Collection essentials #393: You Don’t Know Jack (PS1)

If you’ve been to a lot of parties in the past decade (with young adults especially), there’s a pretty decent chance you’ve witnessed groups of people playing games on the TV that they play using their smartphones. In that instance, you most likely saw them playing something made by “Jackbox Games”. Before smartphones took over the world, those developers first rose to prominence with trivia games for home computers, a series called “You Don’t Know Jack”. The first game in this series was released in 1995, and there would be many entries in the next several years before it went dormant after 2003. What I have here is the first instance of You Don’t Know Jack getting released on a home console, which happened in 1999. The multiplayer-oriented gameplay made it a natural fit for consoles. This entry is basically a port of “You Don't Know Jack Vol. 3” with various changes, such as including questions from a couple other entries.

The rules of You Don’t Know Jack vary between entries. This particular iteration involves 20 rounds of trivia. At the start of each round, a player selects one of three categories, so each game is not set in stone. Most of these rounds involve simply answering a multiple-choice question. Occasionally, to vary things up, players will participate in a “Dis or Dat”, where two categories are given and the player must sort each word or name properly. There is also sometimes a “Three Way” which is similar, in which a set of three terms is given. The three terms will alternate being lit up, and players must buzz in when the term which matches the current clue is highlighted. Finally, all games end with a “Jack Attack” round, when a clue is placed in the center of the screen, and a number of possible answers pass by and players must buzz in when the correct matching one appears. Players earn money depending on how well they do, and winners may enter their name at the end with their high score to be saved to the memory card. Up to three players can play at once, and you can even go at it solo to see how high of a score you can get.

What I just described sounds kind of basic, but if you’ve played You Don’t Know Jack, you know that it’s anything but. This game is defined and carried by its brilliant, stylish and humorous presentation. The MC is an unseen narrator named Cookie Masterson who explains the rules and reads each question and their answers, making all kinds of witty remarks along the way. 

The multiple choice questions are also not so simple. The game has a way of asking questions that are rather straightforward, but convoluting the question and/or multiple-choice answers by adding some kind of silly premise or analogy that makes it both funnier and also harder to understand at a glance. This means that part of mastering this game involves not only knowing a lot of trivia, but being able to quickly decipher what exactly you’re answering in time for you to figure out the answer. That might sound annoying, but trust me, they have the right balance of making it fun and somewhat challenging without really getting on your nerves.

Of course, being a trivia game released in 1999, there’s inevitably going to be the issue that none of the questions will reference anything that’s happened in the past 25 years and counting. I will say that, for an old trivia game, it’s aged about as well as it possibly could have given that inevitable disadvantage. There are newer You Don’t Know Jack titles that you could play instead, but it still might be legitimately worth it to check out this older one too. If nothing else, if you’re playing with someone older than you, it could be a way to give a little handicap in their favor if that’s desired.

I first heard about You Don’t Know Jack on the internet at some point in my teen years, thinking the title was clever, but I didn’t give it much consideration knowing nothing about it other than the title. My first experience with it was on Thanksgiving of 2012. I paid a surprise visit to my friend and cousin Peter Skerritt since I was in his neck of the woods that evening. We were looking for something to do, and he had the idea to play this game. And I instantly loved it as a session of laughs and amusement ensued. Soon after I bought the copy shown in the photo and the rest is history. In my opinion it’s about as good as a trivia game gets, so it’s an easy pick as a collection essential.