The Jack Principles

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As a student of UI design, I was always intrigued by the user interface used in You Don't Know Jack. If you're not familiar with the game, it's a demented in-your-face quiz show game. The first version was released circa 1995, and at the time, I don't think I had ever experienced anything quite like it on the PC. If you haven't played a version of You Don't Know Jack, do yourself a favor and try a recent version on your platform of choice to see what I'm talking about. Plus, it's fun.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/09/the-jack-principles.html
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Cool! What a strange place to find lessons on UI design.

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This reminds me somewhat of the old Infocom text adventure games (there’s still a coterie of devotees creating new text adventures games). There also, the implementers had pretty much decided how the course of the game would run, but you as the player could interact with some characters, pick up things, read things, etc. to make your way through the path.

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Thank goodness for the web archive!

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