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.[4]
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.[5]
In 2015, Lee, Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal), and Shane Small created the card game Exploding Kittens. Originally called Bomb Squad, it became the most-backed campaign on Kickstarter at the time, raising $8.78 million from 219,382 backers. “When Exploding Kittens launched, I thought it would be a side project on the weekend. It’s so weird when the side project dwarfs the scope and scale of the main project. And so I decided to return the money I raised [$5 million for the "main" project, a "technology-based TV studio"]. I realized that if I didn’t turn all my attention to this, it would become the biggest regret of my life.”[6]
Later in the year, Lee and Inman founded Exploding Kittens Inc.[7][8] The company released its second tabletop game, Bears vs. Babies, in 2017, after raising more than $3 million from 85,000 Kickstarter backers.[9][10]
In 2018, the company released You’ve Got Crabs;[7] in 2019, it released Throw Throw Burrito after another Kickstarter campaign and On a Scale of One to T-Rex exclusively on Amazon.[11][12][13][14]
In October 2019, the American businessman and investor Peter Chernin, CEO of The Chernin Group, invested $30 million for a minority stake in Exploding Kittens Inc. Inman said the company planned to use the funds to mount a live gaming convention, Burning Cat, inspired by the Burning Man festival; hire more artists; and produce three and five new games a year.[15][16]
In 2008, Year Zero won the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity Grand Prix Award for "Viral Marketing"[17] and a Silver Award for "Integrated Campaign".[18]
The game also won a bronze Clio Award,[19] and two Webbys: Peoples Voice Award (Branded Content)[20] and Peoples Voice Award (Integrated Campaigns).[20]
