By John Walker on February 28th, 2011 at 10:42 am.
After Richard Cobbett’s impressions of You Don’t Know Jack, it encouraged me to go all the way back to the beginning to play the original 1995 edition. And then write about it for Eurogamer. It contains things like,
“It’s a quiz game. And wow, do those usually suck as videogames. The late nineties and early 2000s were a time of great darkness, as those who cared about gaming looked at the best-seller charts and saw inane, lazy crap like the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Weakest Link games sitting in the top spot, presumably bought by the masses resulting from a mad scientist splicing slug brains into humans. But You Don’t Know Jack was something else. First and foremost, it began as a videogame, despite a few attempts at making television shows out of it. It was intended to be played this way. Yes, it pretends to award prize money, but here it acts as points for a high score. And it was really damned funny.”
You can read the rest here.
28/02/2011 at 11:05 MrEvilGuy says:
I have a brother named Jack! :D
28/02/2011 at 12:03 Brumisator says:
I don’t know him.
28/02/2011 at 12:28 Vadermath says:
ZING!
28/02/2011 at 12:31 Stijn says:
Well done.
28/02/2011 at 11:24 Zanpa says:
I live in France.
We were lucky enough to have one version of the game – not translated, but actually created for us, with questions related to French culture – in 1995.
Since this, nothing.
I still play the original game from time to time (hell, I even played it twice last week), but me and my friends are around the age of 19 and such don’t have the required knowledge for a fair part of the questions.
Still, it is a really good way to kill time with 2 friends.
I can only hope they’ll be releasing a newer version in France soon, but I don’t think this will ever happen.
(This dumb requirement of having the disc in the computer to play, and the reolution limited to 800*600 are here to remind you of the age of this game. Also, francs in place of euros.)
28/02/2011 at 11:28 faelnor says:
Oh. What’s the name of the game here?
28/02/2011 at 13:32 Zanpa says:
It’s “You don’t know Jack” as well.
28/02/2011 at 14:31 GT3000 says:
They dropped the ball.
You don’t know Jacque.
What could’ve been.
28/02/2011 at 11:26 faelnor says:
Reading that, it looks really awesome. Being from France, I had never heard of it.
I love the few questions that are sampled in the EG retrospective and I have a few friends who might be cultured and english-speaking enough to play along. Is there an anthology of all YDKJ titles available somewhere?
28/02/2011 at 11:28 stahlwerk says:
Splendid article and well worth the hassle of VMing Win2k. That last question made me laugh for the better half of a minute.
28/02/2011 at 11:54 Dood says:
The best thing about YDKJ was that there was an absolutely excellent german version of it. I still have Cookie’s voice in my head to this day. Not many games have a synchronisation that matches the original’s quality.
28/02/2011 at 12:13 c-Row says:
“Die Sieben, die Sieben, du musst sie einfach lieben…”
And the ads during the credits were just as hillarious.
28/02/2011 at 12:09 Ravenger says:
I still have my original copy of this. Brilliant game, pity it’s so hard to get working on a modern OS.
28/02/2011 at 12:12 CMaster says:
I think you hit upon part of the reason it doesn’t work as a TV show in the article – that massive team of writers. No host could be as witty off the mark like that, they spend a lot of time preparing this. There are ways around that of course, but it would be relatively expensive as quiz shows go I guess.
28/02/2011 at 12:13 McDan says:
So is there any way of getting this in England? Seems like a travesty if we can’t.
28/02/2011 at 12:17 Lu-Tze says:
It’s eleven minus one plus two minus one it’s eleven.
28/02/2011 at 16:15 LionsPhil says:
…hunh. I’ve only ever played the ’90s UK release of YDKJ, and it’s got Dis Or Dat in it.
I spent considerable time getting a QEMU VM running a data projector at 800×600 through a cranky ATi Mobility under cranky X11 with cranky drivers just for that “lose the desktop” joke to work at a party.
Totally worth it.
(Edited for screenshot. And I grinned like a loon getting it. Scored£57,500 and got reminded of the term “expanding tricolon” too. :D )