Elan Lee

Elan Lee is an American game designer, developer, and creator. He has designed games for the Xbox; helped create the world’s first Alternate Reality Games; and with Matthew Inman created the card game Exploding Kittens, whose Kickstarter campaign was the most-backed of its day. He and Inman founded the Exploding Kittens company in 2015. Lee began his career as a character designer at Industrial Light and Magic, where he worked on several movies, including the computer special effects for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Lee was then hired by Microsoft Game Studios as Lead Game Designer, designing and directing games for PC and Xbox. While working for Microsoft, he was the Executive Producer and Lead Designer for The Beast, one of the world’s first Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) used to promoted the Steven Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence.Lee has co-founded several gaming start-ups. In 2003, he co-founded 42 Entertainment, whose alternate reality games include I Love Bees to promote the Xbox game Halo 2 and Year Zero to promote the Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero. He and Dawne Weisman later co-founded EDOC Laundry to produce ARGs using clothes as the primary platform. Consumers deciphered codes hidden within garments and entered the results into the game's main website to reveal pieces of a distributed story.

In 2007, Lee founded Fourth Wall Studios to create entertainment experiences. Lee developed a new form of interactive programming that engaged audiences across multiple platforms via new technology he created. Projects such as the Emmy Award-winning series “Dirty Work” brought viewers into the show with interactive elements such as “integrated phone calls, texts and emails” as part of the viewing experience.Lee returned to Microsoft as the Chief Design Officer for Xbox Entertainment Studios soon after the launch of the Xbox One game console in 2013.

By 2014, Lee had left Microsoft to build a new technology-based TV studio; he raised about $5 million, assembled a team, and built a prototype.