Elan Lee

Worth knowing

He has taken an idea from a card game prototype to nearly 30 published titles, and before that he built audiences of millions for Halo 2 and Nine Inch Nails using games that played out in the real world. Few people understand better how to make strangers care about something new. Founders planning a crowdfunding launch, or anyone building an audience before a product exists, should write.

Story

Elan studied computer science at Rochester Institute of Technology and started out at Microsoft Games Studio as a lead designer on the original Xbox. There he helped create The Beast, the first alternate reality game, and then co-founded 42 Entertainment in 2003, where I Love Bees and Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero turned marketing campaigns into puzzles that spilled across phone booths, websites and city streets. He founded Fourth Wall Studios in 2007 with Jim Stewartson and Sean Stewart, and later served as Chief Design Officer at Xbox Entertainment Studios. Exploding Kittens began as a card game and became a company, which he now leads from Toronto.

Highlights

• Exploding Kittens Kickstarter raised $8,782,571 in 2015, fourth most-funded to that date
• Peabody Award for The Beast, the first alternate reality game
• Primetime Emmy Award for the series "Dirty Work"
• IndieCade Trailblazer Award for a career in interactive entertainment
• B.S. Computer Science, Rochester Institute of Technology; named Outstanding Alumnus