Allard Laban dives into the past, present, and future of Jackbox Games
21.11.2023 - 16:09
/ gamedeveloper.com
The launch of The Jackbox Party Pack 10 last month marks a milestone for the Chicago-based Jackbox Games, having released a multi-platform party pack containing five games every year since 2014.
But the studio’s history stretches further back than just the past decade, all the way back to the 90s when it was known as Jellyvision Games, a history that Jackbox Games’ chief creative officer Allard Laban was a part of.
“I was working for Berkeley Systems, which was famous for doing After Dark screensavers, but we worked with Jellyvision to publish a CD-ROM game based on…a HyperCard stack they had created, and I was the original art director on that title,” he tells us.
This was the first version of You Don’t Know Jack, which later became one of the five games included in the inaugural Jackbox Party Pack. It was also the beginning of Laban’s long, beautiful relationship with Jellyvision that'd eventually help the company evolve into Jackbox Games.
Laban didn’t initially make the jump from Berkeley Systems to Jellyvision however. He left the former company to work at Disney. “I was a producer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, so we did a CD-ROM version of that game [in North America], and I hired Jellyvision to write and produce it,” he explains.
It was after that game he decided to work solely with his recurrent creative partners. “I had so much fun working with Jellyvision again that I quit Disney and moved to Chicago.”
That move came in 2000 as the sixth console generation was arriving, which not only saw a graphical and technical leap in consoles on par with PC but also what he and the studio described as “the dark at the end of the tunnel” for casual games.
A huge drop in revenue led to significant layoffs, reducing the studio from 75 to just six people, and a need to reinvent itself. This resulted in the creation of The Jellyvision Lab, which repurposed the company’s existing voice-driven interactive pipeline into business software that helped people with selecting medical benefits.
The casual game marketplace rebounded in the era of the Nintendo Wii, as families and large groups gathered around the TV to play games together again. It felt like an opportunity for Jellyvision Games as an entity to come back. This initially took the form a few work-for-hire projects as well as a deal with THQ that saw new editions of You Don’t Know Jack released for the Wii and its contemporary platforms in 2011. An effort to create a Facebook-optimized version of the game proved to be disastrous. “That almost killed us for good,” says Laban. “It’s unlike Farmville or any kind of puzzle game because you need content to keep it alive, so it was really expensive and time-consuming to keep this game going.”
It would take the