Elbow Grease Games (EGG) has completed its first ever EGG Prototype Mixer with 10 game startups presenting to a crowd of game investors and publishers during the Game Developers Conference. Among the surprises: a new experience coming from sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson.

Started by John Graham, the founder of Humble Bundle, EGG is a Y Combinator-style accelerator for funding game prototypes. The game startups are part of its inaugural portfolio of game companies. (You can read EGG’s story here).

Graham started his career in 2008 running business development for Wolfire Games while they shipped Lugaru HD, Receiver and Overgrowth. In 2010 he cofounded Humble Bundle, which was successfully acquired in 2017 and has gone on to raise over $265 million for charity and counting.

Graham has been a member of Indie Fund since 2013 having helped fund titles like Duskers, Tunic, Hyper Light Drifter and Hollow Knight among others. He founded an incubator for video games called Elbow Grease Games (EGG) in 2022. After quietly testing the model for a couple of years, EGG has come out of stealth-mode to publicly evangelize its founding principle: studio funding should be more like startup funding. Prototype funding should be equity based.

EGG is now a growing community of like-minded investors and entrepreneurs who want to foster the next wave of innovation in the gaming industry.

EGG held its own coming out part at a side event at the Olympic Club in San Francisco to introduce founders to investors and publishers and reveal their gaming innovations.

Presenting on stage were:

• Tim Keenan, Creative Director of Misfits Attic
• Ichiro Lambe, CEO Totally Human Media
• Thomas Fossgard, CEO of Free Fall Entertainment
• Tommaso Checchi, CEO of Tomato Cake Inc.
• Tom Kaczmarczyk, CEO of IndieBI
• Karen Laur, CEO of Whenere
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