Like the Playboy under the mattress or scrambled pay cable channels, Artworx’s Strip Poker was the first pornographic exposure for many 20- and 30-somethings. Released in 1982 for the Atari 800, it became the standard by which all sexual party games would be measured. Here we are, 25 years later, and the company is still around.

Arthur Walsh established Artworx to sell his popular bridge game, simply called Bridge. He branched out after distributing an excellent, but poorly selling poker game by legendary Atari 800 programmer Jerry White. “We realized that there were more poker players than bridge players out there, so we thought ‘Why don’t we push poker [more]?’” he says. “Then one of my associates said, making a joke, ‘I bet if it was strip poker, it would sell.’ That was the birth of the idea.”

Walsh and his two collaborators hired a professional photographer to do nude studies. The resulting slides, with models posing in a hotel bedroom, bathroom or the ever-popular Jacuzzi, would be projected onto an Atari 800-connected television. The artist would then fill in the 320 x 192 screen, pixel by pixel. Realizing he had a hit on his hands, Walsh translated it to the Apple ][, IBM PC, and other new computers as they came along.

Clones followed, but one distinctive element was the use of “data disks,” which were software add-ons that gave players new opponents, both male and female. Sometimes they were presented as a couple that people would play against at the same time. “The multi-opponent ones were very popular, but we’ve also seen it be used by a spouse. A husband will use it as an excuse to buy [the game] because he’s ‘buying it for his wife,’” says Walsh.

Walsh says that increasingly conservative storeowners took Strip Poker and its many sequels off the shelves in the ‘90s, but Artworx is alive and well online. Now headquartered in Naples, Florida, the semi-retired Walsh now has Strip Poker on PDAs and plans to hit cell phones later this year. He’s not too worried about the opposition.

“There are some other [comparable cell phone] games available, but it looks like ours will be the quality product,” he says. “We’ve always done the whole thing in extremely good taste… it’s like comparing Playboy to Hustler. We didn’t want to produce a Hustler.”

MAIN ARTICLE: PCs in Ecstasy: The Evolution of Sex in PC Games

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Computer Games, Journalism, Sex, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.