The Exchanges

Q So how did you get, I mean, you were gonna have this guy make you a thousand decks. You have to make 700,000 now, so what did, did you call the guy and say, hey, we got, like, tell me what happened?

A Yeah, I called him up, and I, I explained, uh, Uh, what we needed. We needed 700,000 copies, and he just started screaming. Like, just absolute chaos. Um, I later learned that that would be higher capacity than the entirety of the number of decks of cards he's printed in the 10 years he had been in business. So, uh, he was just out. He was just like, I don't know how to help you. Um, then we called up, uh, a casual friend At, uh, Cards Against Humanity. And they do really, at the, especially at the time, they did just so many decks. And I said, look, here's our problem. Here's what we gotta do. I don't, I, I have no experience in this thing. And they were really nice. They said, look, you're going to, uh, call our distributor. You're gonna call our manufacturer. You're gonna call our agents. And we're gonna, we're gonna make sure we hold your hand through this whole process because we've printed even more than that in a year. Uh, so we got you. And it was incredible. Like, they took such good care of us, and we promised our backers, having no idea how many decks we were gonna have to produce, we promised them that we would deliver this thing in seven months. And, uh, so the campaign launched in January, we promised it would ship in July, and because of Cards Against Humanity and their help, uh, we shipped every single copy Uh, by July 30th of that year.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I called him up, and I, I explained, uh, Uh, what we needed.”

Q So, it sounds like you were a pretty, like, sort of smart kid, and, I mean, was school easy for you? Like, by the time you were in middle school or high school, like, were you, you know, kind of Able to just do well without a lot of effort, or what?

A I was never a great student, mostly because, um, class was really hard for me. I actually graduated from high school with mostly C's and one A+, and the A-plus was in physics, and, um, it's all because I had this incredible teacher, uh, whose name was Fred Carrington, and he, uh, like, on one of the very first days of class, he looked at me, and he said, you're gonna fail this thing. Like, just a hundred percent. You're not paying attention. You're no good at tests. You're not turning in your homework. You're going to fail this thing. But I'm going to make you a deal. I think you're smart. I think we're just trying to figure out where the smart lives, and so here's what we're going to do. Next year, we're switching textbooks. Brand new physics book, and the problem with the new physics book is it's edition one, and that means there's going to be a ton of mistakes in the thing, and they're eventually going to re-release edition two and three and so on. But right now, we've got this book with a bunch of mistakes. Take this book, go home, find a mistake, and fix it, and I'll let you pass this class. And I thought, this is the greatest thing I've ever heard. Like, I get, it felt like a research project. It felt like there's, um, something broken, and nobody knows the answer, and I'm gonna go solve it. And normally, I hate homework, but suddenly, I was devouring this book. Every sin…

AI assessment note: “I was never a great student, mostly because, um, class was really hard for me.”

Q And what was the first game that you, you were sort of assigned to work on, or you got involved with?

A Uh, the first one was Halo, um, which, uh, I wanna be careful not to make it sound like I was the lead game designer on Halo. I was on the design team for Halo. There was hundreds of people working on that game, but starting there, and, um, you know, that, that game, like, defined, that game really changed the history of video games, and being associated with that, uh, we knew, uh, Right away, like right away that this was going to be special, and it kind of set the bar for the other five games and, and what we needed them to be. And so, uh, I was just working with this incredible rock star team, and we all worked for years to just get those things out the door.

AI assessment note: “the first one was Halo, um, which, uh, I wanna be careful”

Q Got it, ok. And, and were you living, were you living in Seattle at the time, or were you living in LA?

A Um, I was living in LA, and, um, what was I doing at the time? I was doing nothing. I, like, I spent a week just saying, like, I don't know what I'm gonna do, I'm not gonna do anything, I'm not gonna make any plans, let me just, let me just try to relax for a week. And then I got An invitation from a friend of mine, uh, Matt Harding, who said, uh, come to Hawaii with me. We're gonna set up a group little Hawaii trip, some of my favorite people, I'm gonna rent an Airbnb, we're all gonna go hang out. And one of the people that Matt Harding invited was this guy, Matt Inman, who is the creator of the online comic, The Oatmeal.

AI assessment note: “I was living in LA”

Q Remind me, what was the premise of that game?

A The premise there was Matt, um, once again, we went back to Matt, and Matt, uh, wanted to make Body parts. He's like, I'm gonna make one card with a head, and one card with a torso, and one with legs, and one with arms, and we'll do a whole deck of like a hundred of those, and you mix and match these characters together to make incredible creatures, uh, that do battle against this oncoming horde of raging infants who are trying to destroy the monsters all the time. And so we called the monsters all the bears and against the babies, and that was the premise of the game. And it was lovely. I mean, it was just such beautiful art. And, uh, we raised, we raised like five million dollars on Kickstarter for that campaign.

AI assessment note: “you mix and match these characters together to make incredible creatures, uh, that do battle”

Q And so, how do you guys decide what to pursue? Like, I'm sure you've got, you have to have a lot of ideas in order to, to, like, decide to land on one and pursue it.

A Yeah. We have these design retreats, and we do them, you know, let's say two to four times a year. And the whole team, sorry, the whole design team, which is like five or six people, we, you Rent an Airbnb. We all go to this house. We spend three or four days just tinkering with ideas. We've got a table full of raw materials, like weird toys and inflatables and, and, and just anything we can get our hands on to just tinker and just play and say, Ooh, what if this? And what if that? But on the last day, the marketing team comes to the house and we have to pitch them and teach them how to play all 20 of those games. And the reason that we're doing that is because they have ultimate veto power over Anything. So we could think it's the best game in the world, but if the marketing team cannot figure out how they're going to sell that thing, that game dies that moment.

AI assessment note: “they have ultimate veto power over Anything... if the marketing team cannot figure out”

Q even talking to you here, like, I, I, I can identify that type, and you're not that, like, and not in a bad way at all, like, you, you, you're, I, I'm similar, like, you're, you're fidgety, you're moving in your chair, like, your brain doesn't work that way, where you're like, okay, here's your task, here's your task, here's your task, here's our schedule, or, or am I wrong?

A No, you're, you're totally right. I'm laughing because that exact observation is, is kind of what changed my life at Microsoft. Um, I was introduced, my boss was a guy named Jordan Weissman, and, uh, meeting Jordan Weissman really defined the next two decades of my life, but it all started with him sitting down with me and making that exact observation. Uh, he essentially said, you're one of the worst program managers I've ever seen. But I think you might be a good designer, so we're gonna give that a try instead. And he put me on the design team to develop the first six titles for the Xbox, the very first six. And, um, yeah, so my job was literally running around from team to team, helping wherever I could, so that when this thing goes out the door, those first six titles are Absolute triple A hits. Um, it was, uh, I was there for about six years, and it was just constant. Here's a problem. Come up with a solution. Here's another one. Come up with a solution.

AI assessment note: “No, you're, you're totally right. I'm laughing because that exact observation”

Q And I guess one of the projects you end up working on is with Steven Spielberg. He, he, he had a movie that came out called AI, and I guess you were assigned to kind of turn that into a video game or, or, or some, some thing for the movie?

A Yeah. Jordan brought Steven Spielberg into my office and said, he's got this new movie coming out called AI, and we're going to do a collection of Xbox games. I think there were either four or five Xbox games that we were going to do Based on AI. So one was going to be an adventure game where you, uh, get to play as certain characters in the movie, and one was going to be a racing game, and one was going to be a gladiatorial combat game, and so we started working on all of those, and then Jordan said, uh, you know what we really need is the glue. What is the story that, like, holds all of these other games together? And I remember we went out to lunch one day, And we were just tinkering around with what is this glue thing? What does it mean? How do we deliver the glue? And, uh, we were sitting at lunch and Jordan's phone rang and he looked at me and he said, what if that was the game calling us right now? And my brain just fell out of my ears. Like what a crazy statement. And so we rushed back to the office and started designing a brand new thing, which was what if we wrote this whole story, this, this, This thing with these characters, and all these different plot points, and it ties all of these stories together. And then we broke it up into little tiny pieces. A two minute video clip, and a text snippet, and a piece of audio, and we scatter all of those all over the internet…

AI assessment note: “Jordan brought Steven Spielberg into my office and said, he's got this new movie”

Q All right, so this is where, where we finally are going to get into Exploding Kittens, because as I understand it, you, you brought a deck of cards with you to Hawaii, and, and what, you've been tinkering with, with an idea for a game that, that a friend of yours had kind of suggested to you, is, is that right? What's, what's the story?

A Yeah. Another friend of mine, Shane Small, had come up with this idea for an app, and he said, what if we do Russian roulette with a deck of cards, and it'll be an app, and you like, you're trying to draw cards, but don't draw the bad card, and we'll, I don't know, we'll, we'll somehow convert this into, uh, something that you can play on your iPhone. And I said, look, I don't understand what most of that means, but let's do that for real. Like, to test if any of this makes any sense at all, what if we did all of that for real? And we'll take a real deck of cards, and I'll just scribble on some of them with a Sharpie, and we'll play this game using a real deck of cards. And so I, I literally took a Sharpie and a poker deck, and I started scribbling on it, and I still have the deck over there on my shelf. And all it was, was Russian roulette. There was one bad card in the deck. Draw, take turns drawing cards. Don't draw the bad card. Every other card that you draw maybe will help you somehow. Maybe one will let you peek at a card before you draw. Maybe one will let you force somebody else to draw instead of you. That's the whole game.

AI assessment note: “Another friend of mine, Shane Small, had come up with this idea”

Q Okay, let's, before we get there, so you, it's a card game, you have the concept down, which is basically Russian roulette, but what happens then when you get back after this Hawaii trip? He just goes to town on, on making the, creating the artwork for these cards?

A Yeah, so every card in the deck, there's 56 cards, every card in the deck is going to be a one-panel comic. My job is figure out what the hell those cards are. Like, we're gonna need a whole lot of cards. Everyone has to feel special and unique. Um, my whole principle behind the thing was, every card in this game should invite an interaction between you and another player. So, I really wanted this thing to feel like you are playing against players. You're not playing against the game. Everybody is playing against each other, and that's just that interactive training that I had walked in the door with, and that partnered with Matt's Art. Uh, over the course of just a few weeks, we put this package together that was the very first version of Exploding Kittens.

AI assessment note: “over the course of just a few weeks, we put this package together”

Q And, and I should, we should just sort of add that the, this is a very efficient thing to sell, right? Because I can't imagine it's that expensive. I mean, first of all, you didn't have to pay an artist or license there because he's a co-owner. Right. And making them, printing the cards and getting them shipped in the container. How much does that cost per deck?

A Yeah. It's to, to make cards, put them in a, put them in a box. This comes out to like between one and two dollars based on the product. Right. And we're selling it for 20. So that's a really good business. But you, you as a person who has built products, you know, like, So much more has to be spent to market that thing. And, um, I think that's, every time I say that statistic, like, yeah, we're building things for a dollar and selling them for 20, everyone has that reaction until you realize, like, this is a complicated business, and there are so many parts that require cash infusions constantly, uh, in order to stay above the competition, in order to stay relevant, in order to make sure that next year you do as well as the previous year. It's Expensive in all the ways that you don't normally write down on paper.

AI assessment note: “This comes out to like between one and two dollars based on the product.”

Q But why would somebody say, oh, that's the game that I want and not the previous ones? Like, what, what was it about... Were you able to tell the story better? Like, why would people pick that off the shelf?

A So, it really stands out on the shelf. Like, it's got this little nice sense of mystery and storytelling right on the box. Like, you told me this was a card game, but what the hell is this dodgeball thing? Why are these burritos here? And you take that game home. That's just enough to get enough people to take it home. And then they go and they play it with their friends, and every one of their friends leaves that party thinking, I gotta buy this game. And that thing, I think its first year, it sold 500,000 copies. A normal game, its first year, will sell 30,000 copies. Like, this was just off the charts for a game, and every year since then, it's grown, because it keeps spreading.

AI assessment note: “So, it really stands out on the shelf. Like, it's got this little nice”