บทถอดความฉบับเต็มของ How 'Exploding Kittens' Founders Turned Their Best-Selling Card Game Into a Netflix TV Series and Mobile Game

It just wasn't something that struck me as television material. I mean, it's a card game, where as we just said, each card is its own non secuity. It's they're all just independent jokes, don't really a story. It'sn't really through line. It would be like if I told you we're going to make connect for into a movie, you'd be like, God, stop, you know, please, don't you know? And what ended up happening was started to think kind of in earnest about, regardless of the card game, what's the show that I would want to watch? And that is where I kind of flipped through an old notebook and started schooling away. And I'd always kind of had this idea in the back of my mind of some sort of cat X related show and hear me out. So when I had a girlfriend in my twenties where she had a cat who kind of simultaneously behaved like God in the house and also like Satan. I think this is very reliable for most pet owners. Your cat things, you own the house, but they also seem to rule the underworld as well, so again, when I thought, how can I make Exploding Kittens into a TV series that I want to watch without ever having played the game, that's where this idea of God and the Devil being trapped in cat bodies on Earth came from. So what I did was most television pitches, you know, you have your little index cards and you nervously stand in a room and try to recite your show in front of a bunch of people. I don't really drive that way, and I can draw, So I thought I would draw my pitch in the form of a comic that you could read like it's a It's about a four minute read, like a tiny graphic novel, so you could you read my show. We pitched it to seven studios and six of them made offers on it right away, and that's when kind of realized, I think I doesinthe really really good here. That's how we connected eventually with Netflix. And at the time Netflix was this was like twenty nineteen, twenty twenty. Netflix was investing heavily in animation, I think, and I think they doubled down on it because of the pandemic, because you couldn't shoot anything live action, and that's that's where it's the when you get touts home. 00:08:20 Speaker 3: Just to add the even before that, like all we ever really aspired to do, at least at first, was let's make a bunch of card games. Like I really like designing games, Matt really likes drawing games, come together and we were able to create these really fun, exciting things under the premise that, like, none of these games should be entertaining. All every game we make should make the people you're playing with entertaining instead. And armed with that, we're able to create like some of the some of the best selling games ever. It's really it's been a it's been a really fun experience. And then once once the Netflix show really solidified, like once it was like, oh, we're doing this, Matt started to lead his team, the show team, as far as like, all right, well, here's what these characters sound like, here's how they behave, here's how

they move, here's here's what the world actually looks like instead of just a bunch of static images. And armed with that, we were able to start saying, okay, well, now this is a world instead of just a bunch of comics, this is an actual world. So that means we can start making more games, more moving games. Right, so like digital games, mobile games, VR games, we can start exploring where else these characters might live and how our audience might be able to experience them. And so it was like this neat little one two punch, like, let's start by building a really strong audience, building simple, fast, easy fun party games. Expand that into the world of TV, and then now we can expand that whole ip outwards because we know what it looks and sounds like. 00:10:02 Speaker 1: As you became more and more familiar with the tabletop game and that's where you started with and that's where you grew, and that's where the success was. Going into TV and going into gaming digital. What did you all have to do to educate yourselves on understanding those worlds, the business model of those things, and expanding the brand into those sections where you had been strictly in tabletop gaming before. 00:10:24 Speaker 2: Well, I actually on once you go first you worked at the Xbox, you can talk about all kinds off there. 00:10:29 Speaker 3: I think we knew, like all of us from hearing all the stories, that there's not a huge amount of money in season one. Season one is like establishing yourself. It's building the team figuring out what this thing looks like, trying your best to build an audience, investing heavily in marketing, making sure you get the word out. It's really once that thing takes off, which we really hope this does because we've worked so hard at it. It's once that takes off that you have more leverage, that you get to start making more demands. Essentially. However, getting to that point, there were a few things that were really important to us. A typical TV deal, the network has a lot of rules about merchandising, about what the show is called, about how you talk about the show, and we were very fortunate that we could walk into those deals saying, look, this has to be called Exploding Kittens, has to has to has to, which is very important to us. That's the brand recognition. They totally agreed. They were like, yes, has to, that's where the audience is going to come from. You've got one of the best selling games in the world, So cool, we're all in agreement there. It's good for them, it's good for us. That was a really nice negotiation point that was not contentious at all. But then the second one was merchandising, which is like, look, We're going to be the best partners ever and anything that comes out of the show, out of these characters, we're all going to participate in that. But it is very important to us that you acknowledge we are a pre existing company that only does merchandising. All we do is put out card games out into the world, So

we have to be able to keep those things in their own little box in order that we can keep running the company, keep coming up with new ideas, and keep using those ideas to generate new IP and new shows for Netflix. So everyone was very good about that. But it was non traditional, right, Like the standard version is all merchandising that comes out of a show gets split up between all the partners, and we had to cut out or carve out pre existing ips and new games that we create that weren't associated with the show. That was a little bit of learning on both sides, right. Nobody was used to that, but that's what that's what we clung onto because it was so important and we knew that as long as we can hold on to that, we can then learn the rest of the process. Working closely with the networks, working closely with Netflix to get the best deal for everybody. 00:12:57 Speaker 1: We'll be back to work from the Exploding Kittens seen actor this break. 00:13:06 Speaker 2: Yeah, so kind of going through card games to digital I know Alons kind of got a rich background, and you know, he worked was a chief design officer at the Xbox, so that there was a lot of stuff that fit there for him. For me going from card game to television, I had I've been working in comics forever, which is very helpful because when you draw storyboards, which become animatics, it's become cartoons animatics fen who doesn't know they're They're kind of like a really crappy cartoon. They're black and white. Usually the actors aren't even there yet, so it's all this rough. I've done a ton of storyboarding just in my career as a cartoonist, so I had some skills there. And then I'd worked in elimination for a couple of years on their movies, did some punch up on their movies, so I had some experience there. That being said, there was a lot of new disciplines to learn. You know, writing a still web comic on the Internet is very different from dealing with actors, writers, sound design, fully score. There's a whole kind of arsenal thing. So past four and a half years has been it's like the greatest film class they've ever gone to, you know, in a way, because I got to actively learn while making show. The other thing that was probably where Robber Mett road in terms of difficulty was when you make a web comic, people hear when they read your comic, they hear what ever voice they want to hear in their head, and usually it's a very funny voice. It's well written television or animation. They hear whatever voice the actor is saying and or the way the character is moving, and it can all break a joke or make a joke. So that was where I had to be really diligent and good about make sure the comedy comes through because there's a ton of funny jokes that are written in script, and then when they're own, you know, they're performed, they can kind of change or breakdown that comes with you. That's the same with the art, you know, creating really rich style guides that I drop people a certain way. You know, I had kind of a signature, kind of inbred frog eyed look to everything that I drop, and I needed to make sure that in bred frog eyed was well ingrained into one in Netflix. It was you know, it's on my office door talking. 00:15:06 Speaker 1: About the voices that brings me a question about passing and how involved you all were in that process. If Netflix had ideas right off the top, if you all had ideas and kind of what it was based on, and also fans of exploding kittens versus people are like, I have no idea what this is. I've never heard of this before, and kind of that barrier to entry maybe with certain talent. 00:15:26 Speaker 2: We you know, initially Netflix and me were aligned that we wanted to go after famous people, you know, celebrities, and we did. We went after famous people and celebrities and what do you get any and they're busy, you know, like I mean that in a good way because it's like a cat themed you know, it'd be like we're making a movie out of them. I don't know, pick the worst they imaginable. Let me paraphrase, paraphrase, I'm I'm blowing this right now. We went out to the first person who went out to to Boyce Godcat was Peter d English and which had been amazing. I love him and he was super interested, but he was shooting a movie. And then the next person we went after was calling Farrell again amazing, great shooting a movie. And then they both got a bunch of awards. I think called Ferrol literally maybe got nominated for an Oscar maybe one I don't remember, and I was like, yeah, it's probably good. You turned down the whole cat card game idea. You were clearly busy something that matters. But sort of through that process, what we kind of realized was we wanted people who were funny. We don't care who they are in terms of celebrity. So that's why we ended up with like, for example, a good example of this, Mark brooksh who plays the dad on the show. He plays Marv. He's the voice. He might not know his name, but if you saw him, you know who he is. He was in the office. He also played the energy vampire in What We Do in the Shadows, And that's the kind of a lack of better word, black of the energy we wanted from our characters was less about can we shove Wesley Snipes in here. I don't know why I picked him. I like him, but whatever, that's really celebrity I can think of right now, Wesley Snipe versus someone that maybe isn't quite as well known, but their ability to perform a joke into a microphone was so good. Tom Ellis is that way to shoo him. They were all like funny, funny people. THAT'SI Sidar is another good example. 00:17:13 Speaker 3: So tom Ellis, though, Matt, I remember going through that casting process and you like sending me all of these recordings and these auditions, and for Godcat, you weren't even there was not even a thought that went into that. It was just like you heard that voice, and you're like, yeah, this is Godcat, like this is one hundred percent sold. 00:17:32 Speaker 2: Yeah, and

he was offer only, so we never heard him before. The table reads. So the table reads, I'm like, there's no way this guy's not gonna not gonna like fell it. And he didn't. I mean, if I said that the right way, he was amazing. Like he We could kind of get a sense of him too, because tom Elise is Welsh, his accent is Welsh. He's funny based on his previous shows Miranda Loose First and other things, but he also has this simultaneous quality of being old world founding but also being fresh and relevant. Another good comparison to him might be someone like Matt Gardy also on what we do in the Shadows, where he's got this old world sound. But he also can like yell at his phone for not charging fast enough, like I can straddle those two. So Tom allis ended up being absolutely perfect god Cat. He's also a very nice man in person. 00:18:21 Speaker 1: I originally thought it was a nice nod to the inverse of him being Lucifer, that he'd be Godcat by them. I mean, that's a big Lucifer fan, so that was. 00:18:33 Speaker 2: I think he's already getting hit with every single comment thread on the internet about the show is like he played the Devil, now it plays God That's like that dominates, and I'm like, great, I like it. I think that probably is helping our marketing a little bit because that's such a funny topic to you know. The other thing worth noting about Tom he has two cats at home and their names are Kane and Abel, so it all kind of fits into the theme of Godcat and Devil Cat. 00:18:56 Speaker 1: Talking about exploding kittens, the brand and exploding Kitten is the show and the digital game and remaining separate as a company right now, how are you functioning when you have this huge show coming out that is made by the brand, but you're also still operating as a company that does other things and is a merchandising company, a game company, as you've said, So we're you're all's focuses right now. How much are you split between different projects? What does that look like internally? 00:19:23 Speaker 3: Yeah, we should We should start by saying, every lawyer, every accountant, every Hollywood agent for the last five years has been begging us to change the name of the company, so that is not the same name as everything else, because you say exploiting kittens. Are you talking about the show or the company, or the or the game or one of the expansions. It's it drives everybody insane. Matt and I refuse to change it because that's how it was born, and we think it's very We. 00:19:49 Speaker 2: Just like it. 00:19:50 Speaker 3: So, so, how is this whole thing functioning? It's it's a it's I've I've done five startups in my life. This is now by far the largest one, which makes it really really hard to manage all of those things because we have separate teams working on individual projects. Right we have our largest team works on sorry, our largest team. Actually, when the Netflix show was in full production, was nearly one hundred people, so that was the actual largest team. Second largest is game production, and then third is digital, where we have a lot of external partners. The company itself in order to function just has a lot of managers. Like we really we started out in my garage, just very few of us, and the whole idea was, let's all be creative all day, every day, and we'll make a game, and it's going to be somebody else's problem to figure out how that thing is produced, how it's printed, how it's shipped, how it gets on boats, how it gets into stores. We don't care about any of that. All we care about is gonna make fun stuff that we like playing. And in the process of doing that, we learned that we want to get good at everything. We want to learn how to print, we want to learn how to distribute, we want to learn how to do sales, we want to learn how to do marketing, like just all the stuff. And so now all of that stuff is internal. We have all of these different teams because we like all of that in one place, but that means our team is very management heavy, like we have someone in charge of every single one of those things. And then we got another person in charge of all of those managers, and then they all report up to someone at the sea level, and it looks a lot like a corporation at this point, much to our dismay, but we just couldn't figure out any other way to do all the things we want to do, get good at all the things, have control of all those things without having a whole lot of managers and unfortunately a whole lot of meetings. Matt, have I accurately depicted the misery that is our calendars these days? 00:21:57 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I feel unwell, so I would say, yeah, now you're you're at you And the question is kind of like, what how do we kind of split up, you know, making the show versus making a game. It's that kind of idea. Yeah, I mean the show was pretty siloed because like Netflix, the way they make sure that they you know, they get a show and then they I don't like one hundred people, and then when the show's over, they kind of trail off its contractors. So for me, I've always burned the vin nine oil, so I was kind of putting the oatmeal cartooning aside for the black couple of years. Just I don't have time, and working most of the time as the showrunner and working on the series and then kind of working at DK when I have time. It's it's actually kind of a fun balance because when I was doing the Oatmeal full time the comic, I could go from creative drawing, I'm the boss, I'm the creator. There's no meetings a crap like that. And then when I when I had to go to K and it was you know, are all hands hr okr blah blah blah. You know I could get into that world as well. Yeah, so long story short, Uh, I just work a lot. Know, it's not ever gonn answer, That's all I got. I will also say I can draw really cast I know that sounds like I'm bragging. I draw poorly quickly, and so when I'm on the show or if I'm working on card games, whatever it is, sometimes I'm at my

speed, my garb my speed of producing beautiful, palatable garbage is very helpful. Kind of like when I talk palatable garbage, you know that's my dad I used to call me. He didn't call me that. 00:23:24 Speaker 1: We're garbage. Translated from the show for Digital What were the aspects I know Elan with the Xbox background, but the aspects for the digital game, and then also making sure that remains separate from the show, because I know that characters from the show will be incorporated into the digital game, but the game itself still stands independent from Netflix show. I know. 00:23:51 Speaker 3: It's a lot, right. Just imagine how much easier this would be if our company had a different name. I know, all right, So when we work on the digital stuff, like look, first and foremost, we do physical games, right, ink on cardboard, put it in a box, go have a great time. And we actually resisted doing digital stuff for a while because you know, I have a very rich history in screens, with my history with the Xbox, and this was kind of a departure from that. This was kind of fun to say, like let's just make games, Like, let's just make physical game when I think back to my childhood playing games with my brothers and sisters, like we're sitting around a table, we're throwing food, we're hiding cards under the table, like all that fun stuff that just doesn't happen with a screen and doesn't happen remotely. So when it came time to start developing digital properties, we had to think through this process of like, we can't just do this for digital sake. There has to be a reason. There has to be something about the digital experience that's better than the physical experience, otherwise we might as well not do it. And we started attacking that on two fronts. Number one is digital had to be more accessible in order to play, especially like during the pandemic, in order to play this game when you can't be in the same room as your friends, Digital solves that problem. So we have to make sure there's remote play, that there's lobbies that people can join and they can make new friends. And we hit that hard. We really really important to us to say one of the reasons you're going to do this is because you can't be in the same room as other people. And then the second one was, let's use this as an opportunity to create cards that literally cannot exist in the real world. And my favorite example of that is in the physical game, there's a card called shuffle really really simple. You've got this deck of cards. One of them is bad, the exploding kitten. You don't want to draw the exploding kitten. And so if you know via playing a bunch of other cards, that let you peak before you draw, you know the top ones in Exploding Kitten. 00:25:52 Speaker 2: Cool. 00:25:52 Speaker 3: So you play a shuffle card, you shuffle up the deck, you hope you've moved the kitten somewhere where it's not going to hurt you, and then you draw the card to end your turn. Really straightforward, everybody understands what shuffle does. In the digital version, not only can we put in the regular shuffle card, but we can put in something that can't exist in the real world, and that's a card called fake shuffle. And what fake shuffle does is when you play it, it looks to all the other players like you just played a shuffle card, but really what you've done is shuffled for you and nobody else. Meaning when you draw a card, it will give you a random card. But after that event, the rest of the deck magically flips back into the state it was before the shuffle happened. And so now for the next player, these pining kitten is still right on top because nothing was actually shuffled. That's not possible to do in the real world. It would require blindfolds and leaving the room. Oh my goodness, what a nightmare. But in digital it's very easy, and so we've got a series of cards like that, which really were the guiding light for us in creating the digital experience to say, like, let's make sure that this experience is not just mimic the physical one, but enhances it in a way that would not otherwise be possible. 00:27:03 Speaker 1: Speaking about the digital game and the mechanics of that. Netflix is very new to games still, they've been ramping up and this was one of the ones that was announced pretty early on and announced in connection with the TV show. So I need to know what your experience has been working with them, just from a company standpoint on the gaming side versus the TV side, because they are so new at the gaming stuff and they're still growing that division. 00:27:28 Speaker 2: Well, I can say really quick the we have there's two versions of Exploding at One is the one we made years ago, and then there's the new Netflix one. The one we made years ago was great, but there's a lot of things that we didn't do just because technically we couldn't or we didn't know how. Some of the car mechanics you play they're familiar with when you play physically in our game. We have other new ones, and there's there's some lot of charm there, but Netflix is the most faithful. Like if you play the physical card game and you play the Netflix one, most were very very close. So in that regard, it was easy because they kind of took the physical game and just recreated it as digital and it was easy and I really like, this is the long way of saying, I really liked the Netflix version, and working with them on that app was pretty seamless. The our teams that Netflix are so good. I mean they can clone things that I make. They can, you know. The other thing was helpful is the show is so kind of put this. It's like so well structured and crafted versus the way I do things. That translating that art over was as an example when you I didn't know this, but when you make an animated series, like if you're maybe making The Simpsons back in whatever that was nineteen ninety something, you do blueprint like a perhaps like a top down bird's eye blue

viewprint of the home. So like the Simpsons probably had a blueprint of their home where the doors swing open and on. We did that for our show. Actually got to look at like architectural plants for where the family lives, so that's like the level of fidelity to some of these documents with regards to creating it. When Netflix made an app out of the show and out of the UK, it was the art was it was easy. 00:29:06 Speaker 3: Also, our interests were aligned, Like Netflix is releasing that game for free, which means their motivation is build the best experience you can, which amazingly is exactly our motivation. Right, So when we first start on that thing, and like you say, like it was in their initial launch portfolio, right before they really knew very much, before they had launched any other games. And as long as your interests are aligned, as long as we get to sit down with them and say, Okay, we're gonna learn a lot, we're gonna build all kinds of cool stuff, but we all want to build the best possible experience for people. You want to, we want to. You can figure everything else out because you're all working towards the same finish line. So that worked really well for us. 00:29:53 Speaker 1: Now I just want to ask about, you know, the tabletop industry. Hollywood is obviously not that connected to it, but so much is being adapted from tabletop games at this point that people are very interested in it. Looking at it, and it's kind of a return to that format because we're drawing from it in more modern media. So I want to know how much you guys can like kind of break down working in that industry and crossing over into Hollywood and seeing the interest in things pick up again in terms of the transmedia component of that mean comes seeing the tabletop gaming community be a very important one to furthering more modern IP. 00:30:37 Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, let's just talk about the background there for a sec because Matt Now used to have this conversation all the time. When we were building the company, like ten years ago now, we talked a lot about like what do we want to grow this into, like how big and what are our aspirations? And the name that kept coming up for us was Marvel. Not to say we've reached nearly that, but their initial model was let's build something cheap, fast and easy comics. Right like, they cranked out a whole bunch of them. Those that worked, they would continue to invest in, those that didn't would elegantly exit, and then they'd move on to others. And what that did was that allowed them to familiarize their audience with worlds with characters, and then over the years, in their case, many decades. They could then start working on more elaborate versions of those worlds because their audience already have the name recognition, and they could build that fast and cheaply. Right. It costs so much less to put out a comic book than it does a full feature Hollywood movie. Right, So we looked at that model and thought, if anything, I don't know if we can ever achieve that, but that's a really nice goal. It is easy for us to put out games. Games are relatively inexpensive, especially compared to a TV show or movie. So let's put out games that have characters and have a little bit of edge to them and hint at a world and build that audience familiarization, so that name recognition. You might fall in love with a particular character from a game because you've invited them into your home and you interact with them night after night with your family and friends. And so that model works really well for us because this is an easy way for us to get into your house, and then we can start expanding. Then we can say, like exploding kinds cool, there's a Netflix show. Now you can see those characters come to life. And so this is just sort of the tip of the iceberg for us. It's just starting to say, here's what phase two looks like. Very established on phase one, right, establish that name recognition. Now we're starting to dabble into this larger world, which is a natural fit. It's much more expensive, and you can only do it for those titles that work really well. But again, like Marvel, we get to double down on those that work well and we get to elegantly sunset those that don't so that we can spend our time on new things. 00:33:00 Speaker 2: It's importantly God, I hope there's another Battleship movie because that was a winner. You know, we could be the next Battleship movie. It would be great. Still comes out in a week, let's find out. Maybe. 00:33:12 Speaker 1: Guys, this is been wonderful. 00:33:18 Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. 00:33:20 Speaker 2: Be sure to leave us a review at Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music. We love to hear from listeners. 00:33:26 Speaker 1: Please go to Variety dot com and sign up for the free weekly Strictly Business newsletter, and don't forget to tune in next week for another episode of Strictly Business.