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> I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess.

I'm from a non-English-speaking country. We didn't understand the questions at all, but all us kids in the neighborhood got into the game just fine with some brute forcing.

Also, coming up with the expected commands in the game was way beyond our skills so we'd only advance to a point where someone had seen and memorized others play. Didn't matter, as it was one of the only games in the system so we'd play it anyway. I still remember how hard it was to type "ken sent me" in the allotted time window.

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Nowhere does the us "center of the universe" mindset shine more through, then when to expect the world to remember the presidential dogs name.
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That wasn’t the era of global releases via the internet. You had to either buy it in person or, order by mail or get a copy from a BBS. It was an American game made for Americans.
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Well, the main hurdle was that we were 7-9 years old iirc and didn't know any English at all, beyond the memorized "knock knock" etc. So the topic of the questions wasn't on the table :-)
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I love this story. I remember seeing two pre-literate kindergarten kids playing on a gameboy or similar handheld, one of them teaching the other strings of button presses for things like “save game” - just navigating through all the menus by memory.
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I played through the entire Pokemon Yellow without understanding a lick of english. You just remembered what the commands did, and you learnt by experimenting.
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Even as an English speaker the Pokémon all sounded gibberish to me so it wouldn't have been much help
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I think everybody does this to some extent.

Like, I remember someone telling me at one point that the thing in Head over Heels was a Dalek with prince Charles head. I didn't know either of those.

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I don't think that the larry games where to be released to the whole world.
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Life is sweet, when you life in the cultural nexus that is a English speaking country and do not have to pay the translation tax.
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Same same!

My brother and I had a notepad with all the questions and possible answers, and we'd run the game several times until we got through, then make a note of the answers. Eventually we had all of them.

"Ken sent me" is buried in my brain for that same reason. :)

Thanks for bringing back the memories!

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> Ken sent me

I also remember the joke that was written on the same wall 'it takes leather balls to play rugby'.

I didn't get the joke till much later, but somehow it stuck with me.

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I learned to read very early because I really wanted to be able to start the games on the family computer (instead of having to ask an adult to do it for me).

And only then I realised that it was all in English :-).

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There is one thing I do not remember, and that is if Leisure Suit Larry was advertised toward children and how much of Leisure Suit Larry revenue sales came from 0–12 years old, adolescent of 13–17 years old, and then adult customers.

It could be that that Leisure Suit Larry age verification was actually fairly good, if one put it in relation towards how much of their customer base and revenue came from selling the game to young children.

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It’s hilarious when adults forget how smart a motivated group of children with an ocean of free time can be.
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Solution: make sure the kids don't have any free time. Let's schedule their days for optimum productivity instead.
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There were so many of these wink-wink things I wouldn't know about if not for trying to brute force LSL.
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Of course rules are circumvented. Maybe even frequently. But that doesn't mean on the margin none of this stuff has an impact and is not worth the effort.

It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.

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