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The Challenge

The night before, at a local bar in downtown Mountain View, we all gathered for drinks after our off-site meeting. I was enjoying my single-malt, cuing in every once in a while to the banter going on amongst my colleagues when I heard a distinctive voice above all others, “A hundred to one, you’re not gonna finish it.” As the Raptr office manager, my ears are trained to pay attention to everything going on.

The feeding frenzy circled in, “Do it, Pat! Bet ten and you’ll get a thousand bucks!” Pat’s response, “I don’t know if that’s enough incentive for me if it’s as spicy as you guys say it is. I don’t want to die.” He had the opportunity we all wanted and a few felt slighted by his nonchalant demeanor at the chance he was presented with, “What more of an incentive do you need than to beat Dennis?” But that wasn’t enough. The comment that pushed him over, “It’s all mental, dude. That’s why I know you won’t do it.” Keep in mind, I don’t think anyone has ever seen Pat genuinely upset and this is the closest I’ve ever seen. He looked at Dennis, chuckled and said, “You’re kinda pissing me off.” He was in, a dollar to Dennis’ hundred.

That same night, Baz sent me an email with the address of the location and links that pertained to this restaurant, including a Myth Busters segment on this restaurant’s Fire dishes. I prepped an email and we had 10 takers. At 12:30 pm we were off in 4 carloads to a reservation for eighteen, some went merely for entertainment purposes. We pulled up to a dinky shopping plaza in Fremont where our nemesis, My Thai, awaited us.

The Trial

We ordered the dishes that would put us to our doom along with a drink of whatever we thought would help us along in our struggle. Some ordered Thai Iced Tea, some ordered Coconut Milk, while Michael decided upon a new strategy: to numb himself to the heat with two beers. While waiting, we scoped out their “Wall of Flame” to look at who our predecessors were and more importantly, to locate Dennis’ photos amongst the many on the wall.

Kevin refused to watch the video clips as to not psych himself out. Dave brought a workout towel to quench his perspiration (even though he only ordered Mild, instead of Fire but we won’t mention that). Ranah brought his own decanter of water. I tried to convince myself that it was going to be so spicy that I was going to puke to psych myself out. And Aaron came equipped with a camera to capture our pain.

The Rules: 1) It can be any dish 2) The spiciness level has to be Fire 3) There can be no remnants left on the plate 4) It has to be finished in the allotted time frame

We had 40 minutes.

Ranah, Thomas, Kevin, Michael, and myself ordered curry with rice. Pat, Hacky, Tommy, Rico, and Wally ordered noodle dishes. The reason why it is important to state this fact: there is speculation that the noodle dishes are harder to finish.  O_O

Ranah annihilated his dish within less than 10 minutes for 1st place. Dennis stated, and I quote, “Wow. I’m impressed.” That’s huge. Michael’s booze-drinking technique landed him in 2nd place. Thomas trucked along not far behind without one whimper or grimace, coming in 3rd. Pat, with a hundred bucks on the line, triumphantly came in 4th. After a choking/coughing spell where I thought my eyes were going to get launched out of my head, I happily came in 5th. Finally, Kevin, with his hands shaking, and a sweat of determination on his brow, defiantly brought us in for the finish. The six of us smiled for a group Polaroid and were placed on the “Wall of Flame”.

The Aftermath

A few of us felt a bit of a high, some claimed hallucination. The Noodle Eaters were disgruntled and stated that the Curry Eaters had an advantage because the curry was easier to eat. We provided Pat as proof otherwise and surmised that the real reason for our success was the leadership and inspiration Ranah provided to our side of the table.

All in all, our fire eating competition was a success. We showed determination and pure mental will power and the willingness to try, successful or not. And plus, Monday’s topic of Breakfast Conversation was worth it:  informative and graphic, as usual, it circulated around bowel movements and fiery sensations below the waist.

Before joining Raptr I could be found building platform sites for Yahoo!. I have a deep passion for web development, second only to my unhealthy adoration of video games and video game music. In addition to developing ridiculous video game joke sites, I’ve also helped Overclocked ReMix launch a few site projects, and most recently contributed a bit of music to Street Fighter 2 HD Remix.

The Raptr office is really fun and the people here are smart, experienced and overall great people. And we’re still hiring! Check out our jobs page and send us a line at jobs@raptr.com if you think you’ve got what it takes!

To celebrate the season, we’ve temporarily changed Raptr to a theme fitting for the occasion. however, if you have already set up your own theme, you will have to go to your account settings to change the theme to “Raptr” for the full effect.

Enjoy!

If you’ve been reading our blog, you may have a little bit of insight into our culture of work and play. We’re a well-funded start-up with an experienced and fun team. In addition to working on a cool product and service, we also have our Starcraft, arcade machines, birthday pranks, ping pong ladder, and many other perks.

Currently, our job openings are:

• Senior Manager / Director, Marketing
• Senior Front-end UI Engineer
• Lead Tools / Automation Software Engineer

We’re located in the Bay Area and looking for qualified candidates. You can find out more about the company on our About Us page. Maybe we’ll see you soon!

Happy Hallowe’en, everybody! In the spirit of the holiday, various Raptr members got into the spirit. Orange is our color so it only made sense that we would do something related to pumpkins. Rico carved a fantastic Raptr Lantern that you can see above and Dave, Renee, Norm and Pat all came in costumes (or in Pat’s case, he came as his previous incarnation).

October 31st is also Charles’ birthday so in true Raptr tradition, we had something planned for him. A lunchtime match of Starcraft was scheduled but it wasn’t our usual Raptr map. We had a customized version prepared where everyone was given 100,000 minerals and gas except of course, for Charles.

If only we had gotten a photo of his expression when he saw a dozen Reavers drop in on his base.

No more secret handshakes, no more private invites; we’re proud to open the doors to Raptr and share the service in an open public beta! If you’ve already been keeping tabs on us and are just itching to get started, you can sign up for an account and take a spin now. Otherwise, we’d love to share with you a little bit about what Raptr is and how we hope it will help you and your gaming experiences.

Being social is hard

Raptr was born out of a stellar team of people who are passionate about playing and discovering games. Naturally, one of our favorite pastimes we love to do is play games with our friends. What should be a seemingly easy process can be surprisingly frustrating and difficult.

Our team plays a wide variety of games ranging from desktop to consoles to Facebook. In every case, each game or system seemed to require a separate login before we could even begin to see whether our friends were playing. There was no single place to go to see what your friends were playing – until now.

Know when your friends are playing

Between Raptr and our Raptr client, we’ve created a service that automatically knows if you’re playing a game across nearly any platform including PC, Xbox Live, Mac, Flash, Social games, browser-based games, Steam, and even some games on the Wii and PS3, then notifies your friends that you’re playing.

But notifying your friends on Raptr that you’re playing is only half the battle.  We wanted to be able to play a game, and without any effort, inform all of our friends so they might join us or such that we might join them in a game. So we also built integration into services such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed to automatically update your status on those sites. Your friends don’t even need to be on Raptr to see that you’re playing.

See how your friends are doing in their games

When you watch a TV show, the experience isn’t only during the time you’re watching it. In fact, a lot of the experience is in discussing the show afterwards with your friends. We realized that games have the same property. Whether we’re comparing high scores, describing some quirky moment or organizing a time to play, we find ourselves engaging in games even when we’re not playing them.

Raptr tracks how you and your friends are progressing in games and helps facilitate such conversations. We built technologies that enable us to automatically pull events happening in games, such as a friend leveling up her character in World of Warcraft, playing a new game for the first time, noting a particular time a friend tends to play, completing a song on Expert in Guitar Hero, or unlocking an achievement on Xbox Live. These events are shared with whomever you choose to share and the ensuing conversations and events expand even single player game experiences to multi-player like social experiences.

But even with this rich level of detail, our philosophy is, “make it automatic, make it easy.” So we designed it such that you only need to enter the appropriate identities once (e.g., your Xbox Gamertag) and we will sync everything for you.

Discover new games you might like

In terms of conversations about games, what better conversation than, “you should check out this game”? One thing we think is pretty cool about Raptr is that we intelligently recommend games to you that you didn’t even know existed or that you didn’t even know were out yet.  We do this by making recommendations based on what you and your friends actually own and play, something that we think will constantly improve the more you and your friends use Raptr.

Just getting started …

We’re pretty ecstatic about what we’ve accomplished so far but we realize the product is new and may be somewhat rough around the edges.  These features are just some of the things we’ve been working on. If you play around with Raptr, you’ll find that there’s a lot more we haven’t even mentioned yet.

Now that we are in public beta, improving the product is going to be a joint effort and we’re excited to have you as part of the team. We have many more features in the works such as a set of open APIs to enable anyone to hook into our platform to surface cool information from their games or websites.   Your input helps shape where Raptr goes from here.  If you’re a game developer and are interested in working with us, please drop us a line at bizdev@raptr.com.

We’d love to hear from you and have made sure you have plenty of ways to let us know your thoughts. We’re always watching our forums as well as those who follow us on our twitter account but you can also contact us directly through our feedback module on the site or even emailing us at feedback@raptr.com.

Have fun trying out Raptr! Game on!

Just about everyone at Raptr loves playing games.  In our line of work, we get to play the newest and most sparkly games out there, but there’s a soft spot in our hearts for older games that just seem timeless.  Thanks to Baz, we’ve got a ton of classic arcade games like Joust and Donkey Kong Jr., but Missile Command seems to be capturing our attention right now.  Just like our Ping Pong ladder, a few of us have engaged in a friendly competition to see who can survive the longest.  Since there really isn’t an end to the game, we can probably keep playing forever. 

In addition to the arcade games, Starcraft has resumed its consumption of our spare time these past few weeks.  Many of us have added an hour or two to our day to engage in a few friendly matches of Starcraft.   It’s amazing how a ten year old PC game has managed to capture our attention for so long. From the Zergling rushes to the Siege Tank attacks, there are so many moments in Starcraft that we’ll treasure.

Will we be playing Starcraft 2 with such fervor in 2018?  Or will there be a healthy cottage industry dealing with vintage PC rigs for games like Starcraft?  What ancient games do you still play today?

A few days ago, there was an epic battle between John and Pat. Pat was heavily favored to win because of his skill and experience, but John had been working his way up the ladder steadily. Surmounting seemingly impossible odds John prevailed with some skilled serves and inspired returns. However, the story isn’t over as Pat seeks to reclaim his standing. Each match between them has drawn most of the company in as an audience, eliciting cheers and cries of sympathetic anguish with every point.

Pat hasn’t reclaimed his position yet but is slowly moving back up the ladder in hopes of taking back what he feels is his rightful place.