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VOX POPULI

ALBERT HIGH

Feature - Mike Czech

We've got an exclusive interview with Harmless Little Pervert 5: Beach Bimbos Bouncing's creator and mostly-beneficent dictator, Albert High!

What would you say is the secret to HLP's success? Is it Luke Lothario's timeless charm?

Albert High: I'm not sure if Luke Lothario's charm really is timeless. I think that Luke's brand of comedy has got maybe another decade on it before everybody realizes he shouldn't be allowed around women. There's a lot of stuff in Harmless Little Pervert 3: Revenge Against The Cheerleaders that I'm hoping nobody thinks about too carefully.

A lot of the hallmarks of Luke Lothario's style are tied directly to our understanding of his character. Luke's bowling shirt, high pants, and leather boots are iconic! Would Luke be the same character in a hooded sweatshirt with backwards cap and baggy pants hanging low around his waist?

Ha ha, I don't think so. How has CD-ROM affected the design of Harmless Little Pervert 5?

Not as much as we'd have hoped! In order to be able to fit the games on both floppy disks and CD-ROM, we had to make all of the extra multi-media content optional - but for our fans willing to go the extra distance, Beach Bimbos Bouncing's CD-ROM is fully voice-acted.

I pushed for us to include the entirety of Debbie Does Dallas in the empty free space on the CD, but legal wouldn't allow it. Instead, we've done our best to include fun extra behind-the-scenes content - like scans of my original storyboards for the series, and dozens of candid photographs of Mark¹ that I took without his permission.

Dallas will just have to wait.

With Big Rock Games pushing to go fully on-line, is there a chance Luke Lothario will come to the information superhighway?

I'm not convinced that adventure puzzle games like this can work multiplayer. Wouldn't it be disappointing to watch someone else solve the puzzle before you get to?

Plus, given Luke's fan base, I think that you're most likely to be playing Harmless Little Pervert with a lot of other men, and I don't think my fans are that excited to have a man-age et trois.

Suffice it to say that on the information superhighway, Luke Lothario is driving an AMC Gremlin.

Evangelical Family is calling for a boycott of your game - would you like to comment on that?

Who sent them a copy?

There's a lot in Harmless Little Pervert that's not intended for children - that's why you have to answer all of the quiz questions about Walter Mondale at the beginning of the game, and why software sellers don't keep it next to Sesame Seed Junction in the kid's section.

I wasn't sure what exactly had managed to get Evangelical Family so riled up about my games until Mark² called me in to his office and asked if we could cut Flaming Frank and the fashion runway scene from the final cut of HLP 5 to avoid "controversy".

I told him, pardon my French, "non, mais putain!"³

Is the humor in Harmless Little Pervert maybe misunderstood by its critics?

Not at all. What's to misunderstand? People either like Beach Bimbos Bouncing or they don't.

Some have called HLP "leering", and that it "objectifies women". How do you feel about that?

I've never been one to bow to the modern ideas of "political correctness", but in this case they're absolutely right. In fact, if you check the game box, "misogynistic", "leering", and "objectifies women" are all listed as first class features, right under the bullet point that says "VGA graphics".

This is the point of Harmless Little Pervert - a modern comedy about a schmuck like Luke is necessarily going to have to involve a certain amount of leering, and the game is very careful to present Luke as a loser and a horny idiot. The "ladies man" always needs to be the butt of the joke for this kind of humor to land - if he were successful, he'd go from "harmless" to "a threat", and that game is much less fun.

But - and this is key - by presenting the leering perversion of Luke as ridiculous, we write ourselves a blank cheque to enjoy it anyway, while still feeling morally superior to Luke.

We're not enjoying the beach bimbos bouncing - Luke is, and we're laughing at him. Which lets us have beach bimbos in our game. We can have our bikini cake and eat it, too. Which is, ironically, part of the solution to the bikini cake puzzle in Chapter 2.

Some fans still talk about the laundromat scene in HLP 3 - the spiked drink, the impromptu wet t-shirt contest, and of course - Luke Lothario swapping all of Vicky Vixxen's clothing for smaller versions of the same clothing. Is Beach Bimbos Bouncing doubling down on that kind of wacky humor?

Absolutely. It wouldn't be a Harmless Little Pervert game without that trademark Albert High touch.

The joke there, though, isn't just Luke swapping the drink - it's that he ended up drinking the drink that he spiked and spending the night with that cross-dresser. It's not just the wet-t-shirt - it's that Luke ended up ruining his own clothes. It's not just that he swapped the clothes: it's that he also ended up having to wear Vicky Vixxen's tiny clothes. Luke is always the progenitor of his own misfortunes - getting to see Vicky Vixxen in tiny clothes is just a nice bonus for the audience.

You'll have to order Harmless Little Pervert 5: Beach Bimbos Bouncing to find out what happens in the next game, but let's just say - there's two big reasons to send your cheques in now.

What's next for Luke Lothario?

Albert High: I've been filling my sketchbook with plans for something I've been calling "The Lube Dome", it's kind of a leather-heavy scantily clad parody of the Mad Max series.

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COUNTERPOINT

New to the CyberGAMER formula? We have our editorial staff comment on every article to let you know where they stand!

Brett Doug: The HLP games are like if the Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds had a hilarious baby, but if you keep getting stuck on the puzzles, remember that Big Rock Games' tip line operates 24/7! They kept me barking through a few tough spots, Dougg pack!. Awoooo!

William Henderson III: The mechanics of Big Rock's adventure games have barely budged an inch since they first released "King's Crown" in 1981 - and my low opinion of the game's abstruse puzzles and moon logic remains largely unchanged by their most recent effort. While Albert might think it's a charming joke that he skipped over Harmless Little Pervert 4 so that he wouldn't have to figure out how to get Luke Lothario out of prison, it also constitutes a pretty glaring plot hole in the series.

Trent Contrall: The oft-discussed implications of the art style are a brilliant and radical example of the patriarchy overturning our perception of reality itself. Luke and the series' other male characters are represented as broad cartoons, farcical masculine forces, and stereotypical homunculi, whereas the series' myriad females are represented without the comforting abstraction of caricature - instead forced to exist as cold, hard collections of pixels, which objectifies and distances them.

Riesling Brandt: I was really excited to see what Big Rock Games would do with the incredibly expressive new multimedia capabilities available to anybody with access to a CD-ROM drive. I'm honestly a little disappointed at how boring and practical Harmless Little Pervert 5 ended up being. Progressive enhancement of a floppy disk game? Hardly world-changing.

Polly Mereyes: While these games offer a broad range of representation to a cast of characters rarely seen in adventure games, the jokes too-often lead on low-hanging-fruit humor featuring broad stereotypes and "dumb blonde" jokes. I think that...⁴

Haymann Nieschott: Unfortunately, I haven't played the HLP series, but CyberGAMER Canada is proud to present an interview with such an influential creator.