Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies

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The fourth installment of the Leisure Suit Larry series was never made for various reasons, but it is jokingly referred to by both Sierra and fans under the subtitle of The Missing Floppies (or The Case of the Missing Floppies). Much gossip and rumor have spread to explain this: most believed that the original production floppies of the game were lost (some rumors jokingly claimed that Lowe's dog ate them) and the team would not remake it from scratch. Al Lowe later confirmed that Larry 4 was to be part of the ill-fated The Sierra Network project.

Note that the Laffer Utilities and the Leisure Suit Larry 1 VGA remake are each sometimes unofficially credited as Larry 4, as the first was the fourth ever Larry production, and the latter, the fourth game to be made. Of course, similar VGA remakes of Space Quest I, Police Quest I, and Quest for Glory I were not given new numerical titles.

The actual reasons are mainly two and have been given by Al Lowe at separate points:

Sierra had tried to create an online gaming world, The Sierra Network, a precursor of today's MMORPGs based on Larry, which would be the real Larry 4. This failed due largely to technical reasons, and a planned multiplayer Larry game on the network was shelved.
The ending of Larry 3 was very definite and extreme (showing Larry and Patti coming to the Sierra studios and making games based on their adventures, living happily in a mountain cabin in Coarsegold). This completed a relatively cohesive trilogy with no sequel planned and Al Lowe was in a dead end because he couldn't find a way to start it since the scenario had completed a story arc.

[edit] Leisure Suit Larry 5

Al Lowe eventually decided to skip the fourth part altogether and intentionally introduce some plot gaps. This allowed him to begin freely a whole new adventure with Larry 5. The absence of the floppy disks was a plot element in the sequel since this is the explanation why Larry, as a computer generated character, came to suffer from amnesia!

According to production notes (given by Lowe himself) the following events must be assumed to have happened between Larry 3 and Larry 5 in order to logically connect the two games:

Larry and Patti plan to marry
Patti leaves him at a Yosemite church to pursue her career, but Larry is gone when she returns
The villain of Larry 5, Julius Biggs, steals the game disks and Larry suffers amnesia

[edit] Space Quest IV

Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers, another Sierra game, played with the idea extensively. Unbeknownst to the employees of Sierra Online, the disks were here apparently stolen by an agent of Sludge Vohaul, who used them to store his consciousness upon his demise in Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge.

Later, the floppies were found floating in space by scientists from the Xenon Super Computer Project. When the game was installed on the computer, Vohaul's consciousness was unleashed on the planet, and the events leading up to the fictional, future sequel Space Quest XII: Vohaul's Revenge II began.

The package of Larry 4 also appears in a video game store of a space station.[1]