Hi, we’re Jackbox Games. People may know us for our popular Jackbox Party Packs (available on this very site, did we mention?) but, like that week-long romance you had in Europe… you may not know our full history.

Pull up a chair. We’re feeling chatty.

Jackbox Games began as Learn Television, founded in 1989 by Harry Nathan Gottlieb to realize his vision of making short, engaging educational films for schools. (Not that curling up with a stack of encyclopedias isn’t awesome, but it’s nice to have options.)

In the nineties, between rooting for Ross and Rachel to get together, Learn Television developed an education-focused trivia game called That’s A Fact, Jack! (see where this is headed?), distributed to schools on these shiny round objects you can find in museums called CD-ROMs.

At the same time, Berkeley Systems, creator of the After Dark screensaver series, for which people paid actual real money, was looking for cool new ideas. One of their creative leads reached out to Harry, who proposed reinventing That’s A Fact, Jack! for adults (translation: adding a bunch more fart sounds). Learn Television became Jellyvision Games, and in 1995, the CD-ROM trivia sensation You Don’t Know Jack was born.

Many You Don’t Know Jack titles followed: YDKJ Sports, YDKJ Movies, there may have even been a YDKJ: Police Procedurals with Singing.

There were also seven episodes of an ABC television show.

We don’t talk about that.

But nothing lasts forever, except Hormel canned meat products. CD-ROMs fell out of use and consoles like the Sega Dreamcast and Sony Playstation took over. A surge of first-person shooters and driving games left us searching for a place in this new landscape… even though you can fire screws at the screen in You Don’t Know Jack 4: The Ride.

Around this time Harry began another new venture, The Jellyvision Lab, which would focus on crafting engaging experiences for businesses using all the “interactive conversation” principles Harry had developed along the way.

With the appearance of the Nintendo Wii in 2006, social games seemed poised to make a comeback. Mike Bilder was brought on board in 2008 as General Manager and we made a version of YDKJ for consoles. We also tried hosting YDKJ on Facebook, with new questions every week. Someone even got engaged using the Facebook game. Google it.

Following the increasing popularity of smartphones and mobile devices, we developed games like Lie Swatter and Word Puttz (the tagline was not “You’ll Believe A Squid Can Golf” but it should have been) and apps like Clone Booth. These projects may not have redefined the genre, but we loved making them and, sure, we still think about them late at night sometimes.

Around this time, Jellyvision Labs was finding its own brand of success in the healthcare world with a product called ALEX. To distinguish the two companies, we became Jackbox Games.

Fun fact! “Jack” comes from, well… that thing You Don’t Know, and “Box Six” is lingo used by our writers for the joke that often follows a You Don’t Know Jack trivia question. Hence: “Jack” + “Box” (we added “Games” so we could finally stop receiving junk mail for Jackbox Personal Panini Stations).

It was 2013. Jackbox Games had lots of interesting projects and ideas, but not as much, how can we put this, “money to pay for things like electricity and snacks.”

With a decreased staff and about ten months of remaining time, the studio decided to focus our efforts on a console game that people would play using only their phones. Later that year we released Fibbage, a social bluffing game, as a standalone product that employed the new “phone as controller” approach.

People liked it. We made more.

2014 saw the release of the first Jackbox Party Pack, five games under one roof that guaranteed something for everyone.

Since then, we’ve released one Party Pack each year. 2020 even saw the release of our first Jackbox title localized for international audiences. With each set of games, we push ourselves to find new uses for our phone controllers: in The Devils And The Details in Party Pack 7, players can wash dishes and sort through a pile of socks. (Just as Charles Babbage, inventor of the first computer, would have wanted.)

Whether played on one big couch or remotely, we’re glad people have been entertained by our products. We love finding new ways to bring people together to laugh and enjoy each other’s company. That’s as true today in 2021 as it was when we got started. 

Thanks for listening to our story and sharing this park bench. Now, like a feather bobbing along on a gentle breeze… we’ll be on our way.