Seattle · VR/MR · Independent Studio
Bernard Yee
He spent twenty-five years making games that broke sales records. Now he is making one small creature that just wants you to come home.
Bernie Yee // the empathy machinist
He spent twenty-five years making games that broke sales records. Now he is making one small creature that just wants you to come home.
Bernie Yee // the empathy machinist
Bernard Yee is sitting on a couch, petting a creature that does not exist. Strap on a Meta Quest and the creature - her name is Ember - curls up in your actual living room, blinking at your actual coffee table. This is the whole business plan of Windup Minds, the Seattle studio Yee runs as CEO and co-founder: build a digital animal so convincing that your instinctual brain forgets to argue with your rational one.
It sounds whimsical. It is also the logical end point of a career that reads like a history of the medium. Yee was a lead producer on Plants vs. Zombies 2 and Peggle 2 at PopCap. He worked on Destiny at Bungie, Rock Band at Harmonix, EverQuest at Sony Online Entertainment. Then he spent nearly a decade inside Oculus and Meta Reality Labs producing the experiences - Dreamdeck, Toybox, Farlands, First Contact, First Steps - that taught a generation what virtual reality could feel like.
And then, in June 2023, he walked away from the biggest company he had ever worked for to build the smallest thing he had ever made.
That is the thesis. Not a bigger world, not a longer quest, not a higher score. A feeling. Yee has decided that the most interesting frontier in interactive entertainment is the oldest human relationship there is - the one between a person and the animal asleep at their feet.
Ember is the star of Stay: Forever Home, the virtual pet experience Windup Minds launched on Meta Quest in 2025. You cuddle her on the couch in mixed reality. You feed her, you play with her, and when you want to leave the living room behind, the two of you explore the Otherlands - Ember's own dreamlike, magical world.
The studio calls it "the perfect antidote to everyday life." Yee, who has thought about this longer than almost anyone, calls it something closer to evolutionary inevitability.
Most game producers came up through QA or design. Yee came up through a press badge and a law degree. Before he made games, he reviewed them - and the curiosity that makes a good reporter, he has said, was the same instinct that made a good lawyer: get genuinely interested in your subject before you say a word about it.
One review tends to follow him around. He wrote a glowing notice for Ultima Underworld, the early 2.5D dungeon crawler now remembered as a landmark in emergent, physics-driven gameplay - worlds where the systems, not the script, generated the surprises. You can draw a straight line from a young critic falling for a game that felt alive to a founder, decades later, trying to build a pet that does.
That journalism habit put him shoulder to shoulder with developers and showed him how the sausage got made. The jump from writing about games to making them was less a pivot than a confession of where his attention had been all along.
He has also taught the craft, lecturing on game design and production at Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences - the rare practitioner who can ship a hit and explain why it worked.
Pick almost any era of the last quarter-century and Yee's fingerprints are somewhere on it.
Lead producer on PvZ2 and Peggle 2 - two of the most beloved entries in the casual-games canon.
Worked on one of the defining shared-world shooters of the modern console era.
Part of the franchise that turned living rooms into garage bands.
Cut his teeth on one of the original massively multiplayer worlds.
Executive producer on the experiences that proved hand presence and social presence in VR.
Senior Technical Program Manager on AR games and consumer experiences for Meta's AR glasses effort.
"They intellectually knew they were in a little demo cubicle, but their instinctual brains told them 'there's a dinosaur in the room with you.' VR and MR can make you feel like your digital pet is real - and no other medium can do this."
- on the Dreamdeck moment that convinced him"The medium of XR is uniquely capable of building emotional connections with characters as vibrant and three-dimensional as any pet."
- co-founder, Windup Minds"Dogs, cats or rabbits - we love to tell stories around their personalities - trying to understand them deepens our attachment."
- on why pets, of all things"Our relationship with dogs and cats is more than just a pastime - it's part of the social evolution of human beings."
- CEO, Windup MindsIn August 2023, two months after founding the studio, Yee closed a $1.6 million seed round. The leads were specialists - Venture Reality Fund, Acequia Capital and New Leaf Ventures - the kind of investors who have watched a lot of VR pitches and still wrote the check.
The angel list reads like a who's who of the people who built this corner of the industry: Nate Mitchell, an Oculus founder; James Gwertzman, founder of PlayFab and a PopCap veteran; Eden Chen of Pragma; Tom Sanocki, formerly of Oculus and Pixar; and others from Apple and beyond. When the people who made VR want to fund your VR pet, that is its own kind of review.
The co-founding team is cut from the same cloth - veterans of Oculus, Wevr, Microsoft HoloLens and EA, with credits spanning Bogo, Toybox, First Steps, Destiny, Plants vs. Zombies and Dishonored.