Those guys consulted with them often about how to create their product. But I took the approach: I’m too busy to talk to you until I get it done, and when I get it done, I’ll show it to you. And they bought off on that for a while. They didn’t know what I was doing. Then finally I said: Okay, it’s done, take a look at it.
Well, then they had a big, long list of changes that we should make, because for them to be important, they had to put some mark on the product. They said; Well, I think that the leaf should be red instead of green, or I think his pants should be this instead of that, or this should be over in that corner.
I said: Well, you know, I could make all those changes, or we could ship the product and make some money. What do you want to do? And Ken Williams said: Well, ship it, you know, let’s get it out. And so, I pretty much did that entire product without any input from Disney. And it was the same with Donald Duck. They had changes they wanted to make, but they weren’t improvements. If they had come up with something better, then yeah, I would have done it. Because I wanted to make it better, but just to make this color a little different, or move that thing over one pixel, you know, that made no difference whatsoever. Anyway, that’s my Disney story.
Roar: It’s such a nice-looking game. And I learned about quarters and dollars and cents.
Al: I haven’t seen it in 40 years, probably.
Roar: In other games, like Winnie the Pooh or Mickey’s Space Adventure, you improved on the Zork formula. You added graphics. And you didn’t have to type in what you wanted to do, but instead clicked buttons with text.
Al: Did you ever play the Black Cauldron?
Roar: No, but I did look at a YouTube video, and I thought: Maybe this is a Sierra game where you cannot die. But ah, I was wrong.
Al: Oh, no, you can. I didn’t know it at the time, but I feel like I invented the point-and-click adventure. Because that whole game could be played with a mouse or a joystick. It could be played just by pointing and moving to where you wanted to go. And then using the function keys – I’m doing it the old-fashioned way, using the keys on the right side of the keyboard where God intended them to be instead of up here, where nobody can hit them. But anyway, I used the function keys instead of clicking icons and stuff. Roberta added the icons with King’s Quest V, I think.
Working for, but not being employed by Sierra
Roar: How was it working with the Williamses?
Al: Well, I have no complaints, they bought me a nice house, bought me some nice cars, let me retire at 52, so I will say I was pretty happy.
Roar: Yeah, because you stayed there your whole career. At least your whole gaming career?
Al: I resigned from my teaching gig and started working for Ken full-time. After six months, he hit hard times. There was one Friday the company started the morning with 120 employees. And in the afternoon it had been cut to 40 employees. So they fired two-thirds of the company that day, including me.
He then called me into the office and said: I want you to keep working. I don’t want you to quit and leave. I want you to work on this product. And, I’ll give you advances against future royalties instead of a salary. I said, whoa, how much are we talking here? What kind of advances? Well, I can do this much for that. I asked: What about this other game you wanted? Because I was going to work on that. Oh, yeah, yeah, we’ll add that on, too. So I can do that one, and we’ll give you so much for that one. And I said, okay, well, what about the translation to Atari and Commodore for, you know, Winnie the Pooh or something? Oh, yeah, you would do that too. So I added up all the advances he was talking about and it was double the salary he had been paying me.
Roar: Ah! Haha, nice.
Al: I figured I could get it done in a year so I said: Okay, that sounds good. Have I just been fired? Yep. Great, thanks! And I shook his hand, and for the next 15 and a half years I was an outside contractor who only worked on a contract basis. I got royalties instead of salary, and ended up having a great relationship with Sierra until Ken left the company. And when Ken got bought out by this … well, I don’t know how much depth you want to go into that, but there was a really ugly end for Sierra, where they were bought out in a hostile takeover by one of their board members, who were then convicted and sent to prison for fifteen years for fraud. So it was an ugly end.
Roar: Oh.
Al: When Ken left, the writing was on the wall. It was pretty obvious that they didn’t have anybody who could replace him, and there was nobody to replace Roberta. Sierra’s new method of product development was: Listen to a pitch, fund that pitch, let them do a lot of work on it, and then look at the product when it’s half done and not fun with nothing to see. Then they’d get cold feet and say: Oh, gosh, I don’t know if we should spend the rest of the money. Then cancel it.
They just went through this endless churn of, you know, we’ll start a new product, oh no, oh, uh, no, we’ll cancel that. Now let’s do another one. Oh, yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Oh, wait, it doesn’t look very good… Well, it’s not done, dumbass. So the company quickly went into this….. Did you ever see the old World War II movies when they would shoot a plane and it would spiral out?
Roar: Oh yeah!
Al: Yeah, that’s what Sierra felt like for about a year there. You could just see all the good people jumping ship and going to better companies. And all the bad people were staying around and making products that were even worse. And so, maybe two years after Ken left the company, they decided to move what little work was left to Los Angeles and merge with Blizzard. Then they turned off the lights and sent all the employees home. They locked the doors, and that was the end of it.
Including the end of all the historic materials that we used to create the games, which were carefully… well, I shouldn’t say that. That’s a lie. They were uncarefully stored. They were thrown in a box, put in a cabinet, and then when they needed cabinet space, they rented a storage unit and threw them in there. Then at the end somebody said: Why are we paying money for a storage unit for all this old crap? Then they burned it all.
Roar: Oh, they burned it?!
Al: Oh, yeah, it was just the dumbest thing. That was the end of the company. I had a few cells of animation that survived, but there’s very little of that stuff left anywhere.
Roar: But at least you did have a copy of the source code for your games?
Al: Yeah, for the early games I made. Once you got to Larry 6, the games were too big and you couldn’t back them up anymore. I think it was like 5 or 6 CDs, and at some point along there I just gave up. I have the source material for Larry 7, but I have no way to compile it.
Roar: If you put it online, someone will create a compiler, I’m pretty sure of it. People are nuts.
Al: It’s too bad they didn’t let me sell the source code, because one of the things I loved doing was writing comments in the code. And more often than not, the comments were funnier than the game. It was a shame to let that all go to waste.
Roar: When you say the later games, you talk about games like Torin’s Passage and Freddy Pharkas, yeah?
Al: Yeah, I have the source material for that somewhere.
Roar: There are some projects that emulate these old games. ScummVM, I think, now supports a lot of non-Scumm games as well. So it might be that someone is thinking about Freddy Pharkas and Torin’s Passage for that engine [this is actually true for both these titles].
Al: Yeah, maybe. I’m not.
Roar: It’s not impossible and I guess that’s also a point with these old games. They are fun to play, but usually because you did play them as a kid. If I gave Leisure Suit Larry to my kids today, I’m not sure if they would like them.
Al: Well, they would have to think. Sierra games were about thinking, they weren’t about shooting or killing, or building things. They were about figuring out things in your brain, and that’s something that we seem to be losing as a species.
Roar: That’s true. It’s also very popular to look at other people playing games today, on Twitch and Youtube.
Al: That I don’t understand at all. And I think part of it is because the games that people watch don’t require thinking, or the same kind of puzzle solving. They’re certainly thinking in shooter games, but it’s not the same, you know? You don’t sit and ponder something. You don’t wait around, figure out what to do. Can I do this? How would I do that?
Roar: Yeah. Did you ever play that Softporn Adventure game without any hints?
Al: Uh, only with the source code.
Roar: Because I think you have a sound argument that people don’t like to think today, but there are a lot strange solutions that are not that obvious in the old games.
Sierra and stairs:
Roar: Why did all the old Sierra games always have these difficult stairs everywhere?
Al: I can’t tell you other than you had to get to a different level. I actually spoofed that in, uh, Larry 2, I think? We had a cliff face and you had to walk this narrow path alongside a cliff. If you slipped, you went over the side, but you grabbed with this long arm that extended out and then brought you back up like a rubber band, so you couldn’t die on those stairs or on that cliff. That was my joke on those stairs.
But you’re right, it was a definite feature of Sierra games. Also, the deaths were because we often didn’t know what people would try. And when they would try something, we had no code in there to handle that. What were we gonna do? You couldn’t ignore it. I think somewhere, Larry 3, maybe, I added the feature that said: When you die you can go back to a game you saved, or you can just go back to life. And that seemed much more friendly.
Roar: Yeah? And you also had these very funny comments about you dying when you died.
Al: Oh, sure. Yeah, it was always fun for me to make fun of the player. And there was something else that I want to bring to you that I don’t know that people have noticed. My games always referred to Larry as you. So when I talk to the player, I would say: You did this, you fell off a cliff, that was a dumb thing you did. Whereas a lot of other games referred to the main character in the third person. It was: Larry has fallen off, you know? But I always felt it like it was more meaningful to me as a player if the game referred to me as a person.
Roar: I agree. And you can only blame yourself for trying to pet that cat or something.
Al: Yep. Yep.
Roar: Someone created a game: Stair Quest. It’s a game where you move like you do in the old Sierra games, and there are these very thin diagonal stairs that you have to traverse, and you fall off all the time and die.
Al: Well, the trick with the stairs usually was to use the keys on the numeric keyboard. You’d have to use all of the keypad, including the diagonals. But I guess people didn’t always have keypads. So when the layout changed it made it pretty difficult to move.
Roar: Hmm, that’s a very good point. And with that I will let you get on with the day. It was wonderful meeting you, Al Lowe.
Al: Nice to meet you.
We’d like to thank Al Lowe for talking with us!