After
Leisure Suit Larry 3 had wrapped up, designer
Al Lowe vowed that the Larry series of
adventure games was
FINISHED,
FINITO,
DONE,
END OF STORY.
Of course, fans couldn't live with that.
So Sierra pressured Al into designing the next game. Unfortunately, he'd hit a snag. By the end of Larry 3, he had finished the series as best as he could, and tied up all the loose ends from the previous games. So what was there to do now?
His solution was rather ingenious. He would simply skip a sequel. He didn't want to bother with all the bullshit that involved untangling the ending of Larry 3, and simply jump right to Larry 5.
Of course, legend abounded about the missing 4th game, until Al Lowe finally owned up, around the time Larry 6 went into production.
To further complicate matters, however, a fourth Larry game WAS originally planned, as a - get this! - multiplayer game! Al and Ken Williams had been fooling around with Sierra's new online community, ImagiNation, and their goal was to see if an adventure game could be designed in multiplayer, on-line fashion. (Way ahead of their time, you might say.) Unfortunately, the amount of programming and the small number of people subscribed at the time quickly killed an otherwise ingenious project.
Most of this info was copped from Al Lowe's own words, both from the accompanying documents in the Leisure Suit Larry collection, and from the man's own website: http://www.allowe.com