‘We’re kind of friendslop’: CEO of Jackbox Games sees the link between party games and this new trend but doesn’t think it’s necessarily ‘a negative moniker’

What was the first instance of a friendslop game? Was it REPO? Human: Fall Flat? Or perhaps it was the first time a group of people tried to guess what someone was saying in what we would now call a game of charades? The name friendslop may be a recent development, but at its core messing around with a group of friends has been one of the oldest ways to socialise. Take Jackbox Games for example.

“We’re kind of friendslop in a way,” CEO of Jackbox Games, Mike Bilder, tells our Ted Litchfield in a recent interview. With senior software engineer Michael Siciliano adding: “We’ve just been around so much longer than the term that it feels strange to retroactively [claim it].”

Now, I don’t think Jackbox Games goes as far back as the 16th-century origins of charades, but it has been around for a while after its rebrand in 2013, with games like Fibbage and Lie Swatter being over a decade old.

“A lot of our games are just casual with a bunch of friends, and you’re drawing ridiculous things trying to make each other laugh, and that’s a lot of the impetus of those friendslop games,” Bilder adds. “So we don’t take issue with it, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative moniker in any way. If anything, it’s a bit encouraging.

“You see what’s happening in AAA, you see what’s happening in the industry at large, and then you see this rise of an indie scene, you see the rise of this kind of category of friendslop and people wanting to play together. It’s like, well, that’s what we do. It might be different than those kind of games, but that’s what we do. We make games that people play together and socialise, and have a laugh. And so we’re excited by that. It means that our kind of genre that we play in is popular.”

I wouldn’t have naturally catagorised Jackbox games like Quiplash as friendslop, but only because they’ve always felt timeless to me (probably because they’ve been around for as long as I’ve been sentient). Meanwhile, a lot of so-called friendslop games tend to be made quickly, to capitalise on a larger trend before it disappears. But the vibes are almost certainly there. The kind of unhinged antics that usually unfold within Jackbox games are undoubtedly on par with what my friend group will ultimately find themselves doing in your average friendslop game.