In January 2014, a now-deleted review was posted to the game's GOG page from an account named "Thraxamer", claiming to be an unidentified lead designer on the game. From context clues across the internet, it's believed that the identity of the account is co-lead designer Duncan McPherson. The account name Thraxamer appears on two different websites attached to a Duncan McPherson, once in a thread on the forums for the game engine Construct, and again as an email address on a member page for The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency, a science fiction enthusiast website created by writer Richard S. Dargan. The member profile for Duncan McPherson on the latter site lists a specialty in "game design", and shows him as being based in Monmouth, Illinois, where High Voltage Software's Duncan McPherson graduated from Monmouth College.

According to McPherson, High Voltage Software had little say in the development of Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude other than the story, which he had to fight to ensure the writers had creative control over. Executives at Vivendi Universal, who purchased Sierra Entertainment and obtained the Leisure Suit Larry IP, believed that point-and-click adventure games were no longer marketable and that the series had lost its appeal. They demanded that High Voltage Software make the series "relevant to the 19-22 year old set" and gave them a treatment that focused on sexual content in a similar vein to films such as "American Pie" and "National Lampoon's Animal House" (previous entries in the series avoided full frontal nudity, instead favoring innuendo). The game's teaser trailer also pokes fun at the series' previous protagonist Larry Laffer, where he appears as a cardboard cutout greeted to empty applause and cricket chirps in an attempt to paint him as outdated compared to his nephew, Larry Lovage. Despite this, McPherson stated that he was "still very proud of that team and what they did, in the face of a difficult set of requests."