Behind the Piepacker project, there is a team of passionate people. Our team has been growing steadily in the past year and it continues to grow with our hopes and ambitions for the project. It started small, Benjamin and Jules, two old friends from France who had spent years in the Silicon Valley, talking over dinner in San Francisco about a new cloud base technology. They both had experience in well-established companies of the tech industry, like Twitch, Facebook, Amazon, EA and Gameloft. Very early on, because they both remembered fondly their childhood pastime, they decided to use this new technology to develop an easy access to online multiplayer for retro games. This became the main focus of their work, and Piepacker was born.
Pretty soon, engineers joined them to develop emulation software and the website, among which Libretro contributors and some of the engineers who helped Sony to create the PS2 emulator for the PS3. The first issues we tackled were to be able to provide a great multiplayer experience with as little lag as possible and integrate our signature video chat system to our site. As Piepacker became more and more concrete, designers and business developers were hired to make our site both pretty and easy to use, and interesting in its content … While designers focused on the look and the user experience, our “biz dev” crew looked for the games that would best fit our catalogue and secured deals to distribute them.
Later on, the frontend unit grew so they could implement the design to the site while our existing engineers focused on making everything work as it should and developing new features. We also got ready to talk to the world by adding community management and marketing pros to the team. We were getting bigger so we enlisted people to manage our contracts and our accounting. A few months ago, the studio was put together and started to work on developing our very first game: Arsène Lupin: Gentleman Bomber 💣. That’s about when we started the production of our 3D masks in cooperation with our partners. As our beta attracted more testers, one of our engineers reconverted into quality assurance and we recruited people to help identify bugs, gather feedback, and generally annoy the rest of the engineering team by giving them extra work.
Overall, our team can boast an impressive experience in both indies studios and major companies such as Blizzard-Activision, Google, Sony PlayStation, Microsoft, Apple, Ubisoft and Twitter. But Piepacker also gave their chances to a few promising people right out of school who have been able to prove their worth, gain new skills and grow by working at Piepacker.
In the future, more people will join the adventure and help us make Piepacker a great product! We all have this common goal in mind and genuinely enjoy working at Piepacker because we have the success of the project at heart. We believe in what we have to offer to the world and we have taken advantage of the platform often among ourselves or with our friends, which is a great way to find ways to improve it.
We are an all-remote company, which means most of us have never met in person! The sanitary crisis prevented us from organizing any kind of team gathering but as soon as possible we really want to all meet face to face and check out how tall everyone really is. We are spread all over the world, from the West Coast of the United States to Vietnam, and most of us are currently located in France. English is the common language we use to communicate among ourselves, but since a lot of us speak French, we also make a lot of jokes in this language. Communication is key to keep progressing in our work together. We use Slack for internal written communication, and Google Workspace to exchange files and plan virtual meetings. It’s very important to us to create and maintain a pleasant and chill work environment, we get things done because the project unites us and we have a good time doing our work. Every addition to the team is considered both based on skills and personality, so that whoever joins us can fit well within our team.
We believe the success of our project will be assured by excitement and enthusiasm, from our team but also our partners and fans! We have received the help of a lot of people to get to where we are now… Retro gamers, indie creators, beta testers, licensors, advisors, supporters… Piepacker wouldn’t have existed without all of you! You’re shaping the project as much as the team is.
Don’t hesitate to come to our Discord server to talk to us and join our adventure! 💜
Originally published at http://piepacker.blog on April 9, 2021.
