On this page I try to give a history of strip poker, both in real
life and as a computer game. Neither is easy. The real-life history
is not very well documented, a lot of information
that you find
on the web comes from commercial sites more interested in creating
myths than in genuine history. For the computer games there is often
very little information as well, and some of them, especially the
earlier ones, have been sub-licensed or hacked and it's not always
easy to tell them apart.
Most of the linked articles go back to the second half of 2004 (2007 for the 8-bit games) and have not been updated very much since. Currently I'm in the process of bringing them up to date, I notice that a number of them have ceased to be sold in the past few years. I'm giving the pages a new design as well, a different one for every game, often inspired by the original website, the box or the game graphics themselves. I list these updated pages here at the top.
The game of poker itself was first seen by the English actor Joseph
Crowell in New Orleans 1829. Unfortunately, I could not find out where
and how Crowell published his description, he is never mentioned in
another context. In 1843, Jonathan H. Green deplores the spreading of
poker through the Mississippi river boats in An Exposure of the Arts
and Miseries of Gambling.
There has been a lot of speculation that
strip poker is just as old, and was played in the brothels of New Orleans.
That's just what it is: Speculation. There is no traceable account of
strip poker before the late 1920s.
The oldest mention or description of a strip poker game I could find
so far is in the 1928 low-budget drama movie The Road to Ruin.
IMDb describes the
plot as follows:
Sally is a 16-year-old New York City teen who, neglected by her parents, takes up smoking and drinking, engages in affairs with a series of older men, gets arrested by the police during a strip poker game, is sent home only to discover later that she's pregnant, and after getting an illegal abortion, the wordsThe Wages of Sin is Deathinexpliably appear over her bed in fire.
1934 this silent movie was remade as a better known talkie, which was however tamer and seems to have cut the strip poker episode.
The Online
Etymological Dictionary says that strip poker is attested since 1929.
Most likely it refers to
Joan Lowell's
autobiography Cradle of the Deep,
where she describes sailors
playing it. That some of the more dramatic parts of her book were made
up is not very relevant here, she really was a sea captain's daughter,
did live more than a year on his ship and no doubt was familiar with
the habits of sailors.
The next strip poker game in literature that I know about occurs in
Eric Linklaters Juan in America
1931. This time it is in mixed
company, and it ends in a row the first time a lady loses a piece of
clothing. Linklaters novel is a rather respectless satire, based on the
author's stay in the United States 1929/30. Strip poker is just one of
the strange things the British hero encounters in this strange country.
In 1939, Eric Ambler mentions a mixed strip poker game in the first
chapter of his novel A Coffin for Dimitrios.
This game takes place
in Istanbul, in the villa of a Turkish lady married to a rich Argentinian,
at a party with international guests. This may be the first description
of a strip poker game taking place outside the United States or a US
vessel. Unlike Joan Lowell and Eric Linklater Eric Ambler could obviously
rely on his readers knowing what a strip poker game was.
The 1945, April 16 issue of Life magazine reports a Starlet Strip Poker to aid the United Nations old-clothing drive. Participating were Renée de Marco, Nina Foch, Evelyn Ankers, Tony Seven, and Ann Miller.
As delicate slips were trampled underfoot and silken brassieres literally thrown to the wind, 20 photographers busily took pictures of five pretty Hollywood starlets and would-be starlets doing their bit for the United Nations. The girls were self-consciously playing strip poker in back yard of Mr. Russell Birdwell, their press agent. Mr Birdwell had summoned theseyoungest, prettiest and lushest screen starsfor patriotic purposes, totake off their clothes for the United Nations Clothing Collection.Each of the girls contributed five pounds of apparel for relief of the shivering Europeans. Mr. Birdwell said that it was a great humanitarian spectacle.
This may have been the first article about strip poker in a major magazine. What less than two decades ago had been a novelty had become something like an institution.
Dieter Eckhardt, who founded Golden Games with Holger Behrmann in 1986, co-produced Hollywood Poker, and started the first online strip poker site in 1996, claims to have written the first ever strip poker game in 1979, when he was twelve years old, for the TRS-80. Since this game seems not to have survived, we will have to take his word for it.
The first surviving strip poker game was created by Artworx for the Apple ][ in 1982. Strip poker games were surprisingly popular on 8-bit platforms, in spite of the limited graphics.
In 1986, Artworx Strip Poker was ported to the Amiga; the next year, Hollywood Poker came out. Strip Poker moved to the 16-bit platforms. Every strip poker game of this era was available for the Amiga, though strip poker never seems to have been all that popular on this platform.
In the early 90s, higher screen resolutions (SVGA on the PC) and the CD-ROM medium changed the character of the erotic games. For a while, Mac/Windows CDs were quite popular. Only few of them were strip poker games, adventure-style entertainment like CyberDreams was more common. While strip poker had previously been near-entirely a European genre (with the Artworx series the only exception), most of these games now came from the US.
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Venzislav Iliev | ||||
| Casino Girls Video Poker |  |
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| Video Strip Poker Supreme | |
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Similar to Tetris-style games, strip poker games are rather international and often come from countries otherwise not very big in video game production.
One of the biggest platforms for strip poker games was the Commodore 64. Except for the short phase of Quicktime games, the Apple Macintosh is underrepresented, in spite of a general interest for erotic entertainment in the Mac community. I was astonished that I couldn't find a single strip poker game for black & white Macs! On the box of Artworx Strip Poker a Macintosh version is mentioned, but I could not verify its existence.
Update 2011-08-10: The existence of Artworx Strip Poker for Macintosh has finally been verified!
There are very few freeware strip poker games, the only ones here are Mick's Strip Poker and WinSP. The rest of the downloads are demos that usually offer only very restricted gameplay.
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