Elan Lee — Co-creator and CEO of Exploding Kittens; former chief design officer at Xbox Entertainment Studios; co-founder of 42 Entertainment; Emmy and Peabody Award winner who pioneered alternate reality games.
The gist
Tim Ferriss interviews Elan Lee, co-creator of Exploding Kittens, about how he designs games around a 'core gameplay loop' where players entertain each other rather than the game entertaining the players. Lee walks through the case study of Poetry for Neanderthals, then unpacks his record-setting Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $9 million by reframing crowdfunding as community activation. He shares lessons from mentor Jordan Weisman, the origin of alternate reality games via a Spielberg/Kubrick collaboration, and how Exploding Kittens grew into a 100-person end-to-end company that took a $40M investment from The Chernin Group. The conversation closes on partnerships, the dangers of social media algorithms, and Lee's philosophy of creating tools for human connection.
Big reveals
- The actual core gameplay loop of Exploding Kittens is Russian roulette with a deck of cards where you secretly decide where to place the bullet (via defuse cards), turning it from a random game into a game of outthinking your opponent.
- The Kickstarter set out to raise $10,000 in 30 days; the bank only allowed deposits up to $50,000, but the final check was almost $9 million.
- They got funded in seven minutes, made $1M day one, $2M day two, $3M day three, then sales fell off a cliff after the first week once Matt Inman's Oatmeal audience was exhausted.
- Lee's key innovation was reframing crowdfunding as CROWDfunding, replacing money-based stretch goals with absurd community challenges (real tacocats, 10 Batmans in a hot tub) while the back-this-project button kept revenue rolling in.
- Exploding Kittens' first major property grew out of a canceled Spielberg/Kubrick AI movie tie-in: the connecting 'glue' narrative by Sean Stewart became The Beast, the world's first alternate reality game.
- Peter Chernin convinced them to stop being a game company and become an IP company; that led to a Netflix show executive produced by Greg Daniels, Mike Judge, and Peter Chernin.
- They raised $40 million from The Chernin Group, but the money still sits untouched in the bank because the company didn't actually need it.
- Lee's proudest moment was anonymously watching kids play Exploding Kittens during a flight delay at an airport, transforming a miserable wait into joy without ever revealing who he was.
Things worth remembering
- Exploding Kittens uses 'Kitty Test Pilots,' a program of volunteer families that took seven years to build, to test very half-baked prototypes.
- Lawyers forced the instructions to say hit the other player 'softly' with the no-stick club; the team rebelliously changed it to 'soft-ish' as a compromise.
- The Kickstarter's associated Gmail account got shut down after hitting Gmail's limit of 10,000 emails per second.
- When Lee looked at the top 10 Kickstarter campaigns of all time, Exploding Kittens was the only company still in business.
- They deliberately lose money on every game box, spending more than the four-to-five-cent industry norm so the packaging survives 20 years of repeated use.
- Retailers like Target and Walmart reached out asking what it would take to get Exploding Kittens on shelves; retail now accounts for about 60% of their business.
- Lee failed out of many colleges but talked his way into an Industrial Light & Magic internship, working on the connective tissue of Jar Jar Binks's neck for Star Wars.
- Jordan Weisman's voting-themed clothing company sold t-shirts with hidden coded messages that unlocked episodic videos, secretly retelling the founding of the US and registering hundreds of thousands of new voters.
- Their very first purchase order was 700,000 games in 30 days, versus an average game selling roughly 50,000 units a year.
- Roughly 16-20 orders shipped to Russia were destroyed by customs and marked as 'delivered' because importing games into Russia was illegal.
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Poetry for Neanderthals
Exploding Kittens
“of all the games tested so far, one game has stood out as a friend favorite, and that is Poetry for Neanderthals” — Tim Ferriss 00:01:40Find it on Amazon
Hand-To-Hand Wombat
Exploding Kittens
“which was you interviewing two game designers who worked on Hand-To-Hand Wombat. I found that short conversation so incredibly helpful” — Tim Ferriss 00:02:11Find it on Amazon
Think Like A Game Designer (Justin Gary episode with Elan Lee)
Justin Gary
“I recommend people listen to Think Like A Game Designer in the episode that Justin Gary did with you as well” — Tim Ferriss 00:02:11Find it on Amazon
Exploding Kittens
Exploding Kittens
“in the case of Exploding Kittens, the core gameplay loop is Russian roulette with a deck of cards. There's a few bad cards in there” — Elan Lee 00:09:23Find it on Amazon
Dungeons & Dragons
TSR (inferred)
“it is also one of the best games I've ever found for co-creating a narrative and finding one another and making one another interesting” — Tim Ferriss 00:54:45Find it on Amazon
Dominion
Rio Grande Games (inferred)
“there's a game out there called Dominion, which is — Yeah, that's a good one to start with for deck building” — Elan Lee 01:00:14Find it on Amazon
Throw Throw Burrito
Exploding Kittens
“We have one out there, it's one of my favorite games ever. It's called Throw Throw Burrito. It's dodgeball and card games all mixed into one” — Elan Lee 01:00:49Find it on Amazon
SET
Set Enterprises (inferred)
“There's a game out there called SET that I believe falls perfectly into that category. I'm not even going to describe what it is, because you should just go and try this game” — Elan Lee 01:02:26Find it on Amazon