Jackbox Party Pack studio will start publishing absurd games: ‘We applaud the baby-slapping’

For the past 15 years, Jackbox Games has known its lane. The studio has largely stuck to creating its own multiplayer games via the Jackbox Party Pack series and a few spinoffs. That strategy has been successful over the years, but Jackbox Games is finally ready to stretch its skillset. The studio is getting into indie publishing, and its first game is about as absurd as you would expect: My Arms Are Longer Now.

Developed by Toot Games, the surreal game about a very long arm that does crimes is the brainchild of Matthew Jackson and Millie Holten, two comedians based out of Melbourne, Australia. It will be the first indie game published by Jackbox as the company looks to share its good fortune. At this year’s Game Developers Conference, Andy Kniaz, VP of business development at Jackbox Games, explained the company’s new publishing philosophy while Jackson walked me through a hysterical demo of the game.

“Bad things happen to good people,” Jackson told Polygon. “You are the bad thing that happens to good people.”

That’s one elevator pitch for My Arms Are Longer Now. The more specific one is that it’s a puzzle game where players embody a snake-like arm that loves to steal stuff and cause comic mischief. Each level consists of a small vignette where players have to complete a few objectives. In one level I saw, the arm had to sneak its way through a train car and steal some items from passengers. First, it dragged a bicycle away from a passenger who very forlornly watched it slip away. Then it ran off with a dog in a carrier, and then a woman’s briefcase. Jackson told me that later levels will have you ruining an optimistic child’s birthday party until you slowly break his spirit. It’s pure evil.

It’s also hysterical. My Arms Are Longer Now is the product of actual comedians — and it shows. The design gags are strong, and so is the idiosyncratic voice acting. Jackson chalks that up to Australia’s singular comedy scene, which he’s part of on the sketch comedy side. When I asked what the key is to making a game that’s actually funny, he said having the right density of jokes is paramount. But Jackson also thinks that you just need funny people actually writing those jokes.

“You’ve got to have comedians baked into every aspect of the game,” Jackson said. “It’s kind of brutal, but when we hire, a little bit we’re there thinking: Is this person funny? It doesn’t matter what they’re doing. You could be a producer, an animator, a programmer, and we’re like, you’re going to be touching the humor of the game. You need to have a comedic voice pushing behind it.”

Jackson thinks that a couple of games have nailed that in recent years. He called out Baby Steps as an example, citing its hilarious voice acting. (Bennett Foddy, one of the game’s creators and lead voice actors, happens to be Australian, too.) He cited Thank Goodness You’re Here as the real gold standard for game comedy, though. That makes sense, considering that My Arms Are Longer Now is a similar kind of pseudo-puzzle game targeting a tight three-hour runtime. Jackson and Holten connected with the developers of that game at last year’s GDC and have since become friends, even though the game nearly broke them.

“Their game has a long arm in it,” Jackson said. “We saw the arm and were like ‘If you can control that arm, I might have to kill myself.’”

I can understand that reaction; the long arm is kind of Toot Games’ whole bit. The interactive joy of My Arms Are Longer Now is that the arm can get all wrapped up in the environment. In the train level, I watched it break through one window, swoop back into the train via another, and get all tangled up around a subway pole. Every moving character in the game can also be tripped if you stretch the arm in their path. Getting that slapstick charm down was just as important as writing jokes.

“Millie and I have been working on this for a couple of years, with some big breaks between that to find funding,” Jackson said. “But a lot of that time was me staring at that arm and the nuances of how it moves. There’s a joke on the dev team where we’d be like, I’m going down into the arm mines again. The amount of time I’ve spent working on the hand-to-wrist connection to make it look nice!?”

Image: Toot Games/Jackbox Games

Getting a debut game published can be a difficult task, but Toot Games found an unlikely publishing partner — or rather, a publisher found them. Jackbox Games discovered the game at PAX Australia and instantly fell in love with it, according to Kniaz. Despite the fact that Jackbox Games wasn’t a publisher, the team felt like My Arms Are Longer Now’s sense of humor was on brand for the Jackbox audience. “Oh, how can we not?” Kniaz recalled thinking.

“We’re devs, we’re game fans, we play,” he said. “We see these games that we don’t know if they’re going to have as big of a voice, but we think they’re cool. We’re actually in a very stable position. Jackbox Party Pack 11 actually did amazingly well last year. We’re very lucky to be in the position we’re in, and if we can take our bit of luck and shine it on games that deserve attention, that’s a dream. Especially right now.”

My Arms Are Longer Now will be Jackbox Games’ first publishing effort, as Kniaz says the studio is still feeling out the space. Don’t expect Jackbox to pull a Blumhouse Games and release a list of 10 games it’s working on. And don’t expect the publisher to pigeonhole itself by only publishing comedy games either.

“I think if you described a Jackbox game, you could describe it in a number of ways,” Kniaz said. “You could split it apart like phones as controllers, novel control schemes, humorous, multiplayer, party. As you describe a Jackbox game, if any two of those things line up, we can go, okay, our audience may enjoy this. If you look at My Arms Are Longer Now, this is a single-player game, but it has a sense of humor and a novel control scheme. There are things you look at and go, this is a game the Jackbox audience is going to love.”

That synergy goes both ways. Jackson is thrilled about the partnership too, glad to have found a publisher for the game that understood and appreciated its occasionally dark sense of humor.

“It has been a wonderful fit working with a company that understands jokes,” Jackson said. “Whenever I would talk to a publisher, my biggest worry was: Is, at some stage, somebody in a suit going to come to me and say ‘You cannot slap this baby?’”

“We’ve allowed the baby-slapping to continue. We applaud the baby-slapping,” Kniaz added. “You can put that on the record.”