Playing Leisure Suit Larry on Android in 2025: A Nostalgic Hack That Works

Lately, I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the good old days when the gaming community happily lived in the darkness known as DOS. Back then, moments of joy came from Sierra Online games — which were unfortunately very hard to get, since floppy disks couldn’t exactly be downloaded from the internet. Actually, what internet? There was no real internet, or it was just in its infancy and didn’t look anything like what we have today.

Anyway, one of my favorite series from Sierra Entertainment (later On-Line) was Leisure Suit Larry, especially the later installments — Part 5 (Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work – 1991) and Part 6 (Shape Up or Slip Out! – 1993 — thirty years ago, man). Basically, any project where Al Lowe was involved. That’s when I got the idea to play them again, this time on my Android phone, so I could play whenever I wanted, however I wanted, without losing my progress.

The Quest for a Working Setup

So I started checking my options. Since projects like Dosbox Turbo and afreebox have faded into oblivion (they’re dead), my only real choice was to pay for Magic Dosbox. And then it hit me — wasn’t there a project originally made to run LucasArts games that later expanded to support a whole bunch of other engines, including Sierra On-Line games? Yep, it existed — it’s called Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion Virtual Machine, or simply ScummVM. And yes, there’s an Android port, and yes, it works beautifully.

Quick Tutorial how to setup ScummVM on Android in 8 Steps

Installing it from the Google Play Store is quick and easy. All you need to do afterward is transfer the original game files into a folder that ScummVM can read from. Here’s how to do that:

Step 1: Download ScummVM from the Play Store. Install it, but don’t launch it just yet.

Step 2: Transfer or download your games to your phone. They’re usually zipped and end up in your Downloads folder, so you’ll need a file manager. There’s a good chance your phone already has one.

Step 3: Using your file manager, go to the root of your Internal Shared Storage and create a new folder. Call it DOS (or anything else you like). This folder will be the root where you place all your ScummVM games.

Step 4: Move the ZIP files from your Downloads folder to your DOS folder, and unzip each game (just tap on it and find extract).

Step 5: Now launch ScummVM on your phone and tap OK on the storage warning message about Android storage. (Hint: the mouse is in relative mode, aka touchscreen mode). Tap Add Game, then Add a new folder.

Step 6: Your phone’s storage browser will open. Navigate to the Internal Shared Storage/DOS folder you just created, and tap USE THIS FOLDER. A popup will ask, “Allow ScummVM to access files in DOS?”—just tap Allow.

Step 7: You’ll now be back in ScummVM, and the folders with your games will appear. Enter the folder for the game you want to add and tap Choose. Leave everything as it is on the next screen and tap OK. Repeat this for each game you want to add.

Step 8: That’s it! Your game (in this case, LSL 5) is now in the game list. Just tap Start in the lower-right corner to play.

Hint: You can quickly change how your touchscreen/mouse behaves by tapping the icon on the right. One setting is Relative (simulates touchscreen mode), and the other is Absolute (acts like a laptop touchpad). To perform a right-click (as you would on PC), simply tap with two fingers.

Oh, and don’t forget to save your game progress regularly. Just tap on the hamburger menu (upper right corner) and the in-game menu will pop-up.
Bonus, you can use this menu to quickly pause the game anywhere!

A Few Caveats (Because Retro Gaming is a Rollercoaster)

Although my instructions use Leisure Suit Larry as an example, they can easily be applied to any other game supported by ScummVM. Sometimes, that one favorite childhood game of yours won’t run, or it’ll run poorly. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the team behind ScummVM is doing all of this out of love, which means they can’t drop everything just to fix that one specific game. Be patient, wait for the next version, and in the meantime, report the bug and mention which game it’s about. Here’s how you do that.

Why ScummVM is Still Special

What makes ScummVM special is that development is still active. At the moment, it supports over 200 individual games (mostly DOS adventures), though not all of them are bug-free. Luckily, the Leisure Suit Larry series works almost flawlessly, as do many other “classics” from that era.

Some of the supported games can even be downloaded for free from ScummVM’s official website (Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword 2.5) — but not all of them. In fact, it wouldn’t even be legal to download the entire catalog, since a good number of these games are still being sold.

Final Thoughts

And just like that, I’m back in the early ’90s — except this time, I’m playing Leisure Suit Larry on my Android phone. No floppies, no boot disks, no IRQ conflicts. Just smooth retro goodness.

ScummVM is totally free and available across tons of platforms. Heck, I even managed to get it running on a modded Sony PS Vita, but that’s a story for another day.

If you’ve got old adventure games collecting dust, or just want to relive your misadventures with Larry Laffer, ScummVM is your golden ticket.

Links for everything used in this article

ScummVM Official Website
ScummVM on Google Play Store
Leisure Suit Larry 5 on GoG
Leisure Suit Larry 6 on GoG

Dejan Balalovski,
Happy pixelated retro.