Queen of Phobos is a little known science-fiction adventure game that saw very limited distribution. The game features monochrome line graphics with a verb/noun parser.
In Queen of Phobos, the player must recover a highly valuable Martian mask on an abandoned spaceship - before looters can get to it.
Paul Berker talks about the game: "Queen of Phobos was an idea generated by my close friend William "Bill" Crawford. Bill was always doodling weird stuff, Zombies and Mars always seemed popular items of his doodles. After seeing some truly awful graphic adventure games, we thought we could do better. So I wrote some software to control the Apple Graphics Tablet that enabled Bill to draw the rooms and objects for the game which he had done all out on paper. While he started getting those elements created, I was programming the code for the game and getting all the parts working. Dav Holle wrote the boot and copy protection parts of the program. This game would have been a good seller, but right at that time Ken and Roberta Williams tried to sue a bunch of little software companies out of existence. Queen of Phobos became one of those victims... for using the phrase "Hi-Res" adventure on the packaging. If anyone owned that phrase, I suppose it would have been Apple. Ron did not have the money to fight a court case filed in California, so that basically killed the game. That also ended my game programming. By then I was really getting busy with custom programming for business clients."
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| -> | One significant reason for the limited release of Queen of Phobos was that Softsel, a big wholesaler during the early 1980s, did not like the game. Many retailers would not purchase products unless they were shipped by Softsel. |
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