TheJackbox Naughty Packadds a spicy, adult twist to the classicJackbox Party Packformula, introducing players to three M-rated titles for the first time in the franchise’s history. In theJackbox Naughty Pack, fans can play a new debate-style game called Let Me Finish, where players go head-to-head to present answers to what seem like hilarious and unusual prompts. It also gives two popularJackboxmini-games the sequel treatment with Dirty Drawful and Fakin' It All Night Long as adult re-remixes of the ever-popular Drawful and Fakin' It.
Game Rant recently sat down withJackbox Games' CEO Mike Bilder to hear more about the processes and decision-making behind creating theJackbox Naughty Packand how the company selected the games for it with so many potential candidates to choose from. Bilder also revealed his favorite game in the Naughty Pack, spoke more about the future, and much more.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Why Jackbox Games Created The Naughty Pack
Q: Could you tell us a bit more about the decision behind releasing three M-rated titles and creating the Naughty Pack?
Bilder:Sure. We’ve got a lot of customer feedback over the years. In fact, we do an annual customer survey, just trying to better understand how people are playing, what they enjoy, and what they wish we would make. On that open-ended question of a wish list for any of our customers, it’s consistently come back that they wanted us to make an M-rated game. It’s no secret that people play our games that way anyway.
They are all rated T for teen historically and in the US, at least with the ESRB. Most of them rely on user-generated content, so you may kind of make the game as adult as you want to make the game. But what we consistently do with the editorial and the design is keep it at that teen rating in what we present, and we let the users do what they like. Again, in soliciting our fans, they want us to make an M-rated game.
It’s also not overly surprising. We’ve had 10 years ofParty Packs, for instance, so if somebody played the games when they were a teenager and they’re still playing the games now, they’re in their 20s. If somebody started playing in their 20s, now they’re in their 30s. It makes a little sense that there’s a demand for a more mature version of our games. This year, we decided, let’s do something different, and let’s lean into that and try to make games that cater to that audience.
Yeah, and I guess many of your fans have grown up, as you say, with these games as you’ve released them over the last 10 packs. So, it’s catering to that slightly different audience, in a way?
How Jackbox Games Chose Games For The Naughty Pack
Q: How did you decide which games to include?
Bilder:If you’ve read or followed anything on how we do our game pitching at Jackbox, we let everyone in the studio participate in that exercise. We always will look at titles that are popular, that haven’t had a sequel treatment. We also look at having a bit of a bell curve of experiences within a pack of games. They’re not all drawing games, or they’re not all fill-in-the-blank, or they’re not alltrivia games. We attempt to make a variety, and so we kind of keep that in mind as games are pitched.
Fakin' It is one of the most popular games that we have, and we have never done a sequel treatment to that. It seemed very ripe for you could make adult or kind of spicy content for that game, that could be fun with adults, so Fakin' It bubbled to the top right away. We wanted a drawing game and a drawing mechanic and again, Drawful is a huge fan favorite. It made a whole lot of sense to change all the editorial up in Drawful and attempt to embrace what an M-rated title would look like.
Then we also are always looking for new ideas and new IP and that’s where Let Me Finish came in a pitch. It’s just a bit of creative exploration. We’re in that phase right now at the studio, for instance, where people are ideating and concepting games and pitching games. The same process happened withtheNaughty Pack, and then we ended up selecting what we thought was the best well-rounded pack and also the most fun games. The ones we were laughing the most at, the ones that we thought would resonate the most with the consumers.
Q: When creating the pack, were there any other games that you considered or any other brand-new games?
Bilder:Always [laughs]. That’s always the case there. I think there are a handful of games that would make obvious candidates to be in an M-rated pack. Maybe that’ll happen at some point in the future, and then there’s always new games. In fact, in many instances, games get re-pitched year after year that weren’t maybe quite ready, or they didn’t quite figure something out in the mechanic, the final round, or the scoring.
Games are constantly brought up again each season and sometimes they’ll move forward. For instance, a popular title likeTrivia Murder Partywas pitched multiple times before it was greenlit. There were a number of games that were not necessarily adult but could be made adult and the inverse is true where there were a couple that led as “this is an adult concept.” Those will always just kind of come back up again in future iterations of gameplay.
The other thing that we tend to do is go look at old pitches of games and find what was the neat kind of hook in that game, or what was the singular mechanic in that game that really made it stand out, but it wasn’t enough for it to get greenlit, and sometimes we’ll harvest those ideas and those become a question or a round or a mode of play in a game that we do green light. There’s a lot of that that happens as well over the years with the pitches but, with respect to theNaughty Pack, there were quite a few original pitches as well, and Let Me Finish is the one that bubbled to the top.
How To Play Let Me Finish In Jackbox’s Naughty Pack
Q: What can players expect from Let Me Finish?
Bilder:Well, it’s pretty much a presentation game. If you’ve played Talking Points or Patently Stupid, or you’re used to those mechanics within theJackboxcatalog, then Let Me Finish will seem familiar in the way that you play. It’s adult kind of spicy content as well, but it will bring up a picture and or a series of pictures, it will pair multiple people against each other, and it will ask a prompt. Something like, ‘Where is this thing’s butt or behind?’
Then the players have to circle or draw on the picture. They use their phone, just like you would in Drawful, but in a presentation kind of style. You’re not actually drawing something. It’s not telling you to draw something, but you’re circling or highlighting. After those entries are done, each person is called upon to present. They’re kind of highlighted motion or whatever they were doing to draw attention to the picture that comes up, and they have to explain why that’s their answer, then it’s very head-to-head. The rest of the teammates vote on which one they think is most fun.
Unlike a Quiplash mechanic, for instance—which has a similar head-to-head thing—Let Me Finish allows the other players to jump in. If they get to vote on the two players, but if they have an entry, or they think they can be funnier, or they’ve got some unique take on it, they can basically choose to raise their hand, opt-in, and then they get to do the exact same exercise. You’ll find that a lot of participation happens and a lot of laughter happens because people have very unique takes on things and, as you imagine, with some of the adult content in it, it gets funny pretty quickly.
How Far Jackbox’s Naughty Pack Pushes The Boundaries And Use Of Sensitivity Consultants
Q: What can players expect from each game in terms of how far would you say each game pushes the boundaries?
Bilder:Just as a point of reference in developing the game, when we decided we were going to make amature-rated title, we put a working agreement together with the team that selected and opted in to work on the game. We opened it up to everyone in the studio and said, “Look, we know this is a departure from what we typically do.”
Some people may have no problems playing this kind of game with their friends or maybe even family members, but they don’t want to do that with coworkers, so we wanted to make it a comfortable environment, and we wanted to allow people to opt in and also opt out. If they decided this wasn’t for me, I don’t want to participate in this game, then they had that option as well.
In that regard, we’re sensitive to it, right? We don’t want to be vulgar or insensitive or do things to intentionally get a rise out of people. People call that punching down, right? We don’t want to punch down, but we did want to embrace that it’s a mature-rated title, and the content that’s going to come out is for mature audiences. We used some sensitivity consultants to help us. We typically do that on all of our games. We do reviews of our editorial, but we did that with this title as well and we just wanted to ensure that—I can’t guarantee some people won’t be offended by certain content. I mean, it’s hard. That’s a sliding scale, right? But we tried to make it with intentions of what are we comfortable with and what would we feel okay putting our name and our brand on.
I think you’ll find that it’s spicy, is probably the best way to describe it. We tried to not be overly offensive, or the way other maybe adult party games, let’s say, can be. Again, it’s up to the user. I think we’re trying to be very clear in our marketing and in our advertising of the game that this is a mature-rated title, and so there’s always a little bit of a ‘buyer beware’ associated with that. I think at the end of the day, everybody that worked on the title is proud of it and doesn’t feel bad about what they worked on.
Q: Sensitivity consultants sound like quite an interesting process. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about that?
Bilder:Yeah, so we hire different consultants to do kind of a full review of our game design, and then when the game’s up on its feet, kind of look at a playthrough of the game. Most importantly, it’s a review of the editorial; a review of the prompts, a review of the voiceover speech, and the script for that host. We’ve utilized this for a number of years now on our titles, but kind of a special attention to this one. Knowing that we’re kind of walking a line right, and we want to make sure that we do that as best as we can.
Jackbox CEO’s Favorite Game In The Naughty Pack
Q: Have you got a favorite game from the Naughty Pack and if so, why?
Bilder:For me, it’s probably Dirty Drawful. I really love Drawful as a game as well and, you know, the whole mechanic of Drawful is people are drawing kind of terribly, and so you’re always trying to guess what they’re saying or what theirdrawingis. The prompts that people type in are what they think they drew, or the titles of the drawings are always hilarious, and that holds very true when you have more adult prompts as well. It’s very funny to see the ridiculous drawings. It’s very funny to see what people think it is, and then even what the reveal of the truth is—the true title of it is. That one for me is just—it’s laughter every time I play it.
Yeah, yeah.
How Jackbox’s Naughty Pack Works With The Megapicker
Q: I guess some players might want to maybe hide the pack in their libraries because of its M-rating — some might not. How will the new titles work with the Megapicker? Is it possible to restrict any access in any way?
Bilder:Yeah, that’s a great question. The Megapicker is pretty new, as you know. We have kind of planned updates for it over time to add additional features, and then obviously, as we add new games, we want to ingest them into the Megapicker. That’s a launcher for those as well. That’s a topic right now for the team working on the Megapicker. Of course, we want to be able to say that a filter so you filter out the adult-restricted games or the mature-rated games, let’s say.
Right now, theMegapickerdoesn’t have the sense of a login either, right? It just uses your Steam credentials to know what your entitlements are and what games you’re able to play, but it doesn’t have parental controls or a login where I would log in and then restrict it for other people who use it. It’s still a bit of an open tool and we’re kind of trying to figure out how we might add functionality in the future that makes it a little more accessible. For the sake of the immediate—the immediate will have a filter that allows you to basically turn off M-rated games and then they won’t show up in the catalog to pick.
Jackbox’s Naughty Pack’s Content Filter, Streamer Settings, And Accessibility Options
Q: Could you tell us a bit more about the Naughty Pack’s content filter and streamer settings?
Bilder:Yeah, so Fakin' It’s actually pretty unique. It’s a tricky one to play over, let’s say VidCon, like a Zoom call or a Hangout or Discord, because some of the gameplay mechanics would require—it wouldn’t work well over this. It’s hard to raise hands or look at people’s eyes or see some of the subtleties of what Fakin’ It is asking you to do and finding the Faker. There is a streaming mode that has been added to or a mode of play within Fakin’ It All Night Long, and so that allows for kind ofremote playof the game which is pretty unique for us.
As far as you know the other titles, Dirty Drawful plays just like Drawful traditionally plays. It’s three to eight players. It’s maybe 20 minutes or so in length for a round. There are some kind of sensitivity settings in the sense of filtering out vulgarity and you can kind of pick how strict you want that to be. That setting came into play with priorParty Packs—I think Pack 10 and maybe even Pack 9. I don’t recall when we put that in, but that carries forward into here as well.
There’s some ability to restrict or moderate a bit. Again, it’s an M-rated title, so you’re still going to see and be exposed to adult content, and we’re making that abundantly clear even to streamers and influencers online who like to play our games.
We’re about to go to PAX West, and so we’re going to show off theNaughty Pack, so we have that panel later at night and it’s marked up as a mature audience-only panel. We’re trying to make it clear that it is an M-rated game, and it’s going to come with that, so you can’t really do anything to filter all the content out and suddenly it’s a teen-rated game. That’s not the case, but there are some dials and settings in there that hopefully make it a little more accessible and appealing for people who maybe want to do some moderation of it.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about theNaughty Pack’s accessibility options?
Bilder:That kind of carries forward theaccessibilitystuff that we’ve been working on for years. The familiar things that you’ll see in there in the settings of closed captioning and color and light sensitivity settings for animations and extended timers. Things that we’ve done in the past have all carried forward into this title.
Jackbox Games' Future Plans
Q: Have you got any plans to expand theNaughty Packin the future, or introduce similar packs?
Bilder:I don’t have a lot to announce about the future at the moment but it’s safe to say, as I mentioned, we’re in ideation mode right now for titles for next year. It’s also safe to say that this isn’t a turning of the company, and now everything we do going forward is going to be mature-rated titles. This is a fun answer to a very high-demand request by fans, but you can look forward to teen-rated traditional party games from us in the future as well.
Obviously, if this is well received, there are lots of other titles in our catalog I think that could have this treatment as well as original ideas. Some of which have been pitched and not greenlit, or some that we’ve got to come up with that could be fun as well. Never say never. Maybe we’ll do more of these in the future. Don’t know. Don’t have much to talk about on that right now.
Q: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Bilder:We announced a launch date—September 12 is the launch date for theJackbox Naughty Pack, so look forward to that. We will also have other announcements this year. I can’t really talk to that yet, but there’s more to look forward to fromJackboxin 2024 and then there’s a lot of interesting stuff cooking for next year. Excited for what 2025 will hold for us as well. We’ve got some interesting and exciting stuff in the works.
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The Jackbox Party Pack
WHERE TO PLAY
For 1-100 players! Your phones or tablets are your controllers! The team behind YOU DON’T KNOW JACK presents FIVE guffaw-inducing party games in one pack!Games include:1) The comedy trivia sensation YOU DON’T NOW JACK 2015 (1-4 players) with hundreds of all-new questions.2) The hilarious bluffing game Fibbage XL (2-8 players), with 50% more questions added to the original hit game Fibbage.3) The bizarre drawing game Drawful (3-8 players) -you draw right there on your phone or tablet (very little/no real skill required).4) The racy-as-you-want-to-be fill-in-the-blank word game Word Spud (2-8 players).5) The wacky-fact-filled Lie Swatter (1-100 players).
