From the “posting very old stuff, worthy stuff” series, this one was an underrated (by the business people) case that ended being a sucessful blast. But that’s not why I hold this project so dear. Yeah, it got an international award too (DMA Echo Leader Awards, if you mind), but what matters to me is only this: It was hella fun to do.
There wasn’t too much attention around it, simply because it started as the Mission Impossible itself: Introduce the world known Akamai’s web hosting and optmizing services to the unaware brazilian customer, while using a damn old Santa Claus gift plush Exceda (Akamai representant) had left and wanted to get rid of. It was barely close to Xmas, and even with a low budget, I decided to push this forward with a really straightforward flash game, built entirely upon the concept of  “Understand how Santa manages to attend to so many sites at the same time without crashing”. A stupid analogy that turned out as the perfect excuse for a casual, addicting flash game.
I made the hotsite (not such a hotsite, it’s still up) around this game  (same for the rest of the campaign), and bingo, we had a winner. From nothing.

Above you see the front page of the case, which we called “Xmas Ops” or “Santa’s Ops”. But you can see it in motion here (at least it is on air by the day of this post).

But there is more… :] The “fun to do” factor mentioned above is mainly due to the polish and care given to this little Flash Game.
I took my time (not a fairly amount of it, though) to model the Santa Claus in Maya, exactly like their silly little doll, and made all the cutscenes and in game animations there. So it’s like the new retro gaming trend: old school ‘arcady’ side-scroller but fully 3D rendered. I made a quick montage of these cutscenes:

But these ain’t nothing without the gameplay, which was crafted to AWESOME!
That’s why I insist: you must play it!
The guys at AnimaGames surely know their game, and made quite an effort with the ActionScript on this one. I assisted on programming it a bit, but I was mainly the art and creativity director, a damn proud one.
How could I not be? I still have a blast when I play it, never gets old!