According to studio director Martyn Brown, developer Team 17 should be evaluated based on its latest release — a downloadable Worms title — instead of Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust. A novel idea considering how dreadful Team 17’s continuation of the classic adventure series was.
“I’ll be open as anything. Larry didn’t turn out great,” Brown told VideoGamer. “There are reasons why it didn’t turn out great. I’m not going to rattle on about excuses. It’s one of those things. You’re only as good as your last game. Hopefully the new Worms on LIVE Arcade, other than a couple of bugs that went unnoticed on, not our testing unit but a testing unit, which we’re fixing — I think the Metacritic on that is 84, 85 per cent.”
Brown doesn’t believe that Team 17 has lost any fans because of Box Office Bust and hopes that Alien Breed, a self-published downloadable title, will show that the studio has talent and the ability to make good games.
“Certainly with Alien Breed, if anybody’s got any grumbles about what we can and can’t do, they’ll see the amount of effort and care put into a product where we’re unbridled by any nonsense we had to deal with in the Larry project.”
“Yeah, hands up, it wasn’t great. At the end of the day people don’t have to buy anything. They go on reviews, they go on demos and everything else. If people make that decision that’s unfortunate. It’s not something we’re worried about.”
The bigger question here, left unaddressed and unasked, is why Leisure Suit Larry still exists. There are a ton of worthy and more compelling adventure series — King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, Space Quest to name a few — left untouched. Let’s roll the dice with one of these, eh Activision? Nothing can be as bad as Box Office Bust. Nothing.
