Berkeley Systems' best-selling product, the trivia game You Don't Know Jack, was developed by Jellyvision, based on their award-winning children's educational film "The Mind's Treasure Chest". You Don't Know Jack brought that program's model of interactive learning, engaging structure and pacing, and host character into the commercial mainstream. It also brought graphics, sound editing, and marketing to Berkeley; production of the show continued at Jellyvision's Chicago studios.
History[]
By 1995, the future for Berkeley Systems was beginning to look very bleak. Most of the "A list" licenses had been done or the licensors had commissioned work elsewhere. The market for pricey, artistic and highly animated screensavers was cannibalized by cheap slideshow products.
At this point in time, the company's iconic position in the Macintosh culture quite literally saved it. A company called Jellyvision had a prototype of an original game called You Don't Know Jack, which they approached Berkeley Systems with. The game was irreverent, quirky, and fun, and if handled even moderately well would be a huge success. The deal was signed, and the rebirth of the company began. With the strength of this deal, the founders were able to swing a "white knight" buyout of the company by Sierra and hence a move fully into the computer game market.
BeZerk Network[]
With 250,000 registered users and over 2 million games played in 1997, Berkeley's "You Don't Know Jack The NetShow" (YDKJ) is one of this decade's most talked-about electronic adult diversions.
As an online entertainment network beZerk, they made trivia games interactive with the net show You Don't Know Jack. In late '96 Berkeley decided to put their successful CD-ROM You Don't Know Jack on the Internet.
Playable for free over The BeZerk Network (beZerk.com). The games come in three flavors: regular, sports and a Macintosh version, and the player is first required to download a small software client to reside on the hard drive. Up to three people at the same computer can play at the same time against one another to compete for weekly prizes.
The goal of the game is to answer 15 questions as best you can and within the time limit. Twice a week there are fresh questions that are retrieved from the Internet by the YDKJ program, which can be downloaded for free at beZerk. Bezerk.com was named Cool Site of the Year last year and won the Webby Award.
Berkeley can afford to host these award-winning games to visitors due to their successful line of YDKJ CD-ROM titles, plus the BeZerk Network also contains the first true television-like ads on the Internet, dubbed Interstitials. Every few questions or so, gamers are exposed to these dynamic, full-screen ads, combining audio and fluid animation.