Those Were the Days is a new weekly article in which Gamervision employees share video game-related memories. If you’ve got a story of your own to share, please do so! We love hearing from the community.

I don’t remember the exact year, but it was the mid nineties, likely 1996. In a box, under my bed, I had the original Leisure Suit Larry. I didn’t keep it under my bed for some pornographic fear of being caught, simply because it was in a big box because, as you might remember, old games came on like, a dozen floppy disks. Every so often my friend and I would install the game and play, but there was a barrier between us and playing.

I might be tapping into something no one remembers, but Leisure Suit Larry had an age gate. The way that the developers decided to keep children from playing the game was to ask questions that 18 year olds at the time would know. This was before the years of auto-updating over the Internet, so the questions were time appropriate for the year the game was released. The problem was that the game was released in 1987 and it was nearly ten years old, so my friends and I were always completely perplexed on who the president was twenty years earlier, or what type of car was faster between the ones on the list, since no one drove them anymore. After doing research now, there were apparently ways of skipping it, but we were kids who shouldn’t have been playing the game in the first place, and the questions would take us nearly an hour to get past.

Once we started playing the gameplay wasn’t any easier. We didn’t have the book that came with the game and it was a text-based adventure, where you needed to enter what you wanted to do by typing it. We didn’t know the names of the different places you could tell the taxi to go! We didn't know the command to buy a condom! We were like, twelve, we didn't know how to do those things in real life!

I don’t think we ever did more than get hit by passing cars and turn on porn to distract the guard at the brothel, but the memories are vivid. Just like every other person to play the original few games, Leisure Suit Larry holds a place in my heart despite the utter ravaging the series has had as of recent, with mediocrity being pushed out like it was Larry Laffer’s job. Either way, I’ll never forget those days of trying to figure out how to answer the question “How is your sex life?”

By the way, the correct answer was “none of your business,” in case you’re wondering.

Related Articles:

Those Were the Days: Conquering Terminator 2: Judgement Day 

Those Were the Days: A Street Fighter Virgin's Victory

Those Were the Days: The PlayStation Era Arrives