Infocom Marathon: Leather Goddesses of Phobos - Part Two

Written by Joe Pranevich

My six-year old has recently become very interested in space. In the way that six-year olds can pick odd topics to be obsessed with (er… that apple didn’t fall far from the tree), he’s talked so much about Phobos and Deimos lately that I could probably lecture a course on it. Phobos is the larger of Mars’s two moons with a diameter only of around 14 miles. Gravity on Phobos is incredibly weak and a human could take a flying leap of nearly a half mile without difficulty, although with that comes a low escape velocity. Athletic individuals could potentially jump into space! There’s also a good chance that Phobos could break apart in a few hundred years to give Mars a tiny ring of its own. I have learned so much! And yet, my son has never once mentioned the legendary Leather Goddesses of Phobos. This is probably for the best given that he is just six, but still a disappointment. I have half a mind to start a petition to name one of the many Phobos craters after Steve Meretzky, but I doubt that would go very far.

Where we left off last time, I narrated four of the game’s puzzles and collected four of the game’s eight key objects. We have four left and a ton of great puzzles so let’s get to it.

Infocom Marathon: Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986) - Part One

Written by Joe Pranevich

Sex sells, but few things market a product better than controversy. Throughout much of the 20th century, it was an adage that a book or a play “Banned in Boston” was guaranteed to sell well elsewhere. Oscar Wilde once said that, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” Barbara Streisand discovered that the fastest way to get a lot of people interested in taking photos of her house was telling them that they could not. So it was in that spirit that Steve Meretzky penned A Mind Forever Voyaging as a controversy-magnet, guaranteed to get the conservative pundits wagging their tongues about his leftist pollution of young minds. The controversy never materialized and that game flopped. Unperturbed, he pushed for yet another game that could “go viral”, but this time he aimed to incite the ire of the pundits (and the libido of the players) by embracing sex. Could an assault on decency succeed where AMFV failed?

Whether it was the sex, the return to traditional puzzle-based gameplay, or something else, Leather Goddesses of Phobos garnered enough attention that it became Infocom’s final true “hit”. TBD reviewed the game in 2017 and so I will look at this game through a different lens. Instead of a sequential playthrough and review, I am going to focus on the game’s puzzles. This game is rightly credited as having some of Meretzky’s most clever mind-benders, but does he put them together in a satisfying way? I will also place LGoP in the context of Infocom’s broader story as we progress towards the end of 1986.

My original plan had been for this to come out as a single post, but it turns out that I have more to say about his puzzles than I thought. Rather than cut it down, I’ve decided to split the work into two. Today, we’ll cover the introduction and collect the first four key items. Next week, we’ll conclude with the final puzzles and some thoughts on how the game comes together as a whole.

Missed Classic: Leather Goddesses of Phobos - WON! and Final Rating

Written by TBD

When last we met, Trent had almost died for the fourth? time in Cleveland. A circle in Cleveland took us back to Phobos, and from there on to Venus and Mars.

South Pole

EDUTAINMENT WARNING < While Mars' north pole is made from water ice, the south pole in Mars is made from CO2 ice. >EDUTAINMENT WARNING

While hanging out near the Sultan's palace last post, I found that one of the teleportation circles takes me to the barge. With that information I (eventually) work out that I can get to the south pole without going past the brain exploding machine.

Missed Classic: Leather Goddesses of Phobos - The Sultan of Schwing

Written by TBD

When we left off last time I'd just escaped from a gorilla's body in a mad scientist's lab in Venus.

Inside the locked lab is another black teleportation circle, which I enter, ending up outside the scientists' house. A few screens later is another black circle, which I also enter.

After entering the circle I am now in...

MARS

I arrive in a ruined castle where I get told the story of King Mitre – on Earth we've heard a bastardized version about King Midas who turned everything he touched into gold, including his daughter. The real story is about King Mitre, who turned everything he touched into a forty-five degree angle. Next to him is a pile of angles, including one with golden hair and a flowing white gown {HINT! HINT!}

Missed Classic 42: Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986) - Introduction

Written by TBD

What can I tell you about Leather Goddesses of Phobos? Let's check in with wikipedia...

Leather is a durable and flexible material created by tanning animal rawhide and skin

A goddess is a female deity in polytheistic religions

Phobos is the innermost and larger of the two natural satellites of Mars

Well, that explains it.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos are female deities from a moon of Mars who are made from a durable material.

But that's not the image I get in my head when I read the title.

THIS is closer to the image I get in my head, but that's Space Quest IV clearly referencing this game

Read more to find out about the game everyone is talking about