‘You Don’t Know Jack’ wins Spike social game award

Even Jellyvision Games staff were surprised when the Facebook version of their long-running trivia game You Don’t Know Jack won in the new Social Game of the Year category at Spike TV’s Video Game Awards hosted by Samuel L. Jackson Dec. 7.

You Don’t Know Jack has won its fair share of awards, but this one was a huge surprise to us,” says Marc Blumer, who joined Jellyvision as marketing director in February. “All of our fellow nominees like Draw Something and SimCity Social would probably have been considered favorites over us to win.” YDKJ also beat out Marvel: Avengers Alliance.

Jellyvision released the first version of the game on CD-ROM in 1995, following up with several successful iterations as platforms evolved. In 2011 they rolled out versions for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. They began developing a Facebook version in spring 2011, and launched it in May 2012. Unlike other versions, this one is designed to play alone.

Marc BlumerYDKJ has always been known as a party game, and we think we were able to bring some of that feel to the social media gaming space, which, ironically, is not so much ‘social’ as it is individual,” Blumer says.

“We then took our early learnings from the Facebook version and tweaked and optimized the game for the small mobile screen.” They released the iOS version Dec. 13, and as of late December, Blumer said an Android version would be out “very, very soon.”

Jellyvision has 25 employees dedicated to YDKJ, including engineers, designers, artists, writers and business staff. Tom Gottlieb plays game host Cookie Masterson.

Jellyvision, which has been almost entirely identified with YDKJ throughout its history, also has several new games in the pipeline, one scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2013, and others to follow later in the year.

“As much as 2012 was dedicated to bringing YDKJ to social and mobile platforms, 2013 is the year where we plan to earn the ‘s’ in Jellyvision Games,” Blumer says, “the ‘s’ at the end, not the one in the middle.”