20 Years of Elements
In January 2016 we celebrate exactly twenty years of Elements Interactive. Twenty years of people, projects and technology, but also twenty years of inventiveness, creativity and fun. In this blog post we proudly look back at twenty great years of Elements.
Early days
Founded in January 1996, Elements Interactive was originally known as Elements Internet Producties. Founders Danny and Wouter, back then still studying in Utrecht, could not have imagined how that same company would evolve into the 50+ people strong, multi-office development powerhouse it is today.
Like many startup businesses in the pre dot-com-bubble era of the late 90s, Elements started by offering web development and website design services. At that time Bill Gates stated that the Internet was merely a hype and we used 28k8 modems to dial up to the internet. These were also the days of the AltaVista search engine, the first animated GIFs, the loathed <blink> tag and of course our beloved Netscape Navigator. Back then Elements did back-end development primarily in Perl CGI scripts. Perl is of course the language where your reputation as a developer is measured by how obfuscated you can write your code.
“Recalling the early stuff we did at Elements I remember a Turbo Pascal program that converted conference talk abstracts to HTML in one go, a search engine indexing spider that got stuck in one of our online puzzle games, fun experiments with VRML, building intranets on Windows NT and the first versions of a Microsoft Word-powered, multi-platform CMS that would later be marketed as SiteFeeling.”
— Wouter
In the early years Elements had its office in-house at client ROC van Amsterdam, (first at Fred. Roeskestraat, later at Korte Ouderkerkerdijk) but in June 1999 we made the step to move to our very own office of 100 square meters in the city center of Zaandam. From our new office we also soon started to hire a few people, marking Elements’ first steps of steady growth — although growing bigger was never a goal in itself.
The early 2000s was also the time that we made the switch from Perl to PHP, which resulted in the development of our own modular web application framework, ESL. We also made sure that all of our developers received their Zend PHP certification. In April 2000 Elements founded joint venture Evendi, which would take care of marketing our CMS SiteFeeling.
A few noteworthy projects we did in the early days were websites or intranet applications for Nederlands Instituut voor Gerontologie (1996), SVH Onderwijscentrum (1998), Accor Nederland (1999), Ticket Restaurant Nederland (2000), Fortis (2001), Edelman (2002), Planet Internet (2003), Energiebedrijf.com/Oxxio (2003), Grote Clubactie (2004) and MTV (2005).
We worked on so many projects that Elements grew in headcount and at some point we were in desperate need of more office space. In April 2006 we moved to a brand new office building at the Edvard Munchweg in Almere, doubling our office space. Gradually the business grew and, what turned out to be one of the biggest changes in the company, Barbara was hired as office manager. She quickly became one of the key people at Elements and today she is still our HR Manager, responsible for human resources and recruitment.
Expansion to mobile
In the first few years Elements only did web-related projects. In 2003 Johan (still working with us) started his internship at Elements to look into PDA development on Windows Mobile, which was the dominant player back then. We got a couple of Dell Axim X5 Pocket PCs to play with and Johan’s assignment ultimately became a pretty big shoot-em-up space shooter called Foo Fighter, followed by a few other mobile games, including puzzler Quartz II, which was the first-ever iPhone title published by (now EA-owned) Chillingo.
More importantly, our first steps into mobile led to the development of EDGELIB, a full-fledged software development kit for creating 2D and 3D games, featuring cross-platform development for over ten different platforms including Windows Mobile, Symbian, iOS and Android. In its heydays EDGELIB was licensed to over twenty game studios and development companies worldwide.
EDGELIB brought Elements in contact with Khaeon, a game studio from the Hague, at our booth at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. Together with Khaeon we participated in the 2008 Japan Game Jam, won a publishing deal with Taito, founded Amsterdam-based mobile game studio Rough Cookie and worked with US game publisher ngmoco. This latter collaboration resulted in the release of award-winning iPhone hit game Star Defense, which was prominently featured in Apple’s 2009 WWDC keynote. In 2011, Rough Cookie was acquired by ngmoco and became part of Japanese mobile game giant DeNA.
“I have fond memories of the Budweiser Bud House project we did with Tribal for the 2010 FIFA Football World Cup in South Africa. I remember the huge stack of brand-new Google Nexus One phones we received to install the app on that needed to be shipped ASAP to South Africa. Those were the days!”
— Danny
From Rough Cookie back to Elements, where the business continued to grow and we worked on numerous mobile app projects for brands and organizations such as Volkskrant (2009), Budweiser (2010), Adidas Originals (2011), Philips (2011), Gucci Guilty (2011), UNAIDS (2011) and Gaastra (2011).
A few noteworthy web projects we did in this period of time include ID&T Sensation.com (2008), Zie.nl (2009), Albert Heijn Serious Request (2009), Play Like A Champion (2009), Nationale Postcode Loterij (2010), MTV Mobile (2011), NUSport (2012), NuTech (2012) and WTF.nl (2012).
For various reasons Elements switched from PHP to Python (with Django) around 2011, which is still the preferred web technology we use today.
Internationalization
Early 2009 Erwin joined Elements as a partner to help building the company. As the company grew way faster than anticipated, in 2008 we were in need of new office space again. In March 2009 Elements moved to its current location of 500 square meters at the Transistorstraat in Almere.
“I joined Elements in 2009 since I knew from personal experience (as client while working at Lost Boys) that Elements is a great bunch of people with a no-nonsense and can-do mentality.”
— Erwin
Realizing that the talent pool of developers in the Netherlands was limited and the “war for talent” was about to break loose, we started looking abroad to find developers. We have experimented working with a freelancer in Uruguay and even a North Korean offshore studio. We also had half-serious plans of opening an offshore office in Asia.
After a one-year experiment in the Ukraine where we had a small development team working on several mobile projects, we continued to look abroad to find talent en get our projects done. With the lessons learned in the Ukraine, we eventually ended up in Barcelona, a city we know pretty well because of the annual Mobile World Congress and of course the delicious food.
In October 2013 Wouter moved to Barcelona for half a year to help establish our Catalan sister company Elements Interactive SL. Initially the company found space and hospitality at the offices of DDB España at Carrer d’Enric Granado, but moved to its own place and current office at the beautiful Plaça del Doctor Letamendi in 2014.
While the Spanish office had a challenging start for many reasons, we were able to establish an operation that runs very well because of a great team of people with the right spirit. We will continue to build our Barcelona office in the upcoming years.
Recent years we have worked on so many great projects, sometimes with the team in Barcelona and sometimes at the location of the client. Noteworthy projects include Boer Zoekt Vrouw (2012–2016), NPO Zappelin (2013) WaterSpaarders (2013), McDonald’s (2013), NU.nl (2014), Fietsmodus (2014), Tina Fotofeest (2014), Ducktypen (2015), Katja’s Bodyscan (2015), IKEA Emoticons (2015), Minibrew (2015) and various projects for KPN, including the “Mijn” apps.
Today
Last year 2015 was an eventful year where we not only did a lot of great projects, but also launched Elements’ new corporate identity in February and celebrated our 20th anniversary early with an awesome company-wide trip to Barcelona in October.
Today Elements is a multi-lingual company with an awesome team of 13 different nationalities (counting Catalan as a separate nationality to be on the safe side). And with the recent new entrants Elements is over 55 people strong — most of them developers.
We are also very proud that most of our clients have been doing business with us for ages (at least more than five years). Somehow we still manage to surprise them in such a positive way that they keep asking more from us and trusting us to do very important work for them. Whether it be in mixed teams with them on location or done by us independently.
Elements is not done yet. Will you join us on our awesome journey in the next twenty years?
Originally published at www.elements.nl on January 1, 2016.
