Jackbox Games

About

Jackbox Games is video game development company best known for creating party games such as You Don't Know Jack and later games including Quiplash and Drawful. Online, the games by the company have proven popular on Let's Play channels.

History

Jackbox Games was founded as Jellyfish Games, a division of Jellyfish, in 1995. It created numerous versions of You Don't Know Jack between 1995 and 1998. The company unsuccessfully attempted to enter console gaming, which in led to the shelving of Jellyfish Games.

In 2008, Jellyfish Games was revived with the spread of smart phones. They created an iOS version of You Don't Know Jack and a console version in 2011. The game was awarded the "Social Game of the Year" at the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards. In June of 2013, the company rebranded as Jackbox Games. They released Fibbage, a game in which people bluff others using their smartphones as controllers, for Xbox One and Playstations 3 and 4.

Jackbox Party Pack

The success of Fibbage on streaming sites such as Twitch led Jackbox to package Fibbage, You Don't Know Jack, and other games together as the Jackbox Party Pack. Those games include Quiplash, a game in which players make up punchlines; Drawful, a game in which players draw pictures; Guesspionage, a game similar to Family Feud in which players guess the percentages of statistics; and Monster Seeking Monster, a quasi-dating game.

Online Presence

Online, Jackbox Party Pack games have proven very popular in Let's Play culture. Polygon has an ongoing series in which its employees play the games, regurlaly gaining hundreds of thousands of views (example shown below, left). Several of the games have been played by members of the Game Grumps channel--a video on KittyKatGaming gained over 310,000 views (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References