Most party games suck. Nothing kills a good time like thumbing through a rulebook to figure out what happens when you roll two sixes, or when your drunk uncle and his new wife get into a messy fight over whether her drawing looks more like a battery or an eggplant. Even decades-old standbys like Charades and Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit get played out of tradition or duty—and not because they’re, you know, fun.
So imagine coming up with not one but five new party games every year. And imagine that your intended audience is, uh, everybody in the world, probably several beers deep.
That’s the annual task for the team at Jackbox Games, a company whose annual Party Pack—downloadable on computers, video-game consoles, smart TVs, and anywhere else they can make it work—has become the definitive party game of this generation. It’s hard to summarize your average Jackbox Party Pack game—there are 25 and counting—but the basics are roughly the same: an eclectic mix of trivia and wordplay that implicitly nudges the player to be as crass and clever as possible. Some games make you a know-it-all; some games make you a comedian; some games make you a liar. All of them encourage heated rivalries with your friends.
Most of all, you can safely assume any game Jackbox releases will require the use of your smartphone. The magic of the Jackbox formula is deceptively simple: It’s the first party game that doesn’t just understand partygoers are going to spend a lot of time looking at their phones—it encourages it. There are no apps to download and no barriers to entry. If you have a smartphone, you can play.
And trust me: People play. I do not come to this story without experience. I have thrown awkward, dying parties that have been completely resuscitated when I turned on a Jackbox game. I have also sat around at 4 a.m., desperate to go to bed, and had guests yell, "One more!" for the 15th time while grabbing another beer from the fridge. I’ll get a text from a hungover friend the following day: "What was that game?"
Which is a good question: What are these games, anyway? They’re so simple and accessible that it’s easy to take them for granted. But as a rule: If something seems effortless, it’s because somebody has done a crazy amount of work to make it seem effortless. That goes double when you’re making something that needs to make drunk people sit up, pay attention, and have fun—as well as make sure they can actually comprehend what they’re supposed to be doing in the first place.
I wanted to see how a Jackbox game comes together. So I headed to Chicago to spend a few days in the Jackbox offices, where the company’s employees engage in the very serious business of making a very funny video game.
There’s a vague tension in the air when I arrive at the Jackbox offices on a sunny Wednesday morning. It’s not that anyone is unfriendly; in fact, everybody I meet is unusually eager to introduce themselves, or give me a quick tour, or bring me a cup of coffee. It’s that—no matter how sincere your intentions—it’s weird to let a stranger like me into your office, to look over your shoulder and pick apart the work you’re still in the middle of. CEO Mike Bilder—a warm, boyish figure who plays Willy Wonka on my tour of the Jackbox office—eventually confesses, only half-jokingly, that they spent the week prior to my arrival tidying everything up.
You could mistake the Jackbox offices for pretty much any office block in the country: a semi-open floor plan of desks and computers where people are quietly and diligently typing away. Heads pop up when I arrive, but within a few minutes everyone is back to typing away at their keyboards. It’s only when you take a closer look that you might notice the little trappings that mark this space as the Jackbox office: the bookshelves stuffed with dozens of board games, or the two standing arcade units, or the glow-in-the-dark cups designed as a jokey tribute to founder Harry Gottlieb, or the little recording booth where the game’s voiceover artists—many of them Jackbox employees pulling double duty—work their magic. (I’m 15 minutes into a friendly conversation with Spencer Ham, director of the Party Pack 5 game Split the Room, when he casually reveals that he voiced the sadistic, Jigsaw-like host of the Jackbox game Trivia Murder Party.)
The team is grinding away at the Jackbox Party Pack 5—the latest iteration of what has become the company's flagship product, with a new version arriving each fall. Between 20 and 30 games are seriously considered for inclusion in each Party Pack, and about 70 percent of those games go through some kind of prototyping process. Most of the ideas originate from staffers themselves—anyone, regardless of title or seniority, is encouraged to pitch—and it’s not uncommon for employees to book a conference room, wrangle up anyone who happens to be free, and try out an extremely rudimentary version of a possible Jackbox game using pencils and paper. By the time I arrive, those half-baked exploratory sessions have been finished for months; I’d ask to try some of these aborted ideas, but they’ve long since been filed away. Anything that gets rejected ends up archived—a kind of Island of Misfit Toys where a half-decent idea might eventually be rescued by a developer who polishes it up and makes it worth playing. Some ideas get kicked around for years before they eventually show up, in one form or another, in a Jackbox Party Pack.
So how do they whittle a massive list of contenders down to five? Mike Bilder tells me that the goal is to structure each Jackbox Party Pack like a bell curve: Include at least one game they’re confident the vast majority of players will love, with room for one or two weirder, more experimental games on each side. One of the company’s most popular games is Fibbage—a game that asks a player to write believable lies in order to trick their friends—which has proven durable enough that versions of it have popped up in three separate Party Packs. Another reliable favorite is Quiplash, which pits friend against friend in a battle to make the funniest joke.
And then there’s the weird stuff—the far end of the bell curve. That’s where you’ll find games like Monster Seeking Monster, a dating game using popular horror characters, or Tee K.O., where you design goofy T-shirts that you can actually order at the end of the game.
The Jackbox Party Pack 5 does not break this pattern. Split the Room, which challenges players to come up with a hypothetical question that will evenly divide their friends, is squarely in line with hits like Fibbage and Quiplash. But Mad Verse City, which pits player against player in a series of giant mech rap battles...well, it’s safe to say that’s on the far end of that bell curve.
All five games are unfinished but playable when I arrive, but it quickly becomes clear that the most resource-intensive, highest-stake game in the Party Pack is You Don’t Know Jack—and not for nothing, since You Don’t Know Jack is basically the entire reason Jackbox Games exists. More than 20 years ago, the original version of Jack—described, on its own box, as an “irreverent quiz show party game”—arrived on shelves. And while the subsequent years have seen dramatic improvements in technology, it’s striking how little the core Jack formula has actually changed.
Before it was asking you to answer questions combining Shakespeare and The Brady Bunch, the company that eventually launched the You Don’t Know Jack franchise—then called Jellyvision—was founded with the educational market in mind. Founder Harry Gottlieb, a would-be filmmaker, felt teachers who used movies as a “babysitter” for their students were settling for films of distressingly poor quality. He thought he could do better.
Talking to me in 2018, Gottlieb has the friendly, low-wattage candor of someone who has flirted with failure and makes no apologies for it. Over the almost 30 years of his company’s existence, he ran into numerous dead ends. “You have to work hard. And stay persistent. And not run out of money,” he says. “But timing always matters. And you can’t do anything about it. It’s almost like the trick is hanging around long enough that your time is right."
The proto–You Don’t Know Jack was an educational CD-ROM for kids called That’s a Fact, Jack!, which quizzed kids on classic literature. Gottlieb had a friend, employed at Berkeley Systems, who liked the game enough that he asked Gottlieb to make something similar for adults. “I fell into it backwards, I guess,” he says, shrugging.
Gottlieb wasn’t interested in trivia games, he tells me. But he was interested in comedy. So the end result was 1995’s You Don’t Know Jack: a trivia game where the questions were brain-teasing but absurd, and where the host—voiced by Gottlieb himself, playing a cross between an obnoxious nerd and a stoned surfer bro—routinely roasted the players. (Over the years, You Don’t Know Jack has seen a wide array of hosts, but the best-known—who returns for the new Jack—is Cookie Masterson, a snarkily abrasive know-it-all voiced by Gottlieb’s brother Tom.)
One representative question from the original You Don’t Know Jack: “If you took the deposed ruler of Cambodia and you baked him in a light, flaky crust, what would be the best name for your creation?”
The answer, of course, is “Pol Pot Pie” (and not “Baked Chiang-Kai-Shek-en” or “Mussolini and Cheese”). But the key is that you had two ways to get there. There’s the Jeopardy! way: “This person was the deposed ruler of Cambodia.” And there’s the hungry stoner way: Which of these foods has a light, flaky crust? Wrap it up in the fundamentally insane juxtaposition of dictators and comfort food, and you have the basic structure of a Jack question.
Or, to put it another way: No matter how much trivia knowledge you brought to the table, there was some way for you to enjoy You Don’t Know Jack. Its big hook was its accessibility; unlike many games of the era, it was easy for pretty much anybody to pick up and play—as long as they were willing to crowd around a keyboard together.
"People thought that would be the death of that game," Gottlieb says. "But I knew that was one of the reasons the game was going to be so great: actual, physical proximity. The number of people who have told me they met their wives playing You Don’t Know Jack, because you were actually shoulder-to-shoulder with people."
The original You Don’t Know Jack was such a hit that a "question pack" was released within the year, expanding the game for anyone who had already burned through all the included questions. In the years that followed, more than a dozen more You Don’t Know Jack games were released, including special entries focused solely on movies and sports. In 2001, there was even a You Don’t Know Jack game show, hosted by Paul Reubens, which aired just six episodes before ABC pulled the plug.
But after so many consecutive releases, You Don’t Know Jack fatigue was setting in. Just as fatally, the appetites of gamers were also changing. Starting in the early ’00s, "all the games were driving games and kill games," Gottlieb says. "Not, like, Let’s-have-fun-at-a-party! games." After 2003’s You Don’t Know Jack Vol. 6: The Lost Gold, the company decided to put the Jack brand on ice for the foreseeable future.
In the years that followed, the company struggled to find the right approach for its technology. There was an intriguing but ultimately unsuccessful partnership with Netflix on a project called Max, which used an interactive conversation tool to recommend movies. Some projects were even weirder. One longtime employee describes a prototype for a talking car, which was scrapped when everyone recognized that the car’s distracting habit of constantly interacting with the driver would have made it "a deathtrap." (Some of these experiments did stick: Today Jackbox Games exists as a separate entity from Jellyvision, which uses the company’s interactive conversation technology for programs like ALEX, which helps employees figure out their benefits programs.)
In the end, the solution to the company’s problem was a fortuitous overlap with a piece of technology that didn’t even exist in the You Don’t Know Jack heyday. "It’s like every documentary on VH1 Behind the Music, when everyone’s at their lowest point. Everybody’s on drugs, and all the divorces—but then they come back. That’s what it felt like. We had literally run out of money. It couldn’t have been closer to the plane crashing," Gottlieb says. "But we had this idea, which we’d been knocking around for, like, a decade: using your phone as a controller."
The cell-phone angle was championed by Mike Bilder, who had been hired as CEO in 2008 following a run at Midway Games, where he oversaw titles like NBA Ballers and Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. But after six years of bleeding money, the company was on its last legs. "We built some great stuff. We just...had a hard time making money on it," says Bilder.
So the cell-phone angle was approached as a kind of Hail Mary. Reaching into his personal bank account, Gottlieb dumped half the required money into the company—a V.C. investor provided the other half—and the first Fibbage was released. The timing was ideal. People had never been more comfortable with their iPhones, and a recent change in the way video-game consoles connected to the Internet made it possible to play Fibbage from your phone via a browser—eliminating the need for a downloadable app, which would almost certainly have turned off casual gamers. (During my time in the Jackbox offices, I had three separate people explain, in exhaustive detail, the technical aspects of how all the games can be played so seamlessly on players’ cell phones without an app. Here’s what you need to know: It’s magic.)
But there was one additional factor that led to the smash success of Jackbox that nobody saw coming: The rise of Twitch and other streaming services. It quickly became obvious that Jackbox was an ideal way for professional streamers to show their audience how funny they could be. Even better, they could invite their fans to play along with them. "These two Twitch streamers logged [to play Fibbage]," recalls Gottlieb. "And suddenly it’s three, four, five, six, seven, eight people. And they’re going, 'Who the fuck is this?' And they realize: The people who are watching the Twitch stream are just…logging in to play with them."
It strikes me that this is literally the opposite of Harry Gottlieb’s original vision for You Don’t Know Jack: three people crowding around a keyboard to play a trivia game. The physical intimacy of being shoulder-to-shoulder was gone. But the games themselves could sustain a kind of emotional intimacy. Suddenly, your couch extended to the rest of the world.
In short: By innovation and by strategy and by accident, Jackbox had come up with a fun, accessible party game you could play with basically anybody. They had saved the company from financial ruin. And all it took was going back to its roots.
Four years (and a couple dozen games) later, Jackbox is finally returning to You Don’t Know Jack—the first new installment in the series since the Jackbox Party Pack 1 arrived in 2014. There’s a new story framework (about a tech company called Binjpipe, which annoys the hell out of returning host Cookie Masterson) and an option to play with eight players—twice the number allowed by the last You Don’t Know Jack.
Ryan DiGiorgi, the co-director of the new You Don’t Know Jack, tells me that directing a new Jack game is a dream project. He has the receipts. When he was a kid, he played the first You Don’t Know Jack on a kiosk demo at a CompUSA and fell for the game so hard that he saved up his allowance, for the first time in his life, so he could buy it. (When DiGiorgi brought up this formative encounter in his job interview with Jellyvision eight years ago, Harry Gottlieb exclaimed, "I knew those kiosks would work!")
Now DiGiorgi is in charge of bringing the decades-old You Don’t Know Jack franchise into 2018. His co-director, Arnie Niekamp, is another longtime employee whose side project—an improv-comedy-fantasy podcast called Hello from the Magic Tavern—has earned him a loyal following.
According to Niekamp—quoting decades of company wisdom on the subject—the ideal You Don’t Know Jack question "combines a pop-culture thing and a high-culture thing," he explains. "You need to know something about Scooby-Doo and something about Hamlet. The one I always loved when I was a kid—which I still think about all the time—is 'Which of these cereal mascots is most like Sisyphus?’ And it’s the Trix Rabbit. Because neither of them can ever get the thing he wants."
Another key to a good Jack question is the element of surprise. Ideally, you take the players who always assume they know an answer—"the annoying group at your weekly bar trivia"—and find a way to catch them totally off guard. "For example: What actor from Predator became governor of California?" says Niekamp. "And you think you know the answer. But then the answers pop up and it’s all slightly different spellings of 'Arnold Schwarzenegger.' " Suddenly, it’s not a trivia question. It’s a spelling question with a timer—and before you can buzz in, you need to shut off the insistent, arrogant part of your brain that leapt ahead.
On my second day in the Jackbox office, DiGiorgi and Niekamp are meeting with Ben Jacobs, a senior software engineer, to brainstorm "screws"—a Jack mechanic through which one player can literally screw with another. In the previous You Don’t Know Jack, there was only one kind of screw, which forced an opponent to answer a question quickly. But the new Jack will have a wide variety of them, with a wide variety of wacky effects. Ideas include: a screw that forces the player to accept an embarrassing new name; a screw that makes you answer a math problem before you can answer the actual question; and a screw that makes your font size huge so it takes longer to scroll on your phone and reach the right answer.
"This is how most of our meetings go," Jacobs tells me, laughing, after another idea gets batted down. "They pitch me ideas that are terrible, and I have to figure out if they’re technically feasible." Niekamp nods. "I always make the mistake of asking can we do something. And the answer is always 'We can, but should we?' "
There’s a debate over a clever-sounding VR screw, which Jacobs votes against because it relies on technology most older phones wouldn’t support. "At that point, maybe it’s funny if you can’t answer because your phone isn’t good enough," suggests DiGiorgi. Niekamp chimes in: "Maybe instead it just says, 'Good news/bad news! Your phone is so shitty you have been protected from this screw.' " The conversation shifts before a final answer can be reached.
Back to the screws list. Can they program a question where they’d flip the whole screen upside-down? Jacobs: "It’s…possible. Is it literally for one question in the whole game?"
Niekamp: "How many questions do I need to write to get it into the game?"
Jacobs: "Five."
Niekamp: "All right. Five. Will you be double-checking?"
At the end of my trip, after a couple of days of interviews and meetings, the Jackbox team is ready to let me try the rest of the Party Pack 5 prototypes for myself. I sit down in a conference room with the developers—who, it’s safe to say, are a little better at these games than I am—and we play.
As the games begin, I think about all the bad party games I’ve played over the years, and the awkwardness of me arriving, like a bug, to interrupt the finely tuned machine of the Jackbox office. Over the past few days, I’ve talked to many of the people who work here. But how well do I actually know them?
And in a weird way, isn’t this problem exactly what party games were created to fix? A good one offers an organic platform for connection between people meeting for the first time, unsure whether or not they have anything in common. After a few minutes of playing the Jackbox Party Pack 5 prototypes, we are laughing like friends. These games, at their best, really do serve as a cure for social awkwardness. By the time we play Mad Verse City, we’ve developed a few inside jokes that pop up over and over again in our increasingly vicious rap battles. I’d include them here, but what’s the point? As with any decent joke, you just had to be there.
At this point, Jackbox fans are primed to expect one new Party Pack per year, and there are no plans to change that strategy. The company still sees massive spikes on all the Party Packs over the holidays, as friends and families gather to hang out and play games together. (When I ask about server outages due to spikes in use—which the company has, so far, managed to avoid—one employee on the tech side tells me: "Every New Year’s is stressful. I watch the servers until I see the traffic finally go down, and then I go to bed.")
There’s no reason to believe that the Jackbox Party Pack well will run dry anytime soon. Then again, a Jellyvision employee might have said the same thing in the wild heyday of the original You Don’t Know Jack, when it looked like the company could keep churning out spinoffs every year.
So I have one big question before I leave: In 10 years, will we be playing the Jackbox Party Pack 15?
"It’s working, and it’s growing every year," Bilder says. "But I’m very sensitive to franchise fatigue. This company had that happen in the ’90s, because all it did was You Don’t Know Jack, and ultimately we know how that played out."
The Party Pack is an ideal package because it lets Jackbox have it both ways: a trusted name that permits constant innovation. The company’s developers can toy around with weird new ideas while periodically issuing updated versions of games that have already stood the test of time. (Nothing has been formally announced, or even decided—but over the course of my visit, several people make it clear that they are very, very aware that there is demand for another installment of the cult-favorite Trivia Murder Party from Party Pack 3, which sees a massive spike every Halloween.)
And so there are plans—early, but ongoing—to bring the Jackbox brand to larger venues than your computer screen or living room. There have been some experiments in which crowds have been invited to play Jackbox games in public settings with massive screens, including movie theaters and football stadiums.
Bilder says there are also active discussions about turning one of the more popular Jackbox games—likely Quiplash or Fibbage—into a TV game show. "In the ideal version, the entire audience could join and play," he says. "Imagine Quiplash as a panel show of comedians, and everyone at home can join in—the way you join in at home now—and swing the vote."
So yes, there are big plans for Jackbox’s future. But for the past year, the majority of employees have been laser-focused on the Jackbox Party Pack 5. Now they’ll get to run the numbers and monitor their social-media accounts and see which big-name Twitch streamers embrace their latest creations. Maybe there will even be enough time for a celebratory glass of champagne. And then it’s time to dig through the archives, get out the pen and paper again, and start figuring out what the Jackbox Party Pack 6 is going to be.
