The previous node on this odd game is quite informative, but what always stuck in my mind about it is the story of how it came about. It's kind of strange, but that sort of fits how odd the game is.
According to Steve Meretzky, a game designer for Infocom, the game started out as a joke. Infocom was still a smallish company, based in Cambridge. The little company had decided to have a simple beer and pizza party for its employees. Although the party was supposed to be informal, according to Meretzky, Infocom's president Joel Berez was very excited about the whole thing and wanted the party to run as smoothly as possible.
The party was to take place in the large central office space of Infocom, where all of the computer and console systems the company made games for were kept. This room included a chalkboard with a table of the games currently released by Infocom (apparently including Zork I, Zork II, Deadline, Zork III, Starcross). Each title had the number of printings listed next to it for each system it was available on (Apple II, Atari 800, etc).
Meretzky was feeling rather silly, though. Before the party started, he added the name Leather Goddesses of Phobos to the chalkboard. "It was just a hack, and I just picked the name as something that would be embarrassing but not awful" according to an interview with Meretzky. Berez, however, came by and saw the name added to the board. The Infocom president quickly erased the name from the board, but the name stuck and was used for years as a name for untitled or nonexistant games within the company.
It wasn't until 1985 that Meretzky actually started to write the game, and it didn't hit the market until 1986 after several other things happened. The game was intended as a tribute to the SF pulp fiction of the 1930s.
Work Cited.
Rouse, Richard. Game Design: Theory and Practice. Wordware Publishing Inc. p179-213.