Studio Profile
Inside the house that Jack built
How Jackbox Games went from making educational CD-ROMs to leader of the party pack
From the outside, the regularity of Jackbox Games’ schedule might look like carefully calculated clockwork. After all, a new Party Pack – its compilation of five party games – has arrived every October or November since 2014. But the truth, spanning more than three decades and as many name changes, is far messier. The fact the Chicago studio still exists can’t be taken for granted.
When Harry Gottlieb founded the company in 1989, it was as Learn Television, an educational multimedia company. Initially producing films, its first real hit was 1993’s That’s A Fact, Jack!, one of many CD-ROMs of the era that attempted to make learning fun – in this case, by turning reading comprehension tests into an interactive game show, with a host who’s equal parts endearing and annoying. It’s a format that has served the studio well over the years.
As Evan Jacover, who joined in 1998 as an intern and is now CTO, tells it: “Someone said to Harry Gottlieb, ‘You should make a game like this for adults’.” This suggestion led to You Don’t Know Jack. Its mix of general knowledge and pop culture and weird sense of humour found an audience, resulting in the firm – rebranded as Jellyvision – taking what chief creative officer Allard Laban calls “a detour into making games”. It was one hell of a detour. Jellyvision produced five main instalments of You Don’t Know Jack in as many years.
This path was reinforced in 1999, when Jellyvision was chosen to develop an interactive version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. What followed was “the shortest turnaround of development I’ve ever seen,” Laban recalls. “It was like six to eight weeks, to get it on the shelf in time for Christmas.” None of which proved an impediment to its success. The game shipped a million copies in its first four weeks, making it the fastest-selling CD-ROM of all time – at least, until The Sims came along.
However, there was a sense that, in taking this path, Jellyvision had pigeonholed itself as a studio that made a particular kind of game – one that didn’t fit on the consoles which were currently ascendant. “Realistically we only had one game, which was You Don’t Know Jack,” Laban says. “Trying to break out from that was hard, because publishers knew us for one thing at that time.”
In an effort to find the next big idea, Jellyvision started to hold internal brainstorming sessions. It didn’t work out at the time, but these sessions did plant vital seeds – albeit ones that wouldn’t see light for almost 15 years. One of those seeds was Word Spud, a simple Flash game. Though ‘game’ might actually be overstating it – the idea was borrowed from an improv warm-up exercise, and its fill-in-the-blank structure was mostly a tool for making jokes together. “We never released it,” Jacover says, but it was kept alive just as a toy for the office. “Whenever we played it at work, everyone would laugh a lot.”
Without a killer game idea to take over from Jack, the detour was over. Jellyvision went through
“[ YOU DON’T KNOW JACK] HAD A BOOM PERIOD. BUT LIKE A LOT OF GAMES IN THAT ERA, IT ALSO HAD A BUST PERIOD”
brutal layoffs – over the course of 2001, it went from 80 employees to ten – and pivoted again. The game side of the business spent the next few years, as Laban puts it, “on life support”, while Jellyvision became Jellyvision Lab. It took work-forhire development gigs, returned briefly to its roots in education and leveraged its experience with voice-led games into a corporate ‘interactive conversation interface’ tool.
Eventually, in 2008, Jellyvision decided to give games another shot, and relaunched Jellyvision Games as a subsidiary. So what changed? “Nintendo Wii had come out, and it was reopening the door to a lot of casual games,” Jacover says. “We were seeing different age groups playing games again, and playing together in the same room.” The conditions were perfect for the types of games the studio made, and in 2011, You Don’t Know Jack made its way back to PC and consoles – including Wii. “That allowed us to pay our bills for a few years and try to figure out something else,” Jacover says. Jellyvision Games separated from the other side of the business, became its own company again, and started “dabbling in different kinds of games and apps in the mobile market”, Laban says.
The studio attempted to expand its horizons with titles like Lie Swatter and Scrabble-golf hybrid Word Puttz. These never quite found an audience, and while You Don’t Know Jack saw success in 2012 as a free-to-play Facebook game, Jellyvision struggled to monetise it. “It had a boom period,” says Jacover. “But like a lot of games in that era, it also had a bust period.” And so, again, the studio went through what Laban calls “lean years.”
As Jellyvision changed its name one last time, in 2013, history looked set to repeat itself. The studio couldn’t escape the niche it had dug for itself, and that niche simply wasn’t profitable in the current gaming landscape. “At the time I was like, well, Jackbox Games is probably going to go out of business,” Jacover admits. “We were really struggling to find traction in a game that wasn’t You Don’t Know Jack. And we couldn’t keep going back to that well and making more.”
This rebranding wasn’t intended to align Jackbox with the product it’s now synonymous with – the Party Packs weren’t so much as an eyetwinkle at this point. But in retrospect, you can see how each step was leading the studio there. “There was no ‘aha’ moment,” Jacover says. “It was a series of experiments that led us down a path. And that was kind of the fun of it all.”
The comeback began with an inauspicious project: yet another version of You Don’t Know Jack, this time a launch title for Ouya. The Android-based console had just become one of the biggest Kickstarter campaigns of all time, thanks in part to its $99 price tag. “But each controller was $50,” Jacover recalls. “So we