The Jackbox Party Pack 10 gameplay revealed in new trailer as series celebrates important milestone
The Jackbox Party Packs have been synonymous with a good time over the years – in fact, they have lightened up the lives of many people for a decade now, making the upcoming The Jackbox Party Pack 10 a special release for the team behind the series. Like previous packages, this iteration contains five mini-games people can play basically everywhere and with everyone:
- Tee K.O. 2 (three to eight players)
- FixyText (three to eight players)
- Hypnotorious (four to eight players)
- Timejinx (one to eight players)
- Dodo Re Mi (one to nine players)
Today, for the first time, Jackbox Games has revealed gameplay of the mini-games included with The Jackbox Party Pack 10 in a trailer you can find below:
Looks like a riot, eh?
We’ve had the chance to speak with Jackbox Games’ CEO, Mike Bilder, about the company’s eventful journey over the past years that led to this point: “As a studio, we’ve gone through quite a journey since making the first Party Pack,” Bilder says. “We started with 15 team members and now we have a staff almost five times that size. We’ve evolved in so many ways.”
Indeed, shipping ten iterations of any series is a big achievement. “Not many studios get to keep making the games they love making for so many years,” Bilder tells us. “We are incredibly lucky to hit this milestone and we wouldn’t be able to do this without our fans.” He calls the series’ fans its “biggest advocates and ambassadors” and says the company owes “this longevity to them.”
This motivation and growth shows in the bigger scope Jackbox Games has been able to think of for its upcoming Party Pack, which will fully support French, Italian, Spanish, and German as languages alongside new settings and features.
Jackbox Games celebrates a decade of fun-filled game nights with The Jackbox Party Pack 10.
Jackbox Games
While The Jackbox Party Packs have been known since their successful debut in 2014, it was the Covid-19 pandemic that really propelled the series’ success into overdrive. Restrictions and total shutdowns of public life around the world led to a surge in popularity for the brand, which allowed people to have fun and socialize with their friends even from afar. “People using our games to stay connected during lockdown is an important part of our history, and something we hear about from fans all the time,” Bilder comments.
Jackbox Games made the most of it: “With such rapid growth of our player base, it became really important to us that we start to personalize our messaging for the different kinds of players experiencing our games.“ Bilder expands on this point: “Jackbox Games are played by traditional ‘gamers’ but they are also played by people who have never previously played a game on a PC or console. That means that we needed to create a lot of guides and messaging for each persona of player that might want to try out our titles. We have guides for teachers, event planners, family gatherings and more all accessible via our website.”
This approach has allowed the company to keep the momentum going even after the global health situation normalized. “Even though people aren’t necessarily having as many Zoom hangouts as they used to, we still have seen consistent growth across all of our social media channels and our official Discord,” Bilder reports. At the end of the day, “our games are about connecting people together and by being very present and active in these spaces, we’re helping people find new ways and excuses to make friends and have a game night.” And that’s always going to be relevant.
Another reason why The Jackbox Party Packs have been able to keep their relevance is that the studio isn’t afraid of adapting to new trends and developments in the gaming space: “It quickly became clear that these games were being used in a variety of settings that extended beyond the confines of a family living room or college dorm,” Bilder says. That’s why Jackbox Games added an audience feature to allow its mini-games to be played at large-scale live events or be directly streamed online. Different settings were added as well to cope with those changes. Bilder names things like family-friendly filters “that can easily be enabled when you might not want that late night Quiplash humor. We have also built profanity filtering and moderation tools that have become crucial to streamers.”
The Jackbox Party Packs run on a massive variety of platforms – while a dream in terms of approachability, Bilder admits that it’s “certainly a challenge to take all of these things into consideration” on a technical level. The company’s QA testing, he says, has to be quite rigorous to account for all the different circumstances its games can be played in. “But that variety of platforms is part of what makes our games so approachable — a Twitch streamer can be playing on the latest console with an audience of 10,000 at the same time that a family of four is playing in their living room on their Apple TV,” he adds.
Accessibility is another area in which the company had to improve over the years. The upcoming Party Pack will include features such as “extended timers, captions, and moderation tools all designed to make the games playable for a wide range of people,” Bilder confirms.
When it comes to the mini-games included in the important milestone that is The Jackbox Party Pack 10, Bilder explains, “we felt a couple things were important in choosing the games: delivering on what we know our fans love and surprising them with something new and exciting.” That’s why the fans' years-long pleas for a sequel to Tee K.O. – a fan favorite from Party Pack 3 – were finally answered. “Party Pack 10 felt like the right time to bring it back, and Tee K.O. 2 comes with some updated drawing tools that we’ve built as we’ve created more party games.”
Overall, the new package comes with a selection of games that is supposed to “contain the same DNA that this franchise was built on.” However, the company also wanted to break on unfamiliar ground on this occasion, a move which comes in the form of Dodo Re Mi: “This is our first ever music game, and we hope our audiences will be delighted by Jackbox’s take on this genre,” Bilder says.
The Jackbox Party Pack 10 contains Jackbox Games' first attempt at a music game.
Jackbox Games
Every bundle the company releases is built to cater to as many tastes as possible, the CEO tells us. “The beautiful thing about a Party Pack including five games is that there’s truly something for everyone. Ask a group of friends what their favorite game is, and they’ll all have a different answer. Party Pack 10 is no exception with its variety.”
Test runs with fans at PAX West yielded some amazing energy, Bilder recounts: “All of the work that goes into these games starts to feel like it pays off when you get to hear the laughter bursting out around the room.” Personally, he looks forward to seeing FixyText in the hands of players the most, because it shares a key mechanic in one of his favorite pastimes at work: “I’ve also been known to troll groups simultaneously editing Google docs in meetings. I know I laugh out loud every time I play it or even just watch it. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing our players like that one.”
While it’s like asking a parent to choose between one of their children, we just had to know the CEO’s favorite title out of everything Jackbox Games has released over the years. “If I had to pick one, it’d be Fibbage,” he responds. There is a story behind this choice, of course, and it’s deeply connected to the company’s history: “Years ago when we were pivoting the company from making games on Facebook and mobile we prototyped Fibbage and had it working on an iPad. One evening while testing out our mobiles-as-controllers technology at a large venue in Chicago the team went out for dinner. At dinner we put the iPad on the table and we all took out our phones and played that prototype version of Fibbage in the restaurant.”
“We were laughing and having fun and numerous people took notice of what we were doing, including our server,” Bilder recounts. “A few of us knew at that moment that we were on to something – both with Fibbage, and with the technology we had built. That led to the first Party Pack and the rest is history. Fibbage will always have a special place for me because of that time in Jackbox’s history… and it’s one of the few games we make that I’m pretty good at!”
Looking back at it all, Bilder says: “Working at Jackbox has been an enormously rewarding journey. I love our Jackbox team and the incredibly fun and funny products they’ve created. It’s been so fun to work alongside them and laugh every day while doing it. And it’s the most rewarding thing to see the joy our Party Pack games have brought to the world over the past decade.” It certainly looks like this crew won’t run out of ideas any time soon.
The Jackbox Party Pack 10 will be released for PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, and PS5 later this year. For a more detailed – and a little wild – look at the quintet of mini-games that awaits you in this bundle, check out the five top reasons to be excited about The Jackbox Party Pack 10 on Geeky Parade.
