Foldees Top Five Moments of 2008

5. Playing Fallout 3 for the first time

There's nothing quite like your first time. Furthermore, this is Fallout we're talking about here. For those who don't know, Fallout is a series of games based on a post-nuclear holocaust world stuck in 50s era music and technology. I'll just refer you to the wiki right here for more information. That's because for those who are Fallout fans, you already know what I'm talking about... and well. There's no such thing as a casual Fallout player. We're all fanatics. Put two complete strangers who've played Fallout in a small room, lock them in there for four hours, and they probably won't even notice.

Here at Foldees, 60% of the office are hard-core Fallout fans. So you can imagine that December wasn't exactly the most productive month for us here :) That aside, the feeling of walking out of your Vault and adjusting your vision to seeing sunlight for the first time falling on the wasteland that was once Washington DC.

Magical.

4. Obama winning

We thought the world had gone crazy for 8 years. Or at least America had... Many of us here remembered avidly watching the John Kerry-Bus debates and being darn sure that Kerry would win hands down.

That same shock-horror threatened this time around when waiting for the final polls to come in for the 2008 election, much less with the US's potentially first African-American president. We love Obama here. We love the hope that he represents for the rest of the world, and we were all cheering madly when he won. We also watched the victory speech and were reminded of those American action movies where there's a rallying speech from the president, and a surging orchestral score.

We named our new company dog after him. Meet Barrack. Or Barrie, as I prefer to call him.

 

3. Our all-nighter launching the Foldees Shopping Cart

Launching your first shopping cart is a harrowing experience. Many of you Foldees fans out there know that we're not exactly known for our timeliness. One of the unfortunates of having a really small team is that there are no contingencies when things sometimes don't go according to plan.

This was one of those moments. For various reasons (Paypal, Javascript, database...etc), we were ironing the bugs up to 11am in the morning - three days in a row, with barely 4 hours of sleep the entire weekend. In that time, we consumed about 28 packets of instant noodles, and countless cups of instant coffee (damn Coffee Bean for not having 24 hour delivery) and Red Bull. We did also, however, play quite a bit of PS2 along the way as well to chill-out (ironically, our game of choice was Burnout), and I've gotta say, our team was much stronger coming out of that than going in.

You can see in this picture that our notebooks are right next to our PS2 controllers.

Nothing unites people like a common goal, and that's to bring the best greeting cards in the world to the public.

2. Watching the Dark Knight for the second time

I wasn't really raving about Batman Begins. Sure, even some of the other guys here at Foldees thought it was awesome, but personally, I thought it really needed a proper villain, and I couldn't even pronounce Ras Al Ghoul's name (or spell it without referring away from this page).

All that faded away once Heath Ledger walked on screen. With the shadow of his death leaning over that very first bank heist scene, it lended an even more mythical feel to the entire movie, helped along by one of my favourite actors, Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent.

Watching it the 2nd time was even better. When you know when all the big surprises, explosions and deaths are coming, you're even more surprised to find out that they still affect you. And you realise the little nuances like the fact that Harvey Den'ts famous coin was burnt on one side during the explosion, and not scratched by himself (showing his transformation was involuntary in this movie). It's a real ballet of tragedy that's beautiful to watch.

This is the best movie I've seen in years. Ok ok, so It's my top 5, but since I'm in charge of the blog, the others can go hootie-patootie.

1. Seeing all the entries come in for "We Are All Geeks"

When we first decided to launch our site on June 16, we had absolutely no idea what would happen. Would designers join? What if the prizes weren't attractive enough? What if there was something wrong with the Template, our engine or our hosting provider?

Of course, it didn't help that the majority of the entries came in at the 11th hour (and 59th minute), leaving us absolutely balls-out anxious until those entries started coming. And boy did they start coming! We received over 70 entries in the last hour itself.

Seeing all the awesome designs and ideas coming through was really a dream come true for all of us. Seeing the thousands of comments flow in just hours later, made everything... all the hard work, planning and praying... absolutely worth it. We had something that worked.

Now, a short six months later, we're into our third contest, sold hundreds of cards and things are moving a bit more smoothly than they used to. We know roughly what to expect, although the design approval process is still very much our favourite part of the process.

That being said, I'm sure you guys can understand... There's nothing quite like your first time.

Thanks for supporting us guys! We are so going to rock it up for you in 2009.

Happy New Year from the Foldees Team!