In addition to designing games at Vicious Cycle, Ellis has written the stories and voice-over scripts for most of their games since 2005. Two of these games won game writing awards. "Dead Head Fred" won the first Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Video Game Writing in 2008, and ' won the 2009 Spike TV Video Game Award for Best Comedy Game. Many of the titles that Ellis has written for are licensed properties. He has written stories and scripts for games based on licenses from Cartoon Network (', "Ben 10 Alien Force", and '), DreamWorks ("Flushed Away", "Madagascar 3" and "Turbo"), Universal ("Despicable Me"), Namco ("Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures 1" and "2"), and Warner Bros. ("Yogi Bear"). In 1998, Ellis wrote a story and script based on the ' franchise for the first-person shooter, "".