You don't know You Don't Know Jack

March 7, 2007 12:59 PM

You Don't Know Jack playable online. "If 50 Cent was actually worth 50 cents when he was born in 1975, adjusting for inflation, what would his name be today?" Plus, see the topical daily DisOrDat, including: Is this quote from the Bible or Deathstalker III? Crayola color or award-nominated porn movie? Brand of computer software or member of the Justice League? (NSFW for insulting commentator and suggestive references)
posted by blahblahblah (51 comments total)

Oh MAN I used to love that game! I'll have to check it out when I get home.
posted by miss lynnster at 1:10 PM on March 7, 2007

Holy cow... we used to play this (online!) back in college, almost a decade ago. Good times!
posted by sonofslim at 1:19 PM on March 7, 2007

I used to love this game. The fourth version, where you ride down an elevator at the beginning, and all the past announcers make appearances and get in fights with one another, was the best. Thanks for the link!
posted by painquale at 1:28 PM on March 7, 2007

The eyes on the animated Jack are creepng me out, but yeah, another old YDKJ addict. I found their audio production wonderfully well done.
posted by cavalier at 1:29 PM on March 7, 2007

Flush your head down the latrine
Ease your way with sour cream
Sixteen
posted by mr_crash_davis at 1:37 PM on March 7, 2007 [2 favorites]

wow! i also played this almost ten years ago - back in middle school! my sister and i used to sing along with the girls who did the question numbers.
posted by timory at 1:37 PM on March 7, 2007

Is it true that there was a Nixon-oriented version of the game called "You Don't Know Dick?"
posted by ZenMasterThis at 1:38 PM on March 7, 2007

i also remember how it knew what day it was, and would wish you a merry christmas in a snarky way. i liked ignoring it when it told me to type my name so that it would assign me a good one, like "offal"
posted by timory at 1:39 PM on March 7, 2007

Wow, the production value is still all there. What a great way to tell me they still have games to sell me, consider me sold!
posted by cavalier at 1:45 PM on March 7, 2007

Except WAHHH!!! They're selling all the OLD Discs! :p I guess this is a way for them to try selling it without a distributor? Huh.
posted by cavalier at 1:47 PM on March 7, 2007

One or Two was pretty challenging.
posted by MtDewd at 1:48 PM on March 7, 2007

I'm an obsessive trivia freak, and You Don't Know Jack used to be my favorite thing ever. Back in college, it reached the point where the only person willing to play against me went on to appear on Jeopardy!. Sad to say, my wife refuses to take me on, no matter how much I beg her.

My favorite YDKJ question was from the Movies version, and went something like this: "Remember that episode of the Brady Bunch where Greg wanted to change his name? Well, if Greg had picked a new name the same way that Indiana Jones got his nickname, what would Greg's new name have been?"
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:56 PM on March 7, 2007

Tiger.
posted by eyeballkid at 2:01 PM on March 7, 2007 [1 favorite]

FoB: I know that one off the top of my head... but checked Wikipedia just to make sure :).

Let's not talk about how many Brady Bunch reruns I watched growing up.
posted by sbutler at 2:01 PM on March 7, 2007

I signed up for this about a month ago, but keep forgetting to check up on it every day. YDKJ is the greatest PC trivia game ever.
posted by eyeballkid at 2:02 PM on March 7, 2007 [1 favorite]

Huh. I haven't played the game, so reading the post just raised an urge in me to visit McSweeney's lists.
posted by LionIndex at 2:11 PM on March 7, 2007

Aw. This post brings back so many memories of time spent with friends all crowded together around the keyboard.

Good times.
posted by amarynth at 2:29 PM on March 7, 2007

(SFW) spoiler: beaver, purple mountain's majesty and ultra blue can be found in the modern*, oversized ... box.
*1962 saw the waxy tube of "flesh" become "peach."
posted by rob511 at 2:29 PM on March 7, 2007

AWESOME-SAUCE!

Thanks so much for the link, hands down it's my favorite trivia game ever.
posted by rollbiz at 2:29 PM on March 7, 2007

I had a buddy who wired a keyboard out to make full sized buzzers for the PC version of this game. I miss the Pwnage I had before Pwnage was even a word. wow!! was that really 10 years ago!!
posted by Megafly at 2:50 PM on March 7, 2007

Man I loved this game as a kid, thanks for the link.
posted by Ndwright at 2:59 PM on March 7, 2007

Ummm... "Pwnage" still isn't really a word.
posted by miss lynnster at 3:16 PM on March 7, 2007

I dunno, I'd say any collection of letters understood by a large number of people to have a specific meaning is, by definition, a word. Would you say more or fewer people understand what "pwnage" means than any given word in Gaelic, Yiddish, or Basque?
posted by Justinian at 3:53 PM on March 7, 2007

Something I loved about the original games was that if you buzzed in too soon (before all the answers were displayed) too often, the announcer would say "Okay, wise guy. What's the answer? Spell it.".

It was a good way to keep the know-it all in the group from just trying to answer every question.

Oh, being able to "screw" your teammate on a question that you're pretty sure they don't know the answer to was also fun.

Oh the good ol' days.
posted by Laen at 4:34 PM on March 7, 2007

Deathstalker?

"Wow! He is Hasselhoffing it big time!"

"Trucksartis, Sunday at the Metrodome!"

Sorry. I'll shut up now.
posted by josingsinthehall at 4:47 PM on March 7, 2007

Damn, you folks are young.

And pwnage is a word even though envy isn't a synonym with jealous. I, the inconstant descriptivist, have spoken. Or, er, written.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 4:49 PM on March 7, 2007

Flibberpiss Nescome
posted by Balisong at 5:22 PM on March 7, 2007

Well, "own" is a word. So some Warcraft dude made a typ-o of "own" that everyone online recognizes now, yet nobody even agrees how it's pronounced.

I like it better when people just "own" but that's just me, I'm old & cranky. And proud of it. Get off my lawn.
posted by miss lynnster at 5:43 PM on March 7, 2007

This brings back great memories. Let me know when Leisure Suit Larry is online too, and my life will then be complete.
posted by amro at 6:11 PM on March 7, 2007

The first time I ever got really, really drunk, I locked myself in someone's bedroom at a party and, over the course of two and half hours, set all ten top scores on this game.

Yeah, I'm that kind of drunk.
posted by Rangeboy at 6:23 PM on March 7, 2007

Excellent: thank you blahblahblah: Ten fingers and ten toes, would you like to have a cheap cigar?
posted by misteraitch at 6:44 PM on March 7, 2007

Fun! But it said David Blaine was no glutton. That confused me.
posted by owhydididoit at 6:57 PM on March 7, 2007

I love YDKJ. Glad to see they survived the Sierra implosion over the last few years. I have two of the CD's on my CD holders on the wall over the desk. Thanks for the post!

Pwn has a Wikipedia page, so, it clearly is a real word. Duh. Also, it is pronounced as "own" or "puh-own." The Wikipedia page indicates that since there's no vowels in the "word," it's hard to get a standard pronunciation ruling from the people that rule on such things.
posted by jeversol at 7:06 PM on March 7, 2007

While I'm thrilled to see Jack's back and as irreverent as ever, I'm a little bummed to see they're charging just about as much now for copies of the games as they were 10 years ago. I'd pay 24.99 for some NEW YDKJ games, but not for the ones whose answers I've memorized.

(and yeah YDKJ The Ride is the best ... also the fake commercials. Mother's Pride Human Breast Milk. And Backne ... with the Neon Bakulator!)
posted by WolfDaddy at 7:43 PM on March 7, 2007

josingsinthehall, I remember the MST3K treatment of the movie too. "Guess what I've been doing!"

(Okay, I just grossed myself the hell out.)
posted by JHarris at 7:49 PM on March 7, 2007

Ok, so I'm all excited & I get home & play YDKJ. Then I remember how much I loved it and think "I should buy it!"

Available for PC only? WTF!?

Newsflash: Wikipedia talks about a lot of things that are crap. Remember, I'm a cranky old person.
posted by miss lynnster at 7:51 PM on March 7, 2007

I used to LOVE this game! It got to the point where no one would play with me... and that damn voice at the beginning just wouldn't let me forget I was playing with myself.
posted by arcticwoman at 8:04 PM on March 7, 2007

I loved the fake commercials on the discs. I specifically remember Chocky the Chipmunk referring to his cereal as "Sweet and Tarty."
posted by bstreep at 8:07 PM on March 7, 2007

My favorite commercial was the Doppleganger doll (or something).
posted by arcticwoman at 8:24 PM on March 7, 2007

Man I loved this game as a kid, thanks for the link.

I'm gettin' too old for this shit.

(sigh)
posted by deCadmus at 8:55 PM on March 7, 2007

I also loved this game when I was younger. I liked the first series best as Cookie rocked so I was delighted to see they got him back!
posted by dobbs at 9:01 PM on March 7, 2007

I used to have to reboot my 486 DX-2 to free up enough RAM to play this. Soooooo worth it.
posted by grrarrgh00 at 10:04 PM on March 7, 2007

Ok. Finally I have a sequitur...

Does anyone else swear to god that they recognize Ryan Seacrest's voice in that game? (Probably YDKJ: The Ride, [i.e., the one with the elevator] which is the one I played the most.)

Anyone?
posted by blenderfish at 10:57 PM on March 7, 2007

Does anyone else remember playing an interactive version of this online back in 1996!? I remember thinking "wow, this is really slick". I think they used Macromedia Shockwave, which was in the very early stages but would have been able to do a multimedia quiz even in 1996.
posted by autodidact at 11:27 PM on March 7, 2007

Either that or I'm taking a memory from 2000 and placing it in 1996...
posted by autodidact at 11:28 PM on March 7, 2007

No, 1996 sounds about right, actually. I think I remember the games being longer than 7 rounds then, too.

Jellyvision also had another cool game back then, but all I seem to remember about it is a giant pyramid on the screen that served as the game board. Oh, and the name of the game was a question.
posted by chrominance at 12:13 AM on March 8, 2007

This and Acrophobia got me through the nights when I didn't feel like playing Quake, lo, those many years ago too. (I was in Middle School or so, to make the old people feel even older.)
posted by sparkletone at 12:15 AM on March 8, 2007

This is priceless, I've missed this game in my insomnia-filled nights.
posted by Dreama at 1:33 AM on March 8, 2007

Always loved YDKJ - but my favorite part of all of it was the bogus commercials you heard after the game was done. Chocky Chipmunk's cereals (Choco-cherry Dingle Doodies!) were enough to cheer me up no matter how bad a day I had.

Hit my beeper - gotta motor!
posted by davelog at 6:04 AM on March 8, 2007

This is a sauce that's so bold that flames are shooting out of my ass.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 6:30 AM on March 8, 2007

oh God, Acrophobia! I played that waaaaaay too much.
posted by Lucinda at 9:17 AM on March 8, 2007