Learn About the Inspiration Behind The Jackbox Party Pack 5
Our team has been so excited to bring The Jackbox Party Pack 5 to Xbox One players. We feel that this Party Pack showcases the fun gameplay you’ve come to expect from us while throwing in some major surprises that we think you’ll love. We made it our goal to home in on the things that players (and streamers) would appreciate the most, while pushing the boundaries with new features, including a completely new style of game that we’ve never attempted before. We’ll let you decide for yourself, but we’ve already heard from fans, during our streams, and at conventions, that this is “the best pack yet.”
You Don’t Know Jack is our longest-running and probably most-loved series of games. It’s been four years since the last one because it was important to us to wait until we had a fresh take on the classic formula. You Don’t Know Jack: Full Stream sees the game (and long-time host Cookie Masterson) acquired by the mysterious media-streaming service, Binjpipe. It’s a big scenery change that allowed us to play with the game in really fun ways. We knew we had a structure and style from previous games that worked well. That left us free to take chances while building on that existing framework. The game has all the twisted trivia and snark you’d expect, along with new question types, new ways to screw other players, a bigger, crazier Jack Attack, and tons more.
We’ve always had a love for weird hypothetical questions, but just talking about them always felt more like an activity than an actual game. That is until we developed Split the Room. It’s easy to create a hypothetical scenario that gets a unanimous response; it’s more challenging and fun to create something that’s really divisive. In addition to the trippy ‘50s sci-fi TV aesthetic, players will love the ridiculous conversations the game prompts. You might think you know your friends well, but wait until you see the bizarre scenarios they come up with.
Mad Verse City is the result of our engineers experimenting with different technologies and bringing new features to the table. Two key additions came into play for Party Pack 5: a more robust audio system and the ability to utilize text-to-speech. We ran with this and turned it into Mad Verse City’s core concept while rooting the look and feel of the game in some dope ‘90s hip-hop and animation. What we love most about this game is that anything you submit in your rap verses can be funny. The absurdity of giant robots trying to verbalize the nonsense you type in is always hilarious. That said, there’s room to get seriously competitive at the game, if you’ve got the mad rap skills to back it up.
In Patently Stupid, we wanted to create a game about inventing ridiculous things. The crazier the better. We just needed a framework where the crazy made sense. Challenge accepted. When we thought about how people interact in a room or on a stream, and about how our games often involve voting, it inspired us to develop a game based on players creating inventions and then selling their ideas, using our own fake presentation tool. (Plus, we love Shark Tank.) Patently Stupid really leans into giving the player tons of creative freedom. It’s a game that’s limited only by your weird imagination.
Believe it or not, Zeeple Dome actually started out as a strategy game! During production, we were looking for a game that would force you to rely on and coordinate with your friends. What we found was that the best way to get people to communicate was to go all-in with a chaotic action game. We wanted to push our controller tech to places we’d never gone before. The resulting game is a hilarious mix of satisfying game-winning shots and situations where your friends accidentally fling themselves into you, propelling you into a game-losing explosion.
Overall, we were inspired to create a Party Pack that welcomes new players, while still remaining a distinctly Jackbox Games experience. Let us know what you think by sharing your thoughts on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. We hope you enjoy it!