Once they got the game down, they needed to produce and sell it, and they decided to use other people's money. 'Every card in the game is designed to make someone you're playing with entertaining, they're just mechanisms to unlock the entertainment value in the people you're sitting down with.' 'This game was not designed to be entertaining,' said Lee.

The one card you don't want to pick is an exploding kitten, because then you're out of the game, unless you have a special card that can mitigate it. 'Exploding Kittens' is part chance, part skill. 'We had 17 cats growing up in my house when I was a kid,' he said of his childhood in northern Idaho. Inman created the characters and did the artwork, everything from the palindromic Taco Cat to the anatomically correct bikini wearing mother cat with four swimsuit tops. 'What if instead of a bomb, everybody was stressing and worrying about a kitten? A kitten would kill you, a kitten would blow you up.' He told Lee and Small that everyone is afraid of bombs, there's no fun in that. 'I thought: 'This is a really fun game, it's got a terrible theme, it's got no soul, and I think I can make it funny,'' said Inman. He partnered with a friend named Shane Small, and they developed a game called 'Bomb Squad.' Draw the card with a bomb on it and you blow up.

That's when Lee decided to make a good old-fashioned card game that lets people interact and have fun together around the table. I started to feel responsible for that, because I was the one who put those pixels on the screen.' 'They're just staring at the TV, and they're not talking and they're not laughing, and their siblings are sitting right next to them, and it started to feel like this very lonely experience. 'I have nieces and nephews that play 'Halo' a lot,' he said. After launching the first Xbox and 'Halo,' he eventually left to start a series of companies, most of them related to digital gaming.Ī couple years ago, he began feeling bad about it all. Then Microsoft hired Lee to be lead game designer for its then-new Xbox project. 'I feel I spend most of my life apologizing for that,' he said. In college, he managed to land an internship at Industrial Light & Magic, where he worked in computer special effects for 'Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace.' One of his jobs was creating the neck of Jar Jar Binks, the least-likable character in 'Star Wars' history. As a teenager, Lee was published in a scientific journal for accidentally photographing a soundwave. He has a crazy resume: 'I went to seven different colleges because I'm a horrible student.'

Lee loved playing table games growing up, though he and his brothers would always change the rules to make it more fun.

Californiaâ”exploding kittens