You Don’t Need an App: The Story of the Jackbox Controller Alan Lopez for Nintendo Life: Since it’s the 10th anniversary of the first Jackbox video game, I want to start with what I view as probably the most pivotal decision for the success of Jackbox: adopting the ability to connect to play Jackbox using only your phone browser. Can you speak to how that decision happened?
Mike Bilder, CEO of Jackbox Games: Yeah, there's a storied history there, so to answer that I need to go back a little further.
The company has been around since 1989. Back then, it was called Learn Television, and then it turned into what became Jellyvision, which was known for the You Don't Know Jack franchise in the ‘90s. The company fell on tough times, and the founder kind of shuttered the games company, then founded a new company called the Jellyvision Lab which wasn’t centred on games. That company actually still exists as Jellyvision today.
It’s hard to get people rallied around a game where you say, “Okay, you have an Android phone or an iOS phone, go to this app store, then download this thing.”
But [around the mid-2000s], the Nintendo Wii became really popular, and the idea of couch play and family gaming started becoming appealing again. Jellyvision thought it might be time to restart the company to try to make fun party games.
Fast forward to 2013, we were coming off a number of mobile products, like Facebook gaming [with] You Don’t Know Jack on mobile. And those all had various levels of success, but they weren't really sustainable, so we were looking to get back into the premium marketplace. That’s where we got into the idea of indie self-publishing.
We’re talking about when downloading games to your console just started to become more common, right?
Right! Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo had just started to allow self-publishing from indies; before, you'd have to have a big publisher associated. So that opened a whole bunch of doors for us as a small company.
But one of the big problems that occurred in the ‘90s, which is why the company shuttered, was the transition from the CD-ROM platform toward the first wave of disk-based consoles. I mean, You Don't Know Jack was a trivia game where you buzzed in on a keyboard and then you had to type in your answers. Translating that to a home console where you might have one controller doesn't make for a very fun party game experience. So this brings us to the controller method.
We first brought You Don't Know Jack to, if you remember this, the OUYA platform. Because we had done PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, and PC builds, we already knew the control was going to be a hurdle. It's more fun to play the game with multiple people, [but] the OUYA consumer wasn’t going to go out and buy four controllers. So we made an app called the JackPad, which was a mobile app on Android and iOS that you could download to your phone. And that app had technical hurdles: it had to be on the same network that your OUYA was connected to, and you had to connect your phone to it. We quickly learned from that OUYA experience that an app was friction.
Who remembers this? — Image: OUYA It’s hard to get people rallied around a game where you say, “Okay, you have an Android phone or an iOS phone, go to this app store, then download this thing.” So we wanted to eliminate as much friction as we possibly could. It was a little bit out of necessity. It was a little bit out of opportunity. And it turned into a little bit of just the right place at the right time.
But even then, there were hurdles to trying to get phone browsers to work with consoles. They were very locked-down ecosystems back in the day. If you wanted to run a cloud server that talked to a game on an Xbox or a PlayStation, you had to go through this whitelisting program and make sure it wasn't going to introduce viruses. But we pushed through, and there was a reason for it. It's not just skinning a gamepad so you don't have to go out and buy another controller, it's because you need it. You needed to be able to type or draw with your finger, and those different modes of play were only unlocked by having Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo allowing it. But it also then unlocked for us this amazing kind of catalogue of opportunity. “What can we do with this now that we’ve got it?”
You pointed out that the phone being your controller was pragmatically better, sure, but I think the decision to go in that direction is clearer in retrospect. During that era, many CEOs, people, and companies pushed “app adoption” as the ultimate measure of success. It would have been so easy to just try and get people to download an app, like so many others.
I think having gone through the process of making the Jack app, it was still the obvious answer. And you know, we weren't the first to make your phone do some kind of control mechanism. Other people had done that kind of thing.
But apps were the name of the game back then.
It was all about apps. But we recognized the friction. When we first started this, I think there were still Windows phones back in the day. And it's like, do we have to support an app on a Windows phone now? Because a tenth of the population was still working on Windows. But it was really the friction in the moment of that collective groan in the room, the ”oh, now go to the App Store, now download this, I get on my Wi-Fi…,” and we learned that there needs to be something simpler and frictionless.
Image: Jackbox Games How Jackbox Games Get Invented So what exactly is the process of creating a new game?
We do an annual release of a pack of games. And so it's open to the entirety of the studio, it doesn't matter what you do [at the company]. You can be a part of this process. If you've got a cool idea for a game, you can pitch your cool idea for a game.
We don't just have a couple of ordained people who are the creative brain trust of the company
After a pitch, it will have one of three outcomes. It can be greenlit, which means you're in this next pack, and we'll start forming a team around it immediately. It can go into a yellow light state, which means something's not quite right. We love the concept, but we need to figure out a few things — the scoring doesn't make sense or the final round isn't a thing, or it's lacking some user interaction. And then a red light is "we don't think this is right," either it's not working or it doesn't fit into what our ambitions are for this year.
If we're making a pack, as we green-light games, we get a little more strict and focused. In the beginning, the funnel's huge — any game idea, any concept, any mechanic [is considered]. As we start to green-light games that have certain genres or mechanics, the funnel shrinks. We don't want a pack of games that has three trivia games in it, for example.
Do you personally work with Creative at all?
Absolutely! There is a Chief Creative Officer [Allard Laban] at the company. But again, Jackbox is pretty unique in that everybody has had some hand in Creative. We don't just have a couple of ordained people who are the creative brain trust of the company.
Some rejected game logos that didn't quite make the cut — Images: Jackbox Games Are there like, bragging rights, or even a monetary component for how many games someone has gotten made over time?
Well, there's no monetary thing, in a sense. But there are a few people who have more of a knack for making a successful pitch or spearheading some successful games that have been greenlit and have been in various party packs. But it's actually broader than you would think. Again, it's not like we have one or two creatives in the studio who are the brain trust behind Jackbox.
‘Shirtality’! The History of Quiplash, Tee K.O. and More I would be guessing, but are you able to tell me your most popular game over the 10 years?
What do you think our most popular game is?
Quiplash?
You got it.
I mean, which is not to say that there aren't other games people are obsessed with. I love Trivia Murder Party for example! But I'm definitely curious about the development of Quiplash. Was there a moment when the team was like, "oh, this is the one "?
Yeah, so while we were developing the first Party Pack, after Fibbage, there was a simple prototype of taking what was the Fibbage engine and breaking it down into something funnier. That was the basis of what became Quiplash. And it was very, very funny. Every time we played it, it was funny. And the nice thing about that game is it's accessible to anybody, it needed almost no explanation on how to play, so it naturally became the most accessible, quickest to laughs, easiest kind of prototype of the game that we made.
Image: Jackbox Games We probably had 20-25 people tops in the studio at that time. So when ideas like that came out, we'd prototype them and play them. It was "How quickly can we build this"? The basis for which we pitch, prototype, and test games now has grown in scope and complexity because the nature of our games has gotten a little more complex and more graphically pleasing, but the basis is still: how fast do you get to laughter? With Quiplash, it was instantaneous. Time to laughter is like zero.
The voice of Quiplash, how did you cast that?
So there's a couple of stalwarts that we've had in the company for quite a long time. Cookie Masterson, who's the voice of You Don't Know Jack, works for us. His name's Tom Gottlieb , and he's voice hosted a number of games, including Fakin' It and Fibbage and a couple of other games. And Phil Ritterelli is a character called Schmitty in the original You Don't Know Jack…and so he's the voice of Quiplash.
Every time we played it, it was funny.
The nice thing is we're based out of Chicago, so we have access to a lot of the Chicago comedy scene. There's the Improv Olympics , there's Second City , there's all that stuff in Chicago. And a lot of the folks who work for us have come through those programs or they still work in Second City, but they write for us. And so there's a real comedy bent and a performative bent to a lot of the folks that work for us.
So you still do casting calls?
We absolutely do that. We do auditions. We do auditions for writing positions, contract writing positions, and full-time writing positions. We do the same for voice talent. And there is this fandom of some of them because they know the voices from back in the ‘90s.
What was the first game you made besides Quiplash where you felt it had a bigger impact than you anticipated?
Well, Fibbage was the first standalone game that used our tech. So that, to me, is the pivotal one that was either going to prove this is going to work or not. And in all candour, back then, the company was kind of running out of money. We were trying to keep the lights on. We had great ideas and great talent, but it's like anything in the video game space: you've got to keep working at it. You've got to keep launching products.
Image: Jackbox Games But the big thing we didn't anticipate was that Twitch was starting to grow and take off. We didn't anticipate people streaming our games. So when we did Quiplash the next year, we added an audience mode which brought the ability for up to 10,000 people to join a single game session. And that was intentionally to cater to the streamers and the Twitch community that wanted to play the games that way. That has persisted since then and throughout the franchise.
So my favourite Jackbox game is Tee K.O.
Great. Have you bought any T-shirts?
I haven't, but I wanted to ask you about that. What on Earth was the process for scaling being able to print a t-shirt literally any time you play the game? And do you actually see all the t-shirts that come in yourself?
The funny thing is, there is a screening process that happens at the printer to reject shirts, thankfully. And we pay for that so we don't have to do it ourselves, but some still get through. We get the undeliverable ones and the return ones, which are often very tame. But then we'll also get the t-shirts that should have been rejected, but somehow still got printed, and those go in the trash because they'll probably have the worst thing you can imagine printed on them.
These are both acceptable — Image: Jackbox Games There is a bin of them in the office, and sometimes we'll go through them and offer them up to people in the studio, but after that, we'll donate them. But then the terrible ones... we get rid of them.
That’s…incredible. When did the idea to print the shirts come into play?
That process was an interesting one. It was just a very funny pitch. We had a couple of interns at the time, and we challenged one of them to build a process that would make [printing shirts] happen. There's a very small number of vendors, even now, that will do print-on-demand, one-off shirts and not charge a ridiculous amount of money for them. Miraculously, at launch, we had it ready to go, and my directive was that this didn’t need to be a big revenue item for us, it was just meant to be a fun novelty and a way to spread the word about our games. It didn’t have to set the world on fire.
"Do you really think that's my job? Like I read every question and memorize them all?"
Fast forward to now, and it's still a revenue line item for us. People buy enough shirts that we still make money off of selling them.
Do you see them on people sometimes?
Oh yeah. I'm sure there's people walking around in them at PAX right now. And you know immediately that it's a Tee K.O. shirt. We can spot it at least. Yeah, you see them.
Of course, I have to ask you what your personal favourite game is.
I get that question a lot.
I know. I'm sorry (laughs)
I understand. (laughs) I do really like Fibbage. It's always been my go-to, the one that I can be good at, the one that I can be funny at, the one that I can have the most fun with with the broadest of audiences. In particular, Fibbage 3 is the one that I love the best out of all the ones we've made. But it's personal. It's like asking somebody their favourite kid, I don't know. I love both of my kids, I can't pick a favourite.
The better question is, as the CEO, do you always win? Are you great at it?
No. No! And the problem is, I get that stereotype when I play. If I start doing well, people are like, "Oh, well, you know all the questions!" And I’m like, "Do you really think that's my job? Like I read every question and memorize them all?" First off, it would be impossible. (laughs) I don't. I don't know the answers. Maybe the writers who wrote those prompts have an advantage. But, no, it depends on the group. I can win and be funny with certain groups, and then there are others that I can't. But I have fun trying.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Thank you to Mike Bilder for taking the time to speak to us. Jackbox Naughty Pack and Jackbox Survey Scramble , the latest Jackbox games, are out now. You can also pick up every single Jackbox game on the eShop now.
