>> PAYTON: Listen, I promise I wrote an intro for this video that was super funny and well-researched, but somebody just wrote, "Farts LOL," and that won.

So... ♪ >> PAYTON: Hello, and welcome to "Flyover Culture," your guided tour to pop culture in the Midwest.

I'm Payton Whaley, and we are back with an all-new season.

I wanted to start season three off with a bang, and I thought, what better way to do that than with the game studio that has been dominating your house parties for the past decade.

Jackbox Games, headquartered here in a very cold Chicago, pumps out a new party pack of five games every single year.

It's easy to see the appeal.

Games like Quiplash and Fibbage and Trivia Murder Party have players use their smartphones to answer prompts, draw, and just basically try and make each other laugh.

But what people might not know is that each of these games takes months, if not years, of work and iteration to get things just right.

So that's what I'm here to try and figure out.

How does a game go from pitch to Party Pack?

♪ But first, some background on Jackbox Games.

Founded in 1989, they dabbled in educational trivia for schools that led to the very first You Don't Know Jack game for CD-ROM in '95.

This led to a whole mess of sequels and spinoffs, and even a short-lived game show on ABC hosted by Pee Wee Herman himself, Paul Reubens.

The American dream!

>> Hello, contestants.

How are you tonight?

>> Oh, just fine.

Just fine.

>> Excellent.

Who asked you?

[ Laughter ] >> PAYTON: Following more sequels and a few name changes, the studio found itself running out of steam in the early 2010s.

So they pivoted to something new, party games you play with your smartphone.

>> We thought, well, what about movie theaters?

Yeah, there's all that time before movies start, and there's a giant screen, and people have their phones out anyway.

You know, plus movie theaters are this evergreen business that will always be popular, right?

We just had people go to a website, togetherplay.TV.

No apps to install.

No controllers.

And guess what, you know, it worked!

People took out their phones and played along.

It was really cool.

>> PAYTON: With this new venture, Jackbox released the first Fibbage as a standalone game in 2014, and then included it in the first ever Jackbox Party Pack later that year.

It was clear the studio had something special on their hands.

And every year since has seen a new party pack of five games.

In 2020, during lockdown, the player base doubled from 100 million to 200 million by that fall.

Five games a year is no small feat, which got me wondering how these things get made.

So I met up with some of the team behind Roomerang, one of my favorites from last year's release.

>> Roomerang is a reality TV show-inspired experience.

We wanted you to come in and feel like you are entering some sort of wild, "Big Brother" style house, and you are coming in as a persona.

The really fun part, which I love, is you vote people out.

But because it's Jackbox, and we want it to be a fun party game, inclusive experience for everyone, when you get voted out, you just lose some points to those people, but then Roomerang is the idea that you are getting, like, tossed out and then boomeranged back into the house.

You say a good-bye speech, and then you come right back in as a brand new player, that everyone has to deal with you then.

>> There's something a little familiar about you, but you've got a new name and different information about yourself.

So what do I know?

>> PAYTON: Developer Alex Weick first pitched the game for Party Pack 8, but he, Brooke, and editorial lead Tim Sniffen revisited the idea for Party Pack 9.

>> So much of our stuff is, like, we're playing it, and then we're realizing like, oh, we thought it was three parts.

And actually, like, this part that we were all so invested in, it's not working.

We're losing people.

We got to get rid of it.

You have to be able to let go of things you thought to be true early on, but also, if you don't have that strong vision driving you through, you are not going to get to the place where you are learning the things that you can let go along the way.

>> PAYTON: It's company policy at Jackbox that any employee can propose a game idea.

>> Any member of the company can come with an idea and kind of shouts out to the rest of the company, like, who's available?

Let's play with this.

Sometimes, like, a little seed of a concept from one game, that the game as a whole didn't work, but that little mechanic gets, like, tossed in the mix with something else and becomes something entirely different.

My pitches are often, like, very straightforward.

I'm like ya telling a joke.

People are gonna tell you, is it a good joke, and then we go to the next round.

[ Laughter ] >> PAYTON: When games get pitched, Brooke says they usually come with a very rudimentary prototype.

>> Some games are just pitched in a paper test, which we say is like when we were in office a lot more.

It was, like, piece of paper being actually tossed around.

Answer this, like, fill out this.

Here's your points.

Now we find ways to do it digitally as well.

So it's like we're on, like, a Jamboard, on, like, some sort of shared space to, like, show the moving pieces.

>> PAYTON: As the design team keeps fiddling with the bones of the game, other members tag in to start realizing the vision.

Like Farhan, who then turns the paper test into something more playable.

>> They were, like, we need somebody who can speak to computers.

And I'm, like, hey, that's me.

And then I came in and kind of did my little computer science magic.

And a lot of the times people will come up to me and say, hey, are you interested in this project?

Do you want to work in this project?

And then kind of go from there.

I picked Roomerang specifically.

I'm, like, nope, I'm working on this one because it's reality TV, thank you very much.

>> PAYTON: It's here that the team starts to realize what's going to work in the final game.

Like, literally work.

But it also helps them figure out the game flow and mechanics.

>> Part of one of my responsibilities is sort of giving that advice on what will work in a digital space.

Like -- if we take this translation, is this going to work digitally?

It works on paper, but how is this going to work in the actual computerland?

>> So the thing that was such a joy to find out that, like, it worked so well, is the good-bye speech.

Because it's not really, like, a game moment in the sense of it's not being judged.

Like, you don't get points for the good-bye speech, but it's so iconic of reality TV, that it was, like, we had to have it.

And the one technical element that made it even better is we were able to do the live typing.

And this we were, like, we really want it to feel like in the room.

So, like, giving people the option, we say in the instructions, like, say it out loud if you want, type it.

And we've seen people do both.

Where someone will give, like, an in-the-room, really passionate speech, and then write something terrible and shut the door.

>> One of the things I love about Jackbox, is it's kind of like a catered experience.

It's all about making you feel like the game is in the room.

The hard part is because it's repetitive, it, like -- well, when you get into the repetitive part of it, now everything has to be perfect.

If it's wrong, you'll see it over and over and over and over again, which is why I don't play our games.

I mean, not because they're not fun, but you have to understand that by the time it's released to the public, I've played this game for 120-some hours.

So by that point, I see nothing but all the things I couldn't get to when I had to ship it.

>> PAYTON: And this last tidbit is for you browser game Homestar Runner heads out there.

>> We actually use our own engine.

So we have our own engine, but it's based on ActionScript 3 or ActionScript.

It's something that Adobe uses, and it's actually based off of Flash.

So if you remember Flash from like Newground's days, and all of those old school days, yeah, we're actually still using that.

You'd be shocked at how many game devs actually still use Flash because there's no better way to show UI.

>> PAYTON: While Farhan was putting together the code, art lead Hector M. Padilla was busy giving Roomerang that signature Jackbox look.

>> Cubism was always in the vision, because I wanted to have art that walked the line of realism and fantasy, and I feel like cubism was a good -- a good way to portray that.

It takes a lot of research.

It takes a lot of preproduction work.

A lot of sketching, a lot of -- I don't know.

When you have limitations like that, it allows you to be more experimental and just explore a lot more.

Surprisingly, I haven't had too much trouble not replicating something that I have done before, while also making a game feel like it's mine.

>> PAYTON: I asked Hector, what makes something look like a Jackbox Game?

>> Our games are like none other, right?

Text is king in our games, and we have a big variety of text, which can go from small title to paragraphs of text.

And so as art leads, we have to highlight text through our art.

That's really our biggest guideline, but for the most part, we're -- we have a lot of creative freedom.

As long as the aesthetics serve the functionality of the game, then that's all that matters.

>> PAYTON: What follows is months of testing and iteration to get everything just right.

>> The camera finds you in tears on the patio.

Who is to blame, and what did they do?

>> PAYTON: And that leads to the final release, when players get their own chance to start drama with friends.

And Brooke will be watching.

>> I lurk on streams, like, sometimes on Twitch, if I see games playing, because I'm always fascinated to see our games in the wild, and just, like, actually hear people playing them.

Reality TV as a concept that can be very divisive and people either love it, hate it, indifferent.

I think watching people grasp on to it, and then go for the ride of it, especially the first time, like, watching people play it the first time is the greatest joy because they get so upset and so worried when they have to eliminate somebody.

And then as soon as they come right back, they're, like, oh, they're just coming back.

Like, this is not -- why were we upset?

Good-bye, Sharon.

Like, why were we so concerned?

>> I'm more someone who likes to see fan art.

Like, I'm always encouraging fans to make art, because -- I don't know, maybe I'm a bit of a narcissist, and I just want to see other people's interpretations of what I have drawn.

>> PAYTON: Jackbox just announced that Party Pack 10 is coming this year.

And if the last nine are any hint, we know the team will keep building on what came before.

>> I learn every year that less is more.

I also learn every year to, like, trust my team's expertise.

Like, I love being proven wrong.

I'm, like, please, please, I dare you.

It's great.

It's better because I was.

>> PAYTON: It's not just on the artistic side either.

There's literally more they can do now than they could in earlier games.

>> This is going to be my little plug on why our games are great.

No, but we added so many features, like subtitles and like dynamic sound, and we played a lot with, like, positioning and stuff like that.

I think our engine has evolved more than the platforms have, more than anything else, because we've just grown as a company, and we've gotten a little bit more ambitious with some of the stuff we do too.

>> PAYTON: Play a few rounds of any Party Pack, and it's not hard to see that the kinds of games this studio makes are very different from other stuff out there.

The devs here know that better than anyone.

>> The one thing I appreciate about our games, it's pure escapism.

It's just let's come into a room, still have our friends, make some jokes, and kind of be on our way.

And it's like a little bite-sized form of that which is great.

You know -- and it's accessible.

I think the one thing I love about Jackbox is that everybody can play.

>> Video games was not anything that I thought I would be working in.

I come from a comedy, like, working in professional comedy in Chicago for years.

So I think because of that, we have a lot of cool artists and comedians and engineers, like all at the company that, like -- the shared vision that the people at the company collectively have is really the heart of what we do and what we make.

And it's -- I just feel very fortunate to be a part of it.

>> Me and my friends, we used to get together, and even though we would talk about whatever, we always had video games in our hands.

Like, just something to do with your fingers, right?

It's just like a good way to bring everybody together and just have a good time in the room, which there's not many games that do that still.

And I like that we can contribute to that community, because it means the world to me.

So -- >> PAYTON: Thanks so much for watching and checking out our new season.

There are more episodes coming, but if there's something you want to see or have questions about, let us know.

Thanks for watching, and I will see you next time.

>> Oh, my gosh.

I think they'd all be really bad.