Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance

In 1985, Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance brought classic five-card draw poker to home screens with a single clear reward: take a hundred virtual dollars off your opponent, and she takes off an item of clothing.

Sitting down at the virtual table in Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance

When you fire up the MS-DOS release of Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance, there are no story intros, skill trees, or side quests to wade through. You pick your opponent, starting cash is dealt, and you are immediately staring across a pixelated green table at either Suzi or Melissa. The rules are raw, standard five-card draw. You place your bet, exchange up to five cards from your hand, and hope your holdings beat whatever the computer is secretly clutching.

Every time you manage to drain $100 from your opponent's bankroll, the action pauses for her to remove a piece of clothing. To win the match outright, you have to force her to strip five full times until her bank balance hits zero. Lose your own shirt, and you are kicked straight back to the starting screen to reconsider your life choices or try again. It is a simple loop, but one that completely relies on whether you actually enjoy basic computer cards.

How Artworx built the first digital adult card game

Designed by Roger Harnish and coded by Mitch Garnaat, the title was marketed by Artworx Software Company, Inc. as the very first home computer strip poker video game. Artworx pushed the concept aggressively, bringing in artist Douglas McFarland to draw the digitized portrait steps using the brutally limited resolution of mid-eighties hardware. The studio kept porting the engine everywhere, eventually sending the game to the Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit machines, Amiga, and Atari ST.

Because the base program only packed two opponents, Artworx hit on a clever monetization strategy early by selling separate Data Disks. These add-ons added fresh opponents like Marlena and Candi to the rotation, and today those original floppy expansion disks are notoriously hard to find for physical collectors. Interestingly, Artworx planned an edition featuring male models tailored for female players set for a 1988 market window, but that disk ultimately never saw release.

The interface frustrates faster than a bad hand

While early period computer reviews found amusement in its tongue-in-cheek premise, modern retrospectives highlight how tough the underlying interface can be to navigate. If you make a typo during text inputs in the DOS version, you are completely out of luck because the backspace key simply does not function. Worse yet, the input parser routinely drops typed keystrokes if you press keys too quickly between betting phases.

Pressing the Escape key by accident triggers an even harsher punishment: it forces you to watch the entire 15-second intro logo sequence all over again before returning you to the card table. Combined with tiny on-screen typography that turns into a blurry mess over color composite monitors and bare-bones PC speaker bleeps, playing for long stretches requires real patience. Amiga magazine coverage eventually awarded its own port a mediocre 60%, citing how fast the novelty wears off once the clunky layout takes over.

Why modern players still drop in for a quick hand

Nobody plays this today for cutting-edge graphics or tactical depth, yet it shows how early PC software tried to push boundaries on limited RAM. If you want to check out how Artworx Software Company, Inc. kickstarted a whole sub-genre of low-resolution adult entertainment, browsing through a game or two is a quick history lesson. You can explore similar retro releases in our gambling games index or check out other PC software from 1985.

If you want to test your luck against Suzi or Melissa without digging up ancient floppy drives, you can play Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance online, free in your browser right now with nothing to install and no setup required. Jump straight into the first round, watch your card draws carefully, and see if you can take five hundred bucks off the house before your own cash runs completely dry.