I've always enjoyed playing games. I grew up playing Minecraft and Roblox, games which prioritized player creativity and developer integration. More than anything, I liked playing these games with my friends in LAN or remote environments, over Teamspeak, then Skype, then Discord. These games while fun, had their own barriers to entry, whether it be a strong internet connection, a license/subscription, or some sort of gaming console to log on and play with.
Enter Jackbox Games
My freshman year of high school was when I first encountered Jackbox Games, namely, Drawful. The premise, if you haven't played their games (which I absolutely recommend you do) is pretty simple. Use one central device to coordinate a game, and join on your phone for individual interactions. The idea was revolutionary at the time. Since web technology wasn't strong enough to support the animations at the scale of a game studio, Jackbox Games found a clever solution. Leverage one device to host intensive operations (robust animations, central logic, etc) but deliver personalized experiences on each phone (such as secret information like roles or user inputs). The impact? Use your TV as the game console and have any number of your friends join with their phones. Barrier to entry lowered.
The Impact
I love Jackbox Games, but there are still some gripes I have with their model. For one, the games are split across 12+ packs, each of which costs money to purchase, and even if you purchase a license on one platform (e.g. discord, Amazon Luna, etc.) it doesn't necessarily carry over to other platforms. Two, you still need some Jackbox-capable device to play, which meant you can't easily play in the car, on a rooftop, or out at a bar with friends. All of these make sense from a business perspecive, but as a player, I wanted more. That's what inspired the first Cybernaut experience, Jupiter. A completely device-agnostic game that anyone can play anywhere, anytime, and with any number of friends.
Liftoff
Jupiter originally started as a class project in my last semester at UIC. The task was simple, write a research paper on something to do with a distributed system. Unfortunately, I had no interest in writing a research paper, so I asked the professor if I could instead build a distributed system that implemented multiple techniques which I could then write about. She agreed (thankfully) and I wanted until the night before to get started. In just under 24 hours, Jupiter was initialized. It was a shell of what it is today, simply a lobby that displayed Jeopardy-like clues and questions, but used network latency normalization to ensure message round-trip times (RTT) were consistent across players.
- Variable-length rounds. Long enough to bluff, short enough to forgive a bad bluff.
- An LLM-generated 'briefing' for the aliens so each round has a fresh universe to argue about.
- Soft-elimination instead of full elimination, so nobody sits out for ten minutes.
Targeting first private playtests in late 2026. If you want in on the cohort, send me a note.