Exactly what popped into my head first. Which then suggests an "Archer" phrasing moment ... after which interlude, vague seedy memories of other sorts ... arise.*
First, I absolutely loved the "age check" at the beginning. It was an absolute ROAST of the concept. Questions likely MOST answerable by people still in "secondary schools". By nerdier ... members of that set, in fact. And yet, exactly the veneer that, say, a "Niedermeyer" might 'take at face value', so-to-speak. Lampooning the (effectively 'Confucianist', whether Asian or not) 'adults' that way was such a highlight.
Second - ha, I can barely remember much in the way of details, such as they were, from the actual games! If anything, I remember that there were some enjoyable puzzles, including in the realm of dialogue and 'moves' towards goals and sub-goals. Those games were really like the ice-cream sundaes all games were at the time, with a ... slightly different 'cherry on top' than the type found in other games.
(I still preferred King's Quest, Space Quest, 7th Guest ... Under A Killing Moon ... so many games more or less similar in fundamentals, but, different fleshy drupes on top. And that, is the kind of apparently warped thinking [as judged against the majority, it seems] that leads to browsing this site right now.)
*And yet, somehow, I seem to have been misled by Mr Brooks as to what sorts of tests would be involved when it came to 'UNIX'*
I played Larry as a Dutch kid with only a bit of English, and the questions seemed utterly impossible. I needed to brute force them and write down the answers I tried for each.
I learned a lot of things in that game, but not what the mysterious terms "leisure suit" or "lounge lizard" meant...
A leisure suit is just a suit that's only used for discos/night clubbing, they were often white with big lapels - a style that only miami vice agents could really pull off as 'work' attire.
A lounge lizard was someone that frequented the type of pick-up orientated disco/lounge/night clubs that were the rage at the time.
'lounge' as a type of bar with easy listening or jazz 'soft music' in the background often used as pick-up grounds seem to have been mostly an american thing, although I wouldn't be surprised if they were common in Germany too for some reason.
edit: I suppose 'wine bars' are the modernish (european) equivalent to american 'lounge' bars, but I have no idea if they were similar in their 80s incantation since I never had any interest in wine bars at that time.
I knew a reasonable amount of English when I came across it, but yeah, there was still an element of brute-forcing involved, which was also a part of how ludicrous it was, which fit in with the game, I guess:
Of course kids our age wanting access to a game like that would have no issue brute forcing the limited number of questions - we were used to waiting often many minutes for games to load, or spending hours typing game listings in from magazines - repeatedly retrying an "age" protection like that was no harder or more annoying than any number of the other things we endured in the quest for access to games.
In comparison the age check of Leisure Suit Larry was part of the fun - increasing the feeling we were about to get access to something forbidden.
I remember my uncle showing a PC game during this era. Larry was one he showed. Another was a game more set in a fantasy world. In it, there was a wizard or something that asked the player a riddle. My relative had to look at some printout, as I understood a cheat he had got from someone where he worked.
The answer was just gibberish random letters. I never understood how an honest player could have guessed that answer.
Does this ring a bell? This was in the 80s and I was probably 11 or something. Not all details are clear.
This sounds like King's Quest 1, where you have to enter Rumplestiltskin's name as "Ifnkovhgroghprm", a reverse alphabet cipher. The game hints: "Backwards is the key!" Mercifully this wasn't required to complete the game!
No idea what game you might be talking about. But the process would seem to be some sort of copy protection (sheet of codes) which was quite common back then.
Not really my style to respond / talk to myself on the internet. I mostly selfishly keep that ... perk ... of my 'carnival hall of mirrors'-esque mind to myself (unless I'm muttering more audibly to keep 'the crazies' away at the bus stop ... you know, the real ones, not like me ...).
But...
Realized I need to temper what I wrote about the 'roast' aspect of the "age check". Specifically, I think there IS a (deeper) wisdom to the setup, and a more nuanced satire of "age restrictions". What I will offer here is more the conclusion I drew years ago - drowned out temporarily by not having thought about the game in years and by the strength of the relived 'glee' at the seeming "hurling of the hammer into the 'Big Brother'" face* that I quickly realized the system could be taken to represent.
While labeled something like "age check" - the simple-minded approach, the question-based system IS more what you'd ~rationally want: a maturity check (perhaps not quite the best word, but, will do for now). I.e., what's the point in restricting access to the content in that game if someone is already at a point where they know and/or can dig up the kinds of information queried for in those questions?
I always love the example of Benjamin Franklin, the dude became an apprentice printer at 12, began writing letters that were published under a pseudonym in the guise of a middle-aged widow around the age of 15 or 16, began influencing the politics of the era in significant ways around that same age, fled his apprenticeship and lived as a fugitive for a bit when 17 ... founded a successful newspaper at 23, etc. The world was different, and some of that was more the usual than it would be today. But, at the same time, Franklin himself WAS unusual - particularly 'fast', intelligent, clever ... and, that is the point. People both on average AND as individuals do not conform to such 'simple boxes'.
Age is a practical, reasonable, and simple system - in some sense, exactly the right system. About the only reasonable system (as a parameter for sale / no sale, basically). And yet, it's also obviously rubbish. The 'question system' IS almost certainly better - more reasonable / accurate in certain ways (aside from the additional limitation / potential jest in multiple choice ... so someone who is 5 is getting in at least some of the time, which also doesn't seem unreasonable to some degree) - and also great parody of perhaps the entire concept and us more generally (e.g., the literally MOST COUNTERPRODUCTIVE thing you can do - try to hide information about a BASIC BIOLOGICAL DRIVE that has an extremely serious side).
* If unfamiliar, look up Apple 1984 commercial or similar (terms)
I remember trying to play the game as a kid and being too young to understand the answers to any of the questions. I'd just relaunch the game and try again until I got the questions correct through random guessing.
This was the game that taught me the name "Spiro Agnew" (being one of the choices to the question "Who was not Vice-President of the United States in 1973-74?")
Yes. He was replaced by Nixon in '73 because of a number of scandals involved investigations into a range of crimes, and eventually pleading no contest to one of them.
Just to be clear, the establishment had to get rid of Agnew before getting rid of Nixon, so they dug up an old scandal to do so. They then installed one of their own, Ford. It's possible that Agnew never would have gotten the VP job in the first place had he not been fully compromised. (You see this mechanism time and again with politicians like Dennis Hastert and Joe Biden.)
Agnew, an unreliable source perhaps, claimed to have been threatened.
Who was the inventive genius behind the Apple computer?
a. Bill Gates
b. Steve Wozniak
c. Ken Williams
d. Steve Russell