Leisure Suit Larry Publisher In Upheaval After Strange Sex Incident

Now, it’s coming to light that one of the men who asked Larry fans for money has been exercising some strange behavior that many who helped fund the project might find troubling. That behavior appears, in part, to be the reason Larry’s creator is no longer involved with the series’ revival.

Leisure Suit Larry‘s re-emergence owes itself largely to three men—Al Lowe, creator of the original 1987 classic PC game, stand-up comic Josh Mandel and Replay Games CEO Paul Trowe, whose company published Reloaded. Lowe essentially came back from retirement to lend his efforts to Reloaded, while Trowe’s bio says he’s been in the multimedia business for 25 years.

Kotaku has learned that, earlier this year, Trowe pled guilty to the offense of displaying harmful material to a minor. The offense is a class-A misdemeanor in the state of Texas, where both Replay and Trowe are based. As a result of the plea bargain, Trowe received two years’ probation and agreed to attend sex offender counseling.

THE VIDEO INCIDENT

In the course of reporting this story, we’ve heard two very different versions of the 2012 incident that led to Trowe’s guilty plea. The two versions share some common traits. In both, there’s Trowe involved, at some point, in a sexual relationship with a young man. The young man’s age is in dispute, either an older teenager or a guy in his mid 20s. The young man’s identity has not been revealed, and a lack of charges tied to his age appear to clear Trowe of any issues related to a possible sexual encounter with a minor. Both accounts—those of witness statements given to the police and Trowe’s account given to Kotaku—do agree that a girl with whom the young man was also in a relationship with was a minor. Trowe had a video of two men—the young man and an older man—having sex, and he showed that video to the girl.

Why that chain of events happens is where the two accounts widely diverge.

According to a search warrant affidavit dated August 7, 2012, the girlfriend of the younger man told police that Trowe called her on her cell phone last April. The account winds its way through details of a supposed parking lot meeting between Trowe, the girl and her mother, the purpose of which was supposedly for Trowe to tell the girlfriend that her boyfriend was cheating on her and that he had proof of it, in the form of a video involving the boy having sex with another person.

Ultimately, according to the girlfriend’s statement, Trowe sent her the video of the boy “performing oral sex on an unknown man.” Police investigating the matter viewed the video that Trowe sent to the young girl and showed a still image pulled from it to the young man. According to the search warrant affidavit, the young man identified his own face in the image.

Ultimately, who was sleeping with who wasn’t the issue. The problem was that Trowe had sent a minor a video of people having sex. Trowe, however, told Kotaku that things didn’t quite happen the way described above and he defended much of this as a private matter. “I’m gay. I’m out. I’ve been married to my husband for 15 years. In 2012, we had a threesome with a guy. He was 24 years old,” Trowe said. “A day later I started getting text messages and phone calls from an unknown number saying, ‘Who are you? Who is this? Why are you texting my boyfriend?’ Blah-blah-blah. I was like, ‘Who are you?'”

Trowe: “Had I known she was 16, I would have never sent her the video.”

According to Trowe, he told the girl that the young man had sent him a video and that he was trying to warn the girl that her boyfriend was unfaithful. He says this angered her and maintains that he sent the video at her request.

Trowe says that the plea agreement came about because he wanted to avoid the messy public spectacle of a trial, in part to protect Al Lowe and the Leisure Suit Larry franchise. Trowe also says that he told other members of the Replay Games team about the incident months ago, after he signed the plea agreement.

“I feel like it’s a big, big witch-hunt honestly,” Trowe explained. “I don’t know why somebody is trying to put this out there about me, but they are.” Still, Trowe’s allegation doesn’t wash away the stench of the case’s indisputable core fact: he showed a sex video to a stranger—who happened to be an underage teenage girl.

LOWE’S AWKWARD EXIT

As reporting progressed on this story, Al Lowe’s photo and biography disappeared from the Replay Games website. When contacted for comment last week over e-mail, Lowe replied to say that he resigned from all active roles in Replay Games on December 3.

Lowe: “As far as I know, Replay Games still has the rights to do Leisure Suit Larry games, but they’ll have to do them without me.”

“There were many reasons for my departure, including that [2012] incident,” Lowe told us, in response to a question about why he was leaving Replay. “As far as I know, Replay Games still has the rights (from Codemasters, owners of the I.P.) to do Leisure Suit Larry games, but they’ll have to do them without me.”