Leisure Suit Larry series continues with free-to-play poker game later this year

Long-running comedy series Leisure Suit Larry is getting a spin-off poker game for iOS later this year, the game's creator Al Lowe told Polygon.

Leisure Suit Larry's Casino will be a free-to-play title available only for mobile devices, said Lowe. The game is based off of the 1998 game of the same name, originally released on Windows PC.

Lowe recently released the Kickstarter-funded reboot Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded to Windows PC and mobile devices last month; however, he says despite its success on the crowdfunding site, the realities of the modern market are not in favor of the game.

"Nobody knows there's a game out," he said. An over-saturated industry is partly to blame, he said, but Lowe also referenced a lack of funds for marketing following the game's release.

According to Low, the team miscalculated the development costs for the game when it first went to Kickstarter for funding. Despite reaching its funding goal of $500,000, studio Replay Games ended up spending of over $1 million in development costs. Lowe initially went to Kickstarter following a suggestion from Tim Schafer, who he met with the morning after the Broken Age Kickstarter went live.

"Nobody knows there's a game out"

The games industry is a different place from when Leisure Suit Larry first released, said Lowe. "In the '80s you couldn't produce enough games. You'd sell as many games as you could make. Now there's a flood of games but not exactly a flood of creativity," he said.

Similarly, modern comedy sensibilities are different to those from decades ago. "It was a balancing act. People who paid for the game expect more of the same. But then you also have these modern players," he said.

Despite the difference in eras, Reloaded is a labor of love. Its original IP owners "threw away" all of the original code used in the design of the adventure game, forcing Lowe to ask a friend to search his house for the floppy disks used to store the game's original audio. Reloaded is a "complete reboot" in this sense, says Lowe.

Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded launched for Windows PC and Mac in June, with versions on iOS and Android released last month. Casino will release sometime next year.