The success of the game can be chiefly attributed to three factors: high production values, wonderfully eccentric questions, and a unique social experience. Though entirely pre-recorded and constantly streaming off the game disc, the constant jaunts, jabs and teases of YDKJ's hosts rarely repeat, flowing in a natural, conversational manner that players take for granted. Combining a number of unlikely subject matters, YDKJ's categories often catch players completely off-guard. Within YDKJ Volume 2's X-Rated Star Wars category, host Buzz asks players to pick the correct euphemism for having sex with Chewbacca. The answer? Making Wookiee. After a long-winded diatribe about astrology stemming from the Virgins & Bulls category, Buzz pesters players to recall which term he used to describe the pseudoscience at the beginning of his lengthy rant.

Perhaps most importantly, the local multiplayer of You Don't Know Jack encouraged social competition in a way few games have. Up to three players could face off on one screen using only one keyboard, emphasizing a friendly though competitive atmosphere based on knowledge and reaction time, not gameplay skill. Of course, the occasional chance to use the in-game screw to literally screw an opponent into answering a question also helped. As a result, YDKJ appealed to gamers and non-gamers alike since it put them on equal ground, creating a particular social experience that is sadly rare among more recent PC and console offerings.

Though the franchise has faded from public view in recent years, it was recently revived at youdontknowjack.com, which offers a new episode of You Don't Know Jack every Monday, along with daily DisOrDat questions, brief timed sections challenging players to quickly classify on-screen words into one of two categories. Thanks to Macromedia Flash, these online episodes retain the high production values and biting witticisms of the previous iterations, but sadly lack the multiplayer component that helped define YDKJ in the first place.

With all this in mind, I sat down with Steve Heinrich, who helps write, edit and direct the YDKJ online project.

Shack: You're currently offering weekly episodes of You Don't Know Jack, along with daily DisOrDats, which sometimes focus on relevant events such as St. Patrick's Day or the vernal equinox. Where's this all going? Telltale Games has been slowly releasing the Sam & Max games as monthly episodes with a combined retail release following. Is that something you guys are pursuing?

Steve Heinrich: Yeah, I mean, definitely. What we want to do is to walk a fine line. We want to offer free online content in sort of an episode based experience and keep the community growing online. But at some point, obviously, we do want to try to monetize this again because it was hugely successful before and we think it can be again and people have sort of taken to it again online. So, you know, at some point in the future, and we don't know how at this point, but at some point in the near future probably, we're definitely gonna try to offer up sort of two versions--one that you can play for free and one that you can either pay for by subscription or whatever. Like I said, it hasn't been decided yet. So there definitely will be [some type of premium content], and of course, that experience will be much more robust than what you can play online, which we feel with the free online version right now, is actually pretty robust and you're getting a lot for free compared to some other sites out there.

Shack: The online episodes lack the distinctive local multiplayer element that made Jack such a memorable experience for some. Are there any plans to bring that portion of the game back?

Steve Heinrich: Yeah, that's something we've definitely talked about. The classic Jack is built as a party game, and there have been talks about taking it back in that direction.

Update: Michele McPhail, Jellyvision's director of production, contacted Shacknews with some additional details. "When we begin offering additional online games for a fee, the game play itself will be the same as the episodes that are currently being offered at no cost. We'll have brand new content (as the first 4 episodes have been) and we may even also dig into the archive and package some 'classic questions' as well (episodes containing re-used questions will be clearly marked as such) - but the game will look, feel and operate as it currently does."

She also noted that "a console game would certainly be more robust (e.g. multi-player, etc.) than what we currently have online."

Shack: What about the current console market? At one point, You Don't Know Jack appeared on the original PlayStation.

Steve Heinrich: Well, we're open. The quick answer is we're open, we're open for suggestions, we're open for phone calls. I mean, there may be some things kinda possibly in the works right now, but we definitely would listen to offers to get into the console market. Ten years ago, a lot more [PC] CD-ROM games were being sold as opposed to console games and that stuff has totally changed now. Now that we're back in it, there really isn't a reason we shouldn't do it. You're right, we did do the PlayStation version, and we had moderate success with that, but quite frankly, back then the CD-ROM business was actually where we were making the most. Now the CD-ROM business really isn't as lucrative and so we definitely would consider doing consoles and, like I said, if Microsoft or PlayStation want to call us, we're listening.

The main thing is we think that it's still a viable game in the market, and so we wanted to put it back online and see if people would still take to it. And I think what we've learned in the past several months here is that people are still excited about it, even people who have never played it before. There's a lot of people, like you, who played it before and who are seeing it again and loving it and are asking us for more. There's also people who just have never played before. I think that's almost the bigger test, because if we can get people who have never played it before and never seen it before [to play], younger people that maybe were too young to play some of the earlier versions of the game, then we know that the product is viable. We're just trying to see, sort of testing the waters right now. I think people are taking to it, and so we're gonna try to see what we can do with it.

Turn the page for more on Jellyvision's console plans, the importance of pop culture knowledge in making YDKJ, and what else the company has in the works.

Shack: If you were to get back in the console market, would it be a retail game or distributed digitally through something such as the Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network platform?

Steve Heinrich: It could be both, I mean, we've actually discussed both of those options. What we have now is basically a Flash game, so if we were to take it out of Flash and put it into a more retail sort of disc or whatever, there's obviously engineering work that would need to happen there. No matter what we do, there's engineering work that's gonna have to happen. We think that Xbox Live or anything like that is definitely something we could do pretty easily. Like I said, we're open to discussions with these folks. We think that's where the market is right now, so we'd be happy to try to get ourselves there.

Shack: Well I know a lot of folks, myself included, would love to see You Don't Know Jack on the next generation consoles.

Steve Heinrich: [laughter] So would we! I feel like the game itself is still good today, as good as it was ten years ago, and it's just the vehicles have changed. The internet wasn't as big ten years ago, or even five years ago, so we're just hopefully going to start expanding this and figuring out different ways to get it to people.

Shack: You've been selling the old games through the company store, correct?

Steve Heinrich: Yup, all the old games are still available through our store except for Volume 5.

Shack: Is that because of the online play or is there some type of red tape involved with that?

Steve Heinrich: Basically, all of our games have been updated to work on current machines, and that one, yes, the problem with that is that the engineering was so complex with the online aspect of it, [it was] not easily updateable. But yes, everything else is available.

Shack: With those old games still available, is possible we'll see some of the older questions reappear in the newer releases?

Steve Heinrich: That's up for debate, we prefer to use new content. One of the things that we've noticed is like, if you try to go back, well, you just played Volume 2, I don't know if you kinda felt like there was anything dated about the pop culture references [Author's note: I did]. But I would guess that some of the pop culture references are probably asking about Mad About You or Friends or whatever, so we definitely feel like we wanna update it and keep it current to what's going on in the world today. I know if you play Volume 1 you'll get questions about shows that were going on the late 80's and 90's that people might not know today. That said, we've actually identified several questions in past games that are evergreen, that can last forever, so we definitely could repurpose some of those questions. Me, as a writer, I'm always like hey, let's write something new.

Shack: How do you guys keep coming up with all these different questions?

Steve Heinrich: Knowledge of pop culture is very important. I always say that if you don't know what's going on with Britney Spears today, you're out of Jellyvision. We also have this huge database of all the facts we've covered across the years. There used to be a policy that once a fact was in the game, that was it, it couldn't be revisited, but we've sort of loosened up on that with the online episodes.

Shack: Off the top of your head, how many questions do you think you guys have?

Steve Heinrich: Actually, we just did this calculation the other day. For all of our CD-ROM games, it came up with somewhere around ten thousand questions. That doesn't include what we had on the Net Show, when we were running the old internet version of the game, or what we've done recently, so that's probably ten thousand plus You Don't Know Jack questions.

Shack: How big is Jellyvision?

Steve Heinrich: Jellyvision [has] kinda fluctuated over the years, at one point it was as high as sixty-five, seventy people, then at one point was as low as seven people. Now we're kinda around twenty, twenty-five people.

Shack: How long have you been with the company?

Steve Heinrich: I actually started in '97, Jack Volume 3 was the first thing I worked on from a Jack standpoint. There's other projects that we work on here, but that was when I first came on. Then I left for a couple of years, went and did some other things, wrote some children's books and stuff, then I came back a couple years ago.

Shack: Can you comment on some of those other projects?

Steve Heinrich: Without getting into too many specifics, Jellyvision is based on interactive conversation. We call it iCi (pronounced icky): interactive conversation interface. It's the concept that you're having a conversation with the computer or whatever you're using to interface with our product. You Don't Know Jack has been the thing that people most recognize because it was the most popular and the most commercial thing that we've done. And that is an example of interactive conversation, in that you feel like you're part of the experience with the computer, it's talking, it's responding to you, you're responding to it.

There are definitely other applications we've tried to apply that to, anywhere from marketing tools for outside companies--maybe they want to survey their customers in an interactive way, in a less form-based way, in a way that seems more like you're having a conversation--so we've done some advertising kinda things for companies. We're always trying to sort of innovate here and figure out other ways that iCi can be applied to new products.

A lot of the stuff we've done is for other companies who have come to us and said we need a better way to do this or this online, or whatever, and we've said we can do that because we've found that whenever we put someone in front of an interactive conversation situation, people respond better than if they're just given a blank screen with a bunch of boxes to fill in. There are a lot of applications for it.

Shack: I was playing around on the website earlier and I listened to banking demonstration, with the person scheduling payments through an automated teller over the telephone. It made me wish my credit card company used that technology.

Steve Heinrich: [laughter] Yeah, definitely.

Shack: Can you tell us what Jellyvision has in store for the future? Obviously you're going to keep going with the interactive conversation technology, keep developing the You Don't Know Jack episodes--anything else?

Steve Heinrich: The main thing is seeing where we can take iCi. I think that one of the big goals of this company is to just convince people and sell people on the idea of what interactive conversation can do. Not only for people to come to us and hire us and say hey build us this interactive marketing piece, or do this for us or do that for us, but actually for us to sell the tool to people, to sell the tools that help them create their own interactive conversations and for us to, not necessarily produce things for them, but for us to guide people as far as how to use the people to make their own interactive conversation pieces. We've already started doing that with a few companies, and I think that's one of the big directions that the company's trying to head, where people come and they buy our expertise from us along with the proprietary tools we use to help create these experiences.

Shack: Well, I think that's about it on my end. I'm definitely looking forward to more You Don't Know Jack games and seeing more uses of your interactive conversation technology. Is there anything else you want to add?

Steve Heinrich: Nope, just come to the website every day, we've got new stuff.

Shack: Thanks for taking the time to discuss all of this with us.

Steve Heinrich: No problem.

Online episodes of Jellyvision's You Don't Know Jack, along with daily DisOrDats and an almost complete back catalog of the original You Don't Know Jack releases, can be found at youdontknowjack.com.

Next week I'll be revisiting Worms Armageddon, so be sure to dig out your old disc and grab the latest beta patch in preparation for a weekend of squishy Shackbattles.