Leather Goddesses of Phobos

Leather Goddesses of Phobos is an Interactive Fiction game written by Steve Meretzky and published by Infocom in 1986.

As the title suggests, it's a parody of sci-fi B-movies, which has you battling the eponymous Leather Goddesses as they prepare to invade earth and enslave humanity. The packaging of the game includes several B-movie gimmicks, including a 3D Comic Book and a scratch-and-sniff card with numbered areas to be sniffed at appropriate points in the game.

As the title might also suggest, the game contains quite a bit of sexual content: how much depended on the "Naughtiness" level, which could be set to Lewd, Suggestive or Tame.

The game requires the player to indicate the sex of the player character at the beginning, and adjusts the other characters in the game accordingly, so that any character in whom the player character might take an... interest... is always of the opposite sex. It also affects the sex of the player's faithful sidekick: the male player character is assisted by the burly-but-dim Trent, while the female character is accompanied by the attractive-but-ditzy Tiffany.

A sequel Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X! was released in 1992.


 * 3D Comic Book: Included in the feelies.
 * Aliens in Cardiff: The game opens in Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
 * Badass Normal: Parodied with Trent/Tiffany, who wrestles alien threats on a hostile planet. Though his/her tragic demise is a Running Gag, he/she keeps returning due to toughness, persistence and bizarre luck.
 * Cleveland Rocks: Locations include a small area of Cleveland, which is compared (unfavorably) to the slime pits of Venus and sandstorms of Mars.
 * Clue From Ed: The bundled comic book included several referring to (non-existent) earlier issues.
 * Copy Protection: The Feelies for the game included a comic book and a map, both of which contained information vital for getting through the game.
 * Disney Death/Death Is Cheap: Played for laughs. Your faithful sidekick would occasionally get killed in the course of trying to solve some puzzle, with you mourning their loss. They'd show up again with some ridiculous Deus Ex Machina explanation within a few turns.
 * Door Step Baby: Leaving a baby on the doorstep of an orphanage lets you sneak inside the opened door to loot the place.
 * Double Standard Rape: The mad scientist's experiment has heavy overtones of rape, which becomes even more glaring since there's no way to get out of it alive without committing bestiality.
 * Everything's Better with Monkeys: At one point in the game, your character gets mindswapped with a monkey. In a cage. With an amorous monkey of the other sex.
 * Feelies: The feelies for the game included a 3D Comic Book (with glasses), a scratch-and-sniff card, and a map.
 * Heel Realization:.
 * Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The Naughtiness level, although strictly speaking it didn't actually affect the difficulty of the game at all, just the details of how certain events played out.
 * MacGyvering: The climax of the game revolves around MacGyvering a device out of Noodle Implements to save the day.
 * Man-Eating Plant: A large, mobile Venus Fly Trap is one of the hazards on... wait for it... the planet Venus.
 * The Maze: A particularly nasty one requiring you to hop, clap, or say "Kweepa" every so many moves, and pretty much impossible to navigate without the bundled map. Players found this so annoying that a later version of the game included a cheat code allowing you to skip the maze entirely.
 * Moon Logic Puzzle: The player is captured by aliens and thrown into a cell. The way to escape is . Many players were stuck for weeks on this point. Lampshaded in-game as well: the other prisoner admits he never thought to try it.
 * Naughty Tentacles: There's has a scene with some random woman being undressed by a tentacle alien in zero-G.
 * Noodle Implements: The components of the day-saving device include: A common household blender, six feet of rubber hose, a pair of cotton balls, an eighty-two degree angle, a headlight from a 1933 Ford, a white mouse, a photo of Jean Harlow (or Douglas Fairbanks) and a Cleveland phone book.
 * Pit Trap: Constructed to deal with the mobile Venus Fly Trap.
 * Schrödinger's Gun: The player character's sex is indeterminate for the first few moves of the game, then the player has to make a decision about whether to go to the ladies' room or the men's room. Whichever the player chooses retroactively becomes the correct answer.
 * Speak Friend and Enter: The player is captured by aliens and thrown into a cell. The way to escape is.
 * Strapped to An Operating Table: At one point, the player is strapped to an exam table by a mad scientist and turned into a Gorilla. It's also possible to observe other experiments of the Leather Goddesses, but the game won't tell you what they are. Whether that is a Sexy Discretion Shot or a Gory Discretion Shot is entirely up to the player's imagination.
 * Unexplained Recovery: Your faithful sidekick's running gag.