Matt is the creator of the beloved and wildly popular web comic called The Oatmeal. He helped develop some of the world’s first alternative reality games.

Stay tuned.Īnd here’s what you need to know about Elan, Matt, and the card game Exploding Kittens.īefore Exploding Kittens, Elan, as you heard, was Chief Design Officer for XBox at Microsoft. And you’ll learn how they transform a fundraising campaign into an epic interactive game - one that involves cats dressed as tacos and 10 batmans in one hot tub. But the takeaway is relevant for any creative in any field: to make something that people find irresistable: Get to the fun part.Īs Elan and Matt take us on the journey of creating Exploding Kittens, you’ll hear how they intentionally build fun into everything – from the card design to the instruction manual. This is Elan and Matt’s personal story of developing a simple and hilarious card game that snowballed into an entire company. Later, you’ll hear from his creative partner, cartoonist Matthew Inman, and they’re about to tell us the story of creating Exploding Kittens - one of the most popular card games in the world. JUNE COHEN: That’s game developer Elan Lee. So I resolved to start a new kind of entertainment company that celebrated that connectivity. The games were just the tool set to allow us to have those experiences. When I think back to my childhood playing games with my siblings, I don’t even remember the games. Within two weeks, I resigned from Microsoft, thinking, “I can’t be part of this problem anymore. And so I was clearly part of the problem. Here we were, a family having a mini reunion, and they weren’t even looking up. And as a result, the players became unimportant. Everything I did involved putting people in front of screens, building games where all the focus was on the games instead of the players. I was the chief design officer at the Xbox.

To make it worse, it was a video game that I helped design. I’m so excited to see everybody.” My brother has two young kids and they were both just glued to the screen, this video game they were playing. I walk in the front door and I’m like, “Hey, everybody, I’m here. ELAN LEE: I walked to my brother’s house.

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