Building an Exploding Kittens transmedia universe
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Tuesday 28th June 2022
"My background is in video games," Exploding Kittens CEO and co-founder Elan Lee tells GamesIndustry.biz in a discussion at the Collision conference in Toronto. "And I -- with my partner Matt [Inman] -- started Exploding Kittens specifically to get away from that, to get away from the screen. Let's make eye contact. Let's entertain each other a little bit and use a card game as the mechanism to do that."
That game -- also called Exploding Kittens, coincidentally enough -- began as a record-setting Kickstarter campaign in January of 2015, raising $8.8 million from nearly 220,000 supporters.
The original Exploding Kittens proved to be a spark that spawned a variety of versions, expansions, and entirely separate games like Poetry for Neanderthals and Throw Throw Burrito. They've even taken the former Xbox Entertainment Studios chief design officer Lee back to video games, as the company released an Exploding Kittens premium mobile game and Kitty Letter, a free mobile game that combines established word find mechanics with the expected incendiary feline antics. But the video games were just the beginning.
"Now the strategy to build a brand is you take those characters that you've already put into people's homes and made them fall in love with, and you put them in other environments," he says. "You bring them to life, you go into the digital space, you make a bunch of video games. You make a bunch of TV shows. You hopefully eventually get into, like, theme park land, and you start to build a world around this franchise."
As an example, he points to Tacocat.
"What if Tacocat -- a very popular character in our card game -- had its own world," Lee asks. "What if we could start
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