Jackbox is Back - PAX AUS 2025 Interview - Mike Bilder and Allard Laban
Jackbox Games has been part of my life since 2014, when they released the very first Jackbox Party Pack. Back then, it was a bunch of fun party games that livened up a house party and got the laughs going into the night.
Jackbox is still all those things, but these days it is also my enabler. It is the video game that not only lets me be a crass degenerate but rewards me for it. Its unique collection of games really shines a light on my busted sense of humour and glorifies it, enabling me to use the stupid crap that goes on inside my head to win games and inflate my ego. Just what the world needs.
My love for the 11-year-old franchise meant I jumped at the opportunity to spend more time with the Jackbox team at PAX 2025. I was so lucky to have a chat with CEO Mike Bilder, plus Chief Creative Officer, Allard Laban. This year, we chatted about the past, the present, and the really cool stuff that’s coming up for Jackbox Games in the future.
The last time I spoke to the Jackbox team was 2023, when they released Jackbox Party Pack 10 – which was “actually really well” received by the community.
Jenn: Actually, really well?
Allard: Well, I always qualify everything, but it did really well. Unsurprisingly.
Jenn: Just like you knew it would, right?
Jackbox Party Pack 10 saw the release of the very first rhythm game for the company, ‘Do-Do-Re-Mi’, which, despite being “very un-Jackbox-like”, the community loved. “They’re still playing the heck out of it”, Allard assured me, and it’s one of the top games.
Mike: Fixy Text [also in Party Pack 10] has a very special place in my heart, because it kind of came out of trolling people in the studio in Google Docs. So in a shared Google doc, people would be writing stuff, and I’d go in and start deleting things.
Allard: A very good CEO
Jenn: You must be a barrel of fun to work with
Mike: Well, I’ve stopped doing it!
Note to self: Mike is my spirit animal.
Like Mike took on feedback to stop messing with his staff in Google Docs, Jackbox always takes on feedback for their upcoming titles, and I wanted to find out what player feedback made it into their upcoming game, Party Pack 11.
Allard: The focus for Party Pack 11 was ‘how do we make this super accessible?’ For instance [our new game] Legends of Trivia has all the trappings of an RPG, but not all the technical stuff that would make people’s eyes glaze over. It’s a lot of fun, simple, but it’s like a pub trivia game, so we try to make it very simple and accessible.
We also have a return of our head-to-head comedy games, which were really popular. And we have an adjacent to Quiplash: Doominate, where you take something nice, and you ruin it.
(Author’s note: Are you not meant to ruin every Jackbox game you play? Have I been playing them wrong all this time? No. Surely not. It’s the children who are wrong.)
Mike: Hearsay [also new to Party Pack 11] is a fun and funny game where you’re recording sound effects and dialogue and little clips and snippets that get kind of pieced together. That’s a bit of an extension on what we built for Do-Do-Re-Mi, [but now] we do it the other way around, and everything kind of builds off of itself.
Between Jackbox Party Pack 10 and 11, Jackbox Games had an “experimental year”, where they ventured out of their standard party pack game formula and released the ‘Jackbox Naughty Pack’. Whilst this release didn’t prove as successful as hoped, the Jackbox team took it as an opportunity for feedback and growth.
Mike: We survey our fans all the time to see what resonates, what they like, what sequels they would want, and what we haven’t done yet. Having been doing this franchise for over a decade, one of the things that has come up was “we want a mature-rated pack from Jackbox”, so we tried to deliver that last year.
Admittedly, it was not one of our more successful packs. [But] we took the learnings from that and went back to the roots for what pack 11 is. [Party Pack 11 is] more family-friendly, fun and everything’s rated T for Teen. In a typical Jackbox way, if you want to play it with kids and grandparents, you can, and if you want to play with adults and get blue with your comedy and humour, you very much can.
Allard: The lesson for us there was: let’s not tell people what kind of content they should have. Let’s just let people put what they want in the game, which has always really worked for us.
Mike: Another observation was our games have a very broad age range that they appeal to, and it’s hard to be funny in games consistently, and we try to do that as successfully as we can. But when you get into the realm of adult subject matter, different age groups have different tolerances for that. To one, it’s funny and to another, it’s icky and we kind of learned that the hard way. We’ll let the users decide how they want to play.
Allard: We learned a lot about Gen Z.
Jenn: Oh yeah, they kind of scare me.
Allard: I’m actually scared of Gen Alpha
Jenn: Well, they’re a whole different breed
(I KNEW it was the children who were wrong).
After a year of learning, we cast our gaze forward to what is coming up next for Jackbox Games and what we can expect to see in Party Pack 11 when it releases on October 23rd.
Mike: All new games, there are no sequels!
Allard: We wanted to make a point this year, because… You know. Naughty Pack, we were pretty proud of it, but we kind of hit some of the wrong notes there with our fanbase. We want to kind of come back [and say] ‘Hey, we’re still here, don’t worry. We give a shit about this stuff.
There’s five new games, five new ideas; and they’re all pretty ambitious in their own way. From doing a pub quiz trivia game to an audio based…sort of… I don’t know
Mike: Sound effect?
Allard: Yeah, like an audio ‘Drawful’ essentially. And we also have a draw game, which is super accessible because you’re decorating cookies, which is super cute. Then we have ‘Suspectives’, which is a detective/ hidden identity game, which is a lot of fun. And it’s really simple and easy to play. We’re really proud of this pack.
Mike: What we try to do in each of these packs is give a handful of games that are just very easy to get into. We feel like we have a really rounded curve in this pack, where a game like ‘Doominate’ is pretty easy to get to laughs quickly. Then you’ve got something like ‘Hearsay’, our sound effects game, which is surprising how funny it is. For some of our games, people don’t like to get up to perform, but this game’s easy because you just make ridiculous sound effects. It’s a very levelling playing field for everybody.
Everybody can go AAAaaaAAaaAAaahHHHhHhh into their phone, and you know, it works.
Allard: There’s something about Jackbox Games that brings out the inner 12-year-old. And there’s something about just making funny sounds. I watched this German streamer for 45 minutes, and they were just switching out the players so everybody could come in to make a funny sound effect. It was ridiculous, and they were all peeing their pants. It was amazing.
Mike: ‘Suspectives’ is our hidden identity one. If you liked ‘Faking It’ or any of our hidden identity games, this will resonate with you.
Allard: Legends of Trivia is our pub quiz. One thing we realised with that game was that when we made the content too easy, it was boring. So it’s a little bit more challenging than our regular trivia games, but when you’re working with a group, it plays really well. It draws on everyone’s collective knowledge.
Mike: And then the last one is ‘Cookie Haus’, which is a cosy drawing game. It has a unique set of tools and visualisation on the phone that is very satisfying. It feels like you’re actually icing a cookie!
Allard: It’s also super accessible because the pressure to decorate a cookie is different than having to draw something.
Jenn: Nobody really expects a cookie to look, you know-
Mike: Amazing
Jenn: Especially not when I do it
Allard: And that’s ok – because it’s a cookie. Low stakes but high returns
Mike: You’ve got really skilful games, you’ve got some easy, accessible games. We’re proud of it, so far, the early looks have been positive. We’re hopeful that everyone loves it… And it launches on 13 platforms!
Jenn: Is there anything that you don’t launch on?
Mike: Anything that can natively play games, we’re on it, basically.
Jenn: I want it on my fridge
Allard: We-ell, soon you will be able to play it on your fridge because we’re going to have a streaming version of Jackbox, which you’ll be able to play on any device.
Mike: So smart TVs, you won’t even need a console. You’ll be able to play directly on those TVs. That’s next year.
In case that exciting nugget wasn’t enough upcoming awesome news for Jackbox, the team announced that there’s even more in store in 2026.
Allard: We’re doing board games now too. We’ve got ‘Fakin It’ in the US, not sure when it’s coming out in Australia, but we’re also working on a [board game version] of Fibbage.
If the lights go out, there’s no more power, and society fails.
Jenn: Jackbox will still be there!
Mike: And then [also] next year, we haven’t really made announcements yet, but Trivia Murder Party 3 is a standalone title that we’re working on as well.
My final question to the Jackbox team was that if they could say anything to the Aussie public, what would it be?
Mike: I would just say thank you. To the fans and the people that play our games and support us. We’re going to keep doing what you enjoy and we’re going to keep making games for you.
Also, check out Party Pack 11, it’s coming out real soon. We’re going to have a digital bundle of the Party Pack 11 with ‘Survey Scramble’ [launched last year].I feel like [Survey Scramble] got lost in the shop a little bit, but it is an incredibly good game.
2025 is shaping up to be a very good year to be a Jackbox fan. Not only is a new party pack coming our way on October 23rd, but we’ve also a lineup of board games to look forward to, as well as Jackbox on our smart devices.
Jackbox Party Pack 11 released on October 23rd on 13 platforms (except fridges… for now).
