Over the past 15 years, Jackbox Games has known its way around. The studio has mostly stuck to making its own multiplayer games through the Jackbox Party Pack series and several spin-offs. The strategy has worked for years, but Jackbox Games is finally ready to expand its expertise. The studio is getting into indie publishing, and its first game is as absurd as you’d expect: My Arms Are Longer Now.
Developed by Toot Games, this surreal game about long arms committing crimes is the brainchild of Matthew Jackson and Millie Holten, two comedians living in Melbourne, Australia. This 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 said. “You are a bad thing that happened to a good person.”
That’s what an elevator pitch is for My Arms Are Longer Now. What’s more specific is that it’s a puzzle game where the player takes the form of a snake-like arm that likes to steal things and cause comic mischief. Each level consists of a small vignette in which the player must complete several objectives. In one level I saw, the arm had to sneak through a train car and steal some items from the passengers. First, he dragged a bicycle away from a passenger who sadly watched as it came unstuck. Then he ran off with a dog in his arms, and then a woman’s briefcase. Jackson told me that the next level will have you crashing an optimistic kid’s birthday party until you slowly destroy his spirit. That’s pure evil.
This is also hysterical. My Arms Are Longer Now is the product of real comedians — and it shows. The gag design is strong, as is the voice acting excellent. Jackson attributes that to the Australian singles comedy scene, which is part of the sketch comedy side of things. When I asked what the key to making a truly funny game was, he replied that the right density of jokes was paramount. But Jackson also thinks that you just need funny people to actually write the jokes.
“You have to incorporate comedians into every aspect of the game,” Jackson said. “It’s kind of brutal, but when we hire, we think a little bit: Is this person funny? It doesn’t matter what they do. You can be a producer, an animator, a programmer, and we’re like, you’re going to touch on the humor of the game. You have to have a comedic voice that supports that.”
Jackson thinks some of the games have been successful in recent years. He called Baby Steps for example, citing his hilarious voice acting. (Bennett Foddy, one of the game’s creators and main voice actors, also happens to be Australian.) He quotes Thank goodness you’re here as the true gold standard for comedy games. That makes sense, considering that My Arms Are Longer Now is a kind of pseudo-puzzle game that targets a strict three-hour runtime. Jackson and Holten connected with the game’s developers at GDC last year and have since become friends, even though the game nearly destroyed them.
“Their play had a big impact,” Jackson said. “We looked at that arm and thought, ‘If you could control that arm, I should probably kill myself.’”
I can understand that reaction; the long sleeves are similar to Toot Games. Interactive fun My Arms Are Longer Now is that the arm can be completely encased in the environment. At train level, I saw it break through one window, return to the train through another window, and get tangled around a subway pole. Any moving character in the game can also trip if you stretch your arms in their path. Eliminating the charm of slapstick is as important as writing jokes.
“Millie and I have been working on this for several years, with some big breaks in between to find funding,” Jackson said. “But most of the time I was staring at that arm and the feel of its movement. There was a joke in the development team where we would be like, I’m going down the arm mine again. The amount of time I spent making the hand to wrist joint look good!?”
Publishing a debut game can be a difficult task, but Toot Games found an unlikely publishing partner — or rather, a publisher who found them. Jackbox Games discovered the game at PAX Australia and immediately fell in love with it, according to Kniaz. Despite the fact that Jackbox Games is not a publisher, the team still feels like it is My Arms Are Longer NowHis sense of humor really stood out to the Jackbox audience. “Oh, how could I not?” Kniaz recalled his thoughts.
“We are developers, we are fans of games, we play,” he said. “We look at these games that we don’t know if they’re going to have a big say, but we think they’re cool. We’re actually in a very stable position. Jackbox Party Pack 11 actually did very well last year. We are very fortunate to be in the position we are in, and if we can take a little bit of our luck and shine in a game that deserves attention, that would be a dream. Especially now.”
We applaud the baby’s slap.
My Arms Are Longer Now will be Jackbox Games’ first publishing effort, as Kniaz said the studio is still short on space. Don’t expect Jackbox to pull a Blumhouse Games and release a list of the 10 games it’s working on. And don’t expect the publisher to rule itself out by only publishing comedy games.
“I think if you were to describe a Jackbox game, you could describe it a number of ways,” Kniaz said. “You can separate them like phones as controllers, new control schemes, cute, multiplayer, party. When you describe a Jackbox game, if there are two things that line up, we can go, okay, our audience will probably enjoy it. If you look My Arms Are Longer Nowit’s a single player game, but it has a new sense of humor and control scheme. There are things you can look at and see, this is a game that the Jackbox audience will love.”
This synergy goes both ways. Jackson is also very pleased with the partnership, pleased to have found a game publisher who understands and appreciates his sometimes dark sense of humor.
“It’s great to work with a company that understands jokes,” Jackson said. “Every time I talk to publishers, my biggest worry is: Will, at some stage, someone in a suit come up to me and say ‘You can’t slap this baby?’”
“We let the baby slapping continue. We praise the baby slapping,” Kniaz added. “You can note it down.”
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