You Don’t Know Jack is a trivia game from Chicago developer, Jellyvision. It was first introduced in 1995 as a PC CD-ROM title published by Berkeley Systems, whom you might remember as the people who made the “flying toasters” screensaver for your Windows 3.11 machine. Needless to say, YDKJ is the best thing that ever came out of that company. Billed with the tagline, “where high culture and pop culture collide”, YDKJ was (and is) the most well-written trivia game ever made. After spawning a few sequels and spinoffs (e.g. sports), the game disappeared in 2000 and was only recently brought back in a web format in winter of 2006-2007. YDKJ’s charm comes from it’s ability to seamlessly weave stuff like the movie Juno together with Roman mythology in creating trivia questions that will either make you feel smart, or borderline retarded. Either way, you’ll still be having fun.
The webgame consists of 7 questions, the bulk of which are your basic 4-choice trivia questions. Question 3 is always a “Dis or Dat”, where you’re told to categorize several items as they’re thrust in front of you. For example, in the game above, you’re asked whether certain symbols are personal ad abbreviations, element symbols, or both. The last question is always a “Jack Attack” where your goal is to match the right two items as they are presented to you. Taking the example from the game above again, you’re presented with a series of movie titles and you have to match which sport the movie depicts.
What differentiates YDKJ from other, more boring, trivia games is the polished presentation. Every question and choice is voiced by a snarky, yet not annoying announcer named Cookie. The narrative flows such that it feels like a game show written by Diablo Cody. The text and numbers on the screen spring to life like Pixar movie characters, which is an achievement in itself.
I have a fond place in my heart for YDKJ ever since I bought the first edition back in 1995. It was always great fun to have friends over, crammed next to each other at the computer keyboard matched in a battle of wits and lulz. Since then, I made it a point to buy every edition of the game until they stopped making them. I LOVED how creative Jellyvision was in creating the animation/sounds in introducing each question. The game made simple text seem like elaborate works of art. Ironically, this is pretty hard to describe in words, so I’ll link to a youtube video from the original game as a visual aid. If it’s one thing I wish was in the new online version of the game, it’s the fun question number intros. But that might just be for nostalgia’s sake more than anything.
Yahoo! just agreed to distribute You Don’t Know Jack under the Yahoo! casual games banner, so you could argue if this is a “true” indie game still, but fuck it, Jellyvision is still independent and more people need to play this game. The game’s a little over a year old, with 52 episodes + some Dis or Dat standalone games in the archives, so there’s a lot of content to go through.
The best part of it all? It’s free. You don’t even have to register. And it runs on anything. Mac, PC, IE, Firefox. As long as it supports Flash 8.0 it’s good. (here’s hoping for iphone compatibility when Apple gets their act together and patches in Flash support) Every episode of YDKJ is free and there are no annoying ads to go through at all. The experience of playing the game is sublime. Jellyvision has gone as far as allowing you to embed each episode of the game in places where html/flash are allowed. (see above) They even offer an RSS feed of new episodes! This is a developer who knows its shit!
Try out the game at the beginning of this post, I guarantee you’ll like it if you’re into trivia in the slightest.
Play more Jack [youdontknowjack.com]
Visit the developer’s site [jellyvision.com]
