10 Controversial Video Games That Are Insanely Tame Today
8. Leisure Suit Larry: Land Of The Lounge Lizards (1987)
Western culture is often criticized for normalizing hyper-violence in media while lambasting anything remotely sexual: red spatter and gray matter have been blockbuster staples for years, but anything below-the-belt is still pretty much a no-go in most circumstances.
The utterly crude, half-human facsimiles computers could be made to render in the mid 1980s hardly allowed for anything even remotely raunchy, but Sierra challenged these limitations with the 1987 release of Leisure Suit Larry: Land of the Lounge Lizards. Though the game's NPCs were made almost unrecognizable thanks to the primitive VGA cards of the time, they can at least be credited for their efforts.
The subject of inevitable controversy, the Leisure Suit Larry series can, in some strange way, be thought of as a sleazy pioneer, a perverse trendsetter. Today, however, these early titles are downright hideous and borderline hard to look at, and Larry and his exploits are just as irrelevant as the rest of his 1980s home-computing ilk.