[7] Wohlwend met Mike Boxleiter in an experimental video game development class they took together at Iowa State University.

Upon discovering their close interests, they began to work on an Adobe Flash game named Dinowaurs while they completed college.

[9] They saw Flash games as an easy entry point into full-time self-employment, but planned to eventually work on console platforms such as WiiWare.

[1] Wohlwend appreciated the benefits of not doing contract work, but struggled with the relative "isolation" of having few colleagues, a low salary, and job instability.

[1] He disagreed with the "cinematic action games" he saw to be popular at the time and hoped to contribute more compelling ideas to the young industry.

[4] In their next game, Liferaft, the player-character is a young woman set to escape "a post-apocalyptic sci-fi ... test chamber", with core gameplay that revolves around a "Bionic Commando-style grappling hook".

The former is a "prequel teaser" to Liferaft: a game of trial-based challenges with wall-jumping and grappling[20] wherein girl clones attempt to swing and jump around test chambers to reach and ring a bell.

[10] Their first game as Mikengreg was the sport-inspired Solipskier,[23] where the player's finger draws the ground for the on-screen skier to pass through a level filled with gates, tunnels, and walls.

The iOS version made around $70,000 in its first two months (as compared to $15,000 from the Flash release), which gave them enough stability to branch out into non-Flash platforms.

[23] Even though Solipskier was successful, the duo did not have a following comparable to indie developers like Team Meat and thus felt like their external pressure was low.

[23] In making Gasketball, Boxleiter and Wohlwend felt that their game quality had improved continually, but found the idea of a million-person audience "daunting".

[27] The game has been compared to a cross between Boggle, Tetris, and tile-matching, where tetromino blocks fall from the top of the screen that players turn into letters and rearrange into words.

[2] The game's style inadvertently borrowed from his first year in art school, where Wohlwend composed in black, white, and red so as to focus on composition rather than color.

[33] While Wohlwend's design style is "simple and elegant", the game's minimalism was also functional due to his inexperience with programming.

[2] At a lull in-between projects,[34] programmer Eric Johnson of Semi Secret Software found the open source code and ported the game to iPad in a weekend before notifying Wohlwend.

[37] The iOS version added a new gameplay mode and a narrative element based on ciphers and codes,[34][b] and was released on January 7, 2013 for iPhone and iPad,[35] and later for Android.

[42] The four-person team—Vlambeer designer Jan Willem Nijman and marketer Rami Ismail alongside iOS developer Zach Gage[42]—was described by games journalists as an "indie supergroup"[43] and a "dream team".

[50] While IGN's Justin Davis thought the game's levels could have been more differentiated in theme and art style, he found the "almost cubist design ... absolutely gorgeous".

[46] Welsh of Eurogamer agreed that Wohlwend's art was "achingly cool" and reflected a "retro and minimalist" indie gaming trend without overpowering the gameplay.

[55] Early Threes designs had no inclination towards minimalism:[52] the pair felt that the game needed to appear more complex so as to interest players.

[55] Wohlwend sent Vollmer designs with themes such as sushi, chess,[52] broccoli and cheese soup, and hydrogen atoms,[56] which confused their test audiences.

[52] They received a "wake-up call" from fellow game designer Zach Gage, who encouraged them to return from their foray into complexity.

[62] After Gasketball's 2012 release, Boxleiter and Wohlwend planned a celebratory road trip to a game jam in Victoria, British Columbia.

[63] In TouchTone, the player monitors phone calls as part of a government surveillance program to find public threats.

[63] Mikengreg decided against including an option to skip puzzles, which they felt would spoil the game and the player's capacity to adapt to increasing difficulty.

Wohlwend's friend Benedict Fritz developed a prototype of a mechanical arcade game from a bar that they frequented in Chicago.

When Wohlwend saw the video of Ice Cold Beer online, they began work on an open world, dungeon crawl version of the game, which became TumbleSeed.

They also worked through a Cards Against Humanity game incubation program in 2015,[68] and several other indie developers based in Chicago joined the production.

[70] With the announcement of the Nintendo Switch, the development team sought to become a "flagship" demonstration of the console's HD Rumble feature,[69] in which the player proprioceptively "feels" in-game textures through the controller's fine-tuned vibrations.

While Wohlwend hoped that a post-release patch would resolve some of these issues, he did not expect the game to recoup its costs, though the team was proud of their product.