In November 2010 Telltale released Poker Night at the Inventory, a comedy hangout poker game that was made in about three months and pays homage to the studio’s very first release, Telltale Texas Hold'em.
In May 2019, Poker Night at the Inventory disappeared from Steam after licensing deals expired. But never fear! Almost seven years later, the Citizen Kane of poker games is back, remastered by the same team of former Telltale developers who spruced up the Sam & Max trilogy—and it’s more fun than ever.
(Pro tip: Pick it up it before March 19 you’ll get the Reissued Dealer’s Visor to wear whenever you play Team Fortress 2!)
In Poker Night, the banter you hear around the table is as much a part of the game as the cards you play. Each opponent brings their own personality to the game, in the stories they tell and the plays they make.
“Okay, so what’s new in this remaster?” you’re probably wondering. Get comfortable, and we’ll tell you!
Recently Renovated
The Inventory looks better than it ever has before, with a top-to-bottom visual refresh featuring higher resolution models and materials, more detail throughout the space, and a complete lighting overhaul. Keep your eye out for new Easter eggs and crumbs of lore tucked into every corner of the place.
Plus, all four characters around the table are also sporting a visual refresh:
Max has been updated to use his higher resolution model from our Sam & Max remasters, which includes a subtle colored outline that adapts to light and shadow.
Strong Bad is way higher resolution to more closely match his vector-based origins. (He would be upset if he knew we used more polygons in the new release instead of fewer, but we did it anyway.) He’s also got slightly more shading that actually matches the direction of the environment lighting.
The Heavy has around the same number of polygons he’s always used—we like to think he almost literally respawned in here after a game of TF2—but he’s got a new lighting model that is more evocative of how he’s lit when he’s back in the Badlands.
Tycho also got uprezzed, plus he has a new shading model meant to evoke how he appeared in paintings, posters, and book covers around the time Poker Night first came out.
We also dug into every animation and cinematic in the game to remove as many pops and hitches as we could find. The whole game should look a lot smoother than the hastily-made original.
TF2 Items, Reissued
The big news here is that you can finally get Poker Night’s TF2 items without dealing with a scalper. When a player offers up their huge gun (the Heavy), swanky watch (Tycho), gun and badge (Max), or dangerous—err, sorry, we meant Dangeresque—sunglasses (Strong Bad) as collateral and you bust them out, you’ll win their beloved item… and then you can use those items in Team Fortress 2!
The only difference from the original release is that the items now have “Reissued” in their names. And don’t forget you can get the exclusive Reissued Dealer’s Visor if you buy the game on Steam before March 19! Read more about the TF2 items here.
New Content and Features
The remaster has a bunch of new in-game unlockables. Just like in the original Poker Night, in the new release you can unlock new table felts and decks of cards by winning tournaments, and we’ve added a bunch more. And just like the original, some of the unlocks hold secrets that change how the game looks. We don’t want to spoil them all here, so keep an eye out as you play.
Your gamepad works. Poker Night now supports gamepads as well as mouse input, so you can play it on your couch or handheld devices. Speaking of which: We’re Steam Deck Verified!
More Options
In the original Poker Night you could control the difficulty of the poker simulation (i.e., the skill level of your opponents), how frequently the NPCs break into stories around the table, and whether the profanity is flowing free or bleeped into oblivion. You can still do all that, plus we’ve added a few more settings for you to mess with:
Customize the buy-in amount. The default buy-in is $10,000 per player, meaning the game starts with a $50,000 pot. In the settings menu, you can now adjust the buy-in amount between $1,000 to $200,000, literally raising or lowering the stakes of a tournament—but the blinds (the required bet amount at the start of a hand) *don't* change, which means games can get pretty interesting. Play with the huge buy-in for a long, drawn-out game where you have time to really feel out your opponents. Try a $1,000 buy-in and you’d better have a good hand or you’ll get booted pretty fast.
Optional Motion Blur and Film Grain. If you want to feel like you’re in too deep in the third act of a nail-biting, hard-boiled poker movie, we’ve got the graphics settings for you. Motion Blur is character movement–based and pretty subtle (there isn’t any motion blur on the camera itself), adding a little taste of “animated movie” to the proceedings. Film grain is exactly what it sounds like: a little grit for that extra crunch. (Both options are defaulted to “off” in the settings.)
Customize Brightness. A simple one, but a request we got a lot. The game’s dark and moody, maybe too much so for some displays. Now it doesn’t have to be.
Plays Better Poker
One casualty of the original game’s quick development cycle was that its poker logic was a little wonky. To address this, the team stripped Poker Night’s original poker code down to parts, scraped the gunk away, and rebuilt it better than new. Poker Night at the Inventory now plays a far more accurate game of poker, and your opponents will make more informed decisions that better fit their play style and personality.
We won’t bore you with ALL of the glitchy things we fixed (trust us, there were a lot), but here are three of the big ones:
In the original game, the players often didn't evaluate their entire hand, just the high card. It meant they made most of their decisions using a fraction of the information available at the table. That’s a really bad Texas Hold’em strategy! Now that they evaluate their entire hand, they play more predictable poker as a baseline. And now that they’re capable of being predictable, it feels so much better when they start acting unpredictable (we’re looking at you, Max), or when someone makes a sudden rash decision out of nowhere (*cough* Strong Bad *cough*).
So now that we’ve discussed “evaluating too few cards,” let us introduce you to “evaluating too many cards.” While digging through the code, we learned the original game would sometimes evaluate more than the five cards in your hand when determining the winner. Under certain conditions, the game would dive into your hole cards and community cards that weren’t part of your 5 card hand and consider them too, resulting in tie-breakers that should never happen. We don’t think this was deliberate, and instead a hand-evaluating loop that should have stopped after registering the top five cards just sort of kept going. It’s fixed now.
Rules around re-raising were corrected. The original game allowed re-raising at a lower rate than the rules of Texas Hold'em specify—which means everyone at the table, including the player, was cheating. Now, no one is.
TL;DR: If you’re someone who loved the original game because it’s funny but also hated it because it played poker badly, we’ve done our best to balance out that equation. Now you can love it because it’s funny and hate it because the other players are better than you at poker. (Not our fault!)
The only unfortunate casualty of the remaster is we had to remove the yell after the Heavy flips over the table, for rights reasons.
If you have any burning questions about what's new in this release of Poker Night at the Inventory, fire away in the comments and we'll do our best to answer. In the meantime, have fun!
