People may know us for our popular Jackbox Party Packs, but you may not know our full history. 

Jackbox Games began as Learn Television, founded in 1989 by Harry Nathan Gottlieb to realize his vision of making short, engaging educational films for schools.

In the nineties, Learn Television developed an education-focused trivia game called That’s A Fact, Jack! which was distributed to schools on CD-ROMs.

Harry proposed reinventing That’s A Fact, Jack! for adults (translation: adding a bunch more fart sounds). Many You Don’t Know Jack titles followed.

…except Hormel canned meat products. CD-ROMs fell out of use and consoles like the Sega Dreamcast and Sony Playstation took over. 

With the appearance of the Nintendo Wii in 2006, social games seemed poised to make a comeback. Mike Bilder was brought on board in 2008 as General Manager and we made a version of YDKJ for consoles. We also tried hosting YDKJ on Facebook, with new questions every week.

Soon, Jellyvision Labs was finding its own brand of success in the healthcare world with a product called ALEX. To distinguish the two companies, we became Jackbox Games.

The studio decided to focus our efforts on a console game that people would play using only their phones. Later that year we released Fibbage, a social bluffing game, as a standalone product that employed the new “phone as controller” approach.

People liked it. We made more.

2014 saw the release of the first Jackbox Party Pack, five games under one roof that guaranteed something for everyone. Now, we’re on the eleventh iteration of the franchise. 

Whether played on one big couch or remotely, we’re glad people have been entertained by our products. We love finding new ways to bring people together to laugh and enjoy each other’s company. That’s as true today as it was when we got started.

© 2026 Jackbox Games
848 W. Eastman St. #201, Chicago, IL 60642 USA
[email protected]

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