“All the 50 or so characters had to be modelled, high-poly sculpted and textured, all inside a single year, which was a very tall order! For me, the upside was the daily joy of sculpting so many interesting characters: Larry himself, in several different costumes cowboy villains roadkill zombies with tyre tracks through their stomachs and of course, pin-up style heroines. Rory Little, back in the UK and returning to Team17 after living in Japan and working on Shadow of the Colossus, found himself on the art team for Leisure Suit Larry. Though I can’t take credit for that, as the line was inspired by an episode of Red Dwarf!”
“Nearly everything we wrote was discarded, but I do remember the writer commenting that something I had written in the wild west section had made him laugh, so it stayed in. “We had to write placeholder dialogue for the game while we waited for the official scriptwriter to punch up the script,” recalls producer Mark Baldwin. A cast of famous actors, including Jeffrey Tambor, Shannon Elizabeth, Patrick Warburton, Carmen Electra and even the late, great Peter Graves all leant their voice to the game, while comedian and frequent Adam Sandler collaborator Allen Covert was brought in to write the script.
#WORMS 2 ARMAGEDDON IOS REVIEW MOVIE#
With its Hollywood setting and movie parody stages influenced by the likes of Thriller, Titanic and various westerns, Box Office Bust justified a cinematic approach to its story. “The coders, as ever, attempted to keep us a little more grounded! We had a lot of publisher freedom to sketch out story direction, which was then fleshed out and splattered with obligatory Larry-style dodgy puns by a Hollywood scriptwriter.” “It was Team17’s first title developed using the Unreal Engine so to the designers and maybe the artists it felt a bit like the sky was the limit,” says designer Mark Dimond.
#WORMS 2 ARMAGEDDON IOS REVIEW FULL#
Based on a series that had been around since 1987 – three years before Team17 was founded – featuring open-world gameplay, a huge script with full voice-acting and our first Unreal Engine development, it was quite the task! And that’s before you even factor in a change of publisher mid-way through production! “To be honest, I think we bit off a little more than we could chew,” says programmer Charles Blessing. “There are so many different gameplay elements in Box Office Bust that we didn’t really get a chance to do them all justice.” In 2009, Larry was also our most ambitious game to date. Much like Army Men: Major Malfunction before it, Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is a Team17 production you probably don’t hear that much about these days but was important in keeping a growing studio busy during the time before digital distribution and self-publishing paved the way to independence. Year: 2009 | Developer: Team17 | Publisher: Funsta | Format: PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Missed a previous chapter? Head back to 2007-2008 or start at the beginning in 1991! In this chapter, we jet back to 2009, the year in which we got to grips with Unreal Engine, revived a series Team17 fans had missed for years and revived another they hadn’t! Welcome to the latest chapter in our history of Team17’s first 100 games, celebrating the release of game number one hundred, PLANET ALPHA.