It is a vinegary mix of shame and nostalgia that fuels this entry about the Strip Poker series of games that made their way, greasily, through the early days of personal computing. We may have found ourselves at one point playing it on Commodore machines. We don’t even remember how we got it. Was there a shady janitor at school involved? Was it purchased on the kiddie black market with lunch money? Dear lord, did our dad give it to us?

We do remember the game as a series of diskettes, one crudely imagined poker opponent per floppy, which sounds dirtier than it was. It featured those CGA-pixelated ladyfriends taking off their clothes as bleep-bloop burlesque music played. The load time between winning the hand that got you an article of clothing and the actual appearance of semi-nudity was enough to make those of us who played it almost faint, as tender of age and as deep into adolescence as we were at the time. The game in its various versions appeared Apple II computers, the Amiga and eventually on DOS machines. In its small, artless way, it helped shape nerdy computer boys into nerdy computer men.

There is this: it was the fastest and most effective way for a teenager to learn how to play poker in that era. And here’s the happy ending we couldn’t have imagined at the time: Artworx, the company that created the game, is still pumping out new versions of Strip Poker, now in high-def for PCs and scaled down in size for cell phones. Now that’s progress!